Pleasant Prairie at an Inflection Point

Part I

A regional pattern, not a Pleasant Prairie story alone

We compare Pleasant Prairie to five other Wisconsin villages along the southeast Wisconsin interstate corridor: Mount Pleasant (Racine County, home of the Foxconn / Microsoft campus), Sturtevant, Bristol, Germantown, and Menomonee Falls. All six are incorporated villages with 2020 populations between roughly 7,000 and 40,000. The selection is informal: villages a Pleasant Prairie planner might reasonably look to.

Four of the six villages have crossed or are within a percentage point of crossing the 50 percent commercial + manufacturing threshold. Pleasant Prairie and Sturtevant are above the line. Mount Pleasant is at 49.9 percent in 2025, a near-vertical move from 27 percent in 2019 driven almost entirely by the Foxconn and successor developments (classified by DOR as Commercial rather than Manufacturing). Bristol has climbed into the mid-40s on warehouse and logistics development.

Germantown and Menomonee Falls are the other regional pattern. Both started 2010 at roughly 30 percent commercial + manufacturing, the same range Pleasant Prairie occupied, and both held close to that share for the entire 2010–2025 window. The southeast Wisconsin corridor contains both trajectories.

One additional observation is worth flagging because it is not visible in the share-of-value chart. Pleasant Prairie ranks first among the six villages by commercial + manufacturing share of value, but only third by commercial + manufacturing share of land area (13.5 percent of developed acres, versus 16.8 percent for Sturtevant and 16.3 percent for Menomonee Falls). Pleasant Prairie's industrial parcels are unusually high-value per acre, reflecting the type of development the Village has attracted — data centers, distribution centers, manufacturing campuses — rather than physical extent.

Part III

Where the workforce lives

The US Census Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LODES) dataset records the home census block and the workplace census block of each job in the United States. For the 432 census blocks inside the Pleasant Prairie village boundary, LODES 2022 identifies 18,075 jobs. We can see exactly where the people filling those jobs live.

The top four home counties for Pleasant Prairie's workforce are Kenosha County, WI (8,158 workers), Lake County, IL (3,146), Racine County, WI (2,320), and Milwaukee County, WI (1,155). Grouped by residence type: 31.2 percent of Pleasant Prairie's workers live elsewhere in Wisconsin, 28.5 percent in the City of Kenosha, 21.8 percent in Illinois, 8.4 percent in Pleasant Prairie itself, 8.3 percent in the rest of Kenosha County, and 1.9 percent in other states. The Illinois share is the most distinctive feature of the Village's commute profile; most Wisconsin villages of this size do not have a meaningful cross-state inflow.

The counts above are jobs, not unique people. LODES applies confidentiality noise at the block level, which means individual block totals can be noisy, but aggregations to the village scale are more stable. A worker with two jobs in Pleasant Prairie appears twice in the total.

The industries doing the hiring in Pleasant Prairie are concentrated in goods movement. Manufacturing, wholesale trade, and transportation + warehousing together account for 6,813 jobs — 37.7 percent of the Village's total employment. Healthcare and retail are the next largest sectors.

Part V

The broader Wisconsin pattern

To put Pleasant Prairie's tax-base trajectory in context, we pulled equalized-value data for every Wisconsin village with a 2015 population between 2,000 and 50,000 — 108 villages in total. For each one we measured how much its total tax base grew between 2015 and 2023, and then we asked a simple question: did villages that were already more industrial in 2015 grow their total tax base faster or slower than villages that were more residential?

The answer, across this sample, is slower. Villages that were already tilted toward commercial and industrial property in 2015 grew their total tax base less over the following eight years than residential-heavy peers, on average. The gap is large enough to be statistically meaningful at conventional thresholds.

An important caveat. The 2015–2023 window coincided with a national housing boom. Residential property values rose sharply across Wisconsin. A village whose tax base is mostly residential got lifted a lot by that boom. A village whose tax base is half industrial — because industrial property doesn't appreciate the same way — got lifted less. In other words, this result might not be about industrial development at all; it might simply reflect how much residential value each village had available to ride the housing cycle up on. To actually isolate the effect of industrial development decisions on long-run tax base, you would need a different kind of study — one that follows specific villages through time around individual large industrial projects. We don't have that here, and we're not making that claim.

What this result does say is that the common shorthand — "more industrial tax base means faster total tax-base growth" — was not true for Wisconsin villages during this particular eight-year window. That is a descriptive pattern worth putting on the table. It is not a cause-and-effect conclusion.

Technical details. Cross-sectional OLS across 108 WI villages (2015 ACS population 2,000–50,000). Dependent variable: percent change in total equalized value, 2015–2023. Key independent variable: 2015 commercial + manufacturing share of equalized value. Controls: log of 2015 total equalized value; great-circle distance from the village centroid to Milwaukee and to Chicago. Standard errors are HC1-robust; continuous variables are winsorized at the 1st and 99th percentiles. Coefficient on the key independent variable: −66.6 percentage points, standard error 31.0, p = 0.034, n = 108. For three other dependent variables tested (population change, residential equalized-value growth, and change in commercial + manufacturing share), the coefficient on baseline industrial share is not statistically significant at conventional levels.