Like most major metropolitan areas in the United States, Milwaukee’s economy flourished in the 1990s. Unemployment in the region declined to the lowest levels since the 1960s, and real income surged. Controlling for inflation, the average income reported on the tax returns of metro Milwaukee residents grew by 17.6 percent between 1990 and 2000. However, the "rising tide" did not "lift all boats" in metropolitan Milwaukee during the 1990s boom. Real income barely budged in the City of Milwaukee during the decade and, notwithstanding recent reports on the "economic well-being" of Milwaukee’s inner city, real income actually declined in inner city neighborhoods despite one of the greatest booms in U.S. economic history. The income gap between city and suburb widened markedly during the 1990s, and income inequality deepened in the region. The number of affluent metro Milwaukee residents, reporting annual income above $100,000 (in 2000 constant dollars), surged during the 1990s, but the vast majority of these affluent taxpayers lived outside the City of Milwaukee. There were some encouraging signs in the city. For the first time in decades, the absolute number of affluent tax filers living in the city increased during the 1990s, a trend that accelerated towards the end of the decade. Nevertheless, by 2000, as the great boom of the 1990s came to end, a decade of suburban sprawl and growing inequality had resulted in a highly polarized distribution of the benefits of prosperity in metro Milwaukee, leaving the city further behind its increasingly prosperous suburbs. This report offers a detailed overview of income trends in metropolitan Milwaukee since 1990. The most comprehensive data on household income are from the U.S. census bureau, but income data from the 2000 census will not be available until spring, 2002 at the earliest. However, we are able to track income trends in metropolitan Milwaukee during the 1990s by analyzing data on "adjusted gross income" (AGI) drawn from tax returns by the Wisconsin Department of Revenue (DOR). Although these data have some shortcomings and are not strictly equivalent to household income (see Appendix), they provide a solid base from which to analyze income trends since the last census. The most recent Department of Revenue data are from 2000 for major jurisdictions in the region (counties and the City of Milwaukee). In addition, we have secured special runs of the DOR data through 1999 (the most recent available) to analyze trends in various communities at the zip code level.