Milwaukee: A guide to vacation rentals

“Brew City” is more than the home of great local drafts and the headquarters of Harley Davidson. It has one of the most beautiful downtowns in the U.S. A vacation rental is the best way to explore all that Milwaukee has to offer.

Kasa's vacation rentals in Milwaukee

With vacation rentals in the city’s most exciting neighborhoods, Kasa offers comfortable and convenient accommodations no matter what brings you to Milwaukee or where you need to go.

Discover Milwaukee

After booking one of our vacation rentals in Milwaukee, here's everything you need to know for your trip.

With over half a million residents, Milwaukee is Wisconsin’s largest city and the second-largest city on Lake Michigan after Chicago, which sits 90 miles to the south. The Milwaukee River runs south through the heart of the city, merging with the smaller Menomonee and the Kinnickinnic Rivers downtown before pouring into the great lake. F

or thousands of years before Europeans arrived, the area that now includes Milwaukee was inhabited by indigenous societies, including the Algonquian and Winnebago peoples, who were in turn made up of a number of tribes. As European presence grew in the Lake Michigan region, these tribes fought with encroaching colonists and allied themselves in conflicts between European powers, until they were ultimately expelled by the Americans to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi.

This set the stage for a surge in European settlement in the mid-nineteenth, particularly from Germany, whose culture continues to inform Milwaukee’s today in the form of a long tradition of beer brewing (and drinking). Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the next big wave of immigrants came from Poland, and they mostly settled on the city’s south side. During and after the Great Migration, African Americans began to arrive in large numbers from the South and Chicago, and the city became intensely segregated, a legacy that survives today.

While industrial decline hit Milwaukee toward the end of the twentieth century, the city has continued to thrive, particularly in the twenty-first century. In fact, Milwaukee is in the midst of a construction boom, with major private institutions and public districts either arriving or getting revitalized in recent decades. The city is known for its historic neighborhoods, marked by its many waves of foreign and domestic immigrants; for its natural beauty, with its intersecting rivers flowing into the lake; for its exceptionally diverse cuisine, with authentic dishes hailing from all over the world; and for being the home of Harley Davidson, the iconic motorcycle brand. There are great short-term rental options near all that the city has to offer.