Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I preach all the time how Metro KC and even many urban KCMO neighborhoods are very safe and really just great places to live.
But KC's east side is one of the most crime ridden areas in the country and KC has a tremendous amount of blight and ghetto per capita, and more murders and violent crime in these areas of the city than in cities much larger than KC. I attribute much of this to sprawl and the economically depressed areas that our un-controlled sprawl creates because of all massive areas of KCMO, KCK, Independence etc that are left to rot, where in cities like Denver, Boston, Seattle, Minneapolis etc, land is more valuable and people want to live in the city. That has a way of removing blight and boosting economic wealth and activity in what would have been poor, crime invested areas. We have tiny examples of this in KC such as tiny parts of Midtown, near the Plaza etc where new condos, homes and offices have removed what was once blight and crime. In most large cities, especially away from the Midwest, this urban renewal is on a much larger scale, or the city never got into the mess in the first place.
The biggest problem I have always had with KC is how much sprawl and ghetto the city has and how relatively small the areas are that are simply average urban/semi-urban areas, like Brookside. There is no reason for Raytown to become the next Ruskin (suburban ghetto). None. Raytown should be a vibrant inner ring suburb with lots of transit oriented development, bike trails, etc. Instead, it appears to be turning to crap as massive areas of east KCMO continue to shed residents, and thugs.
When a person can't drive home after attending a show at Starlight without getting killed by a stray bullet driving down a freeway on the Eastside, you know you have problems and this is not the first time this has happened on the Eastside. There have been numerous incidents like this where innocent people (black and white) have been killed for simply driving through this side of town.
I'm so sorry for the family, especially the daughter of the woman who was in the passenger seat.
KC, get it together. You are a great city, but its stories like this that remind me of your biggest challenges.
Here is the link…
Watkins Drive shooting victim was attorney for Kansas education department - Kansas City Star (http://www.kansascity.com/news/breaking_news/story/1332373.html - broken link)
One of my family members was a victim of road rage over by 470 on the southeast side of the city. The individual was so angered that they displayed a gun. My family member was so shocked and rattled that they were unable to get the license plate number and report it to authorities. This happened a few months ago. It was probably a random act, but just shows you how many crazed and violent people their are in the area.
Every major city in the Midwest has these areas as far as I know, heck, almost every major city in the world probably has poor, crime ridden neighborhoods. They are very easy to tell unless you're brain dead, especially in the Midwest where you're familiar with the culture.
Every major city in the Midwest has these areas as far as I know, heck, almost every major city in the world probably has poor, crime ridden neighborhoods. They are very easy to tell unless you're brain dead, especially in the Midwest where you're familiar with the culture.
True, but there's no denying that KC has it worse than many other towns it's size.
There's all sorts of things that lead to these problems, but I agree with KCMO that if sprawl had been under control during the last 50 or so years, the problem wouldn't be nearly as bad as it is.
When you have that much blight in that big of an area, and it's all very much ignored by people who have the resources to make the areas nicer, there's bound to be severe issues with crime.
Of course, there's always the issues with family, and children growing up without proper guidance... and then of course, those of us who live out in the 'burbs and pretend like it's a world away, therefore, not our problem.
I do envy Minneapolis a bit. I'm certain it has it's share of problems, but after driving around in several different areas, I never saw anything remotely as bad as what you see in KC. Surely there's some parts of the Twin Cities that are run down, but they obviously don't take up nearly as much of the area as it does around here.
It happened again today...stray bullets hit people waiting at bus stop, one killed.
KANSAS CITY, MO - Two women have died in Kansas City over the weekend, the apparent victims of two stray bullets. The incidents happened in different areas of the east side at different times.
The most recent occurred in the early morning hours on Sunday. Police said a man and a woman were shot near 34th and Troost in Kansas City. The woman was pronounced dead at the scene. The male victim was transported to an area hospital with serious injuries. Police said two vehicles driving south on Troost were shooting at each other and that the two victims were struck by stray bullets.
The second random shooting death happened Friday night on 71 Highway in Kansas City. Deanna Lieber, 45, of Lawrence, Kan. was driving home with her 13-year-old daughter and her mother-in-law from Starlight Theater when she was struck by a stray bullet near the area of 59th Street and 71 Highway.
According to police, officers were responding to reports of shots fired near the area of 59th and Walrond when they discovered Lieber's vehicle on the shoulder of the highway. Authorities suspect she was the victim of a stray bullet from that shooting. Lieber was pronounced dead at the scene. There is no word on the condition of her daughter and mother-in-law.
But KC's east side is one of the most crime ridden areas in the country and KC has a tremendous amount of blight and ghetto per capita, and more murders and violent crime in these areas of the city than in cities much larger than KC. I attribute much of this to sprawl and the economically depressed areas that our un-controlled sprawl creates because of all massive areas of KCMO.
Not blaming the people, I'm blaming the growth patterns of the metro. Not all the blame, but how KC grows has a lot do with all the blight and decay there is in the metro area. Every city has blight and crime areas. But KC has far more per capita than just about any city I have seen, except Detroit and New Orleans. Other cities that would be close to KC in this regard are St Louis, Memphis and Cleveland.
I honestly think KC is worse than those towns. Just not by much.
Now, I'm not saying that the thugs doing the crimes are not to blame. But KC's (and metro KC's) massive crime and blight problem can be directly tied to how this city sprawls and lets massive areas of the metro rot rather than re-invest. Instead of re-building existing infrastructure and neighborhoods, we just move on out to the farm fields. Build new homes and highways and malls and offices and walk away from the roads, schools, offices and homes that already exist.
The urbanized portion of the KC area now takes up 5 times as much land as it did 20 years ago and the regional population is only up 25%.
We don't have mountains or lakes or oceans etc to keep our sprawl in check. We have hundreds of miles of uncongested freeways. We have almost no transit. Most of the people that move to KC are from the rural states around KC. They don’t want anything to do with the city and are generally intimidated by it. Many people that move to Olathe or Liberty from small town Iowa or Kansas are just fine if they never visit anything within 10 miles of Downtown KCMO. While many people that move to Denver or San Fransisco are the same, far more people are much more interested in being in a more urban, diverse and interesting built environment.
We have entire malls, not just in the city, but in the burbs that are vacant or have been torn down.
Go to Denver or Seattle, you will not find 2 million square foot malls vacant. They might struggle for a while, but they will eventually be replaced by new shopping centers or mixed use developments. Whatever replaces them tends to be more dense than what was there before. While in KC, we are lucky to replace a 2 million square foot mall with a walmart. But we continue to build malls way out in the middle of nowhere while existing malls and strip centers shut down. The Legends is in a rural area for example. It would take 20 years of intense growth to fill all the open land between 635 and 435.
KC is also a very racially divided city, much like other Midwestern cities I mentioned and white flight is still very much in play here compared to coastal cities that tend to be far more diverse, even in the suburban areas.
All this blight and decay causes lower income and crime to fester. It’s a cancer.
Low density sprawl and lack of re-investment in existing areas causes massive areas of the metro to be under utilized and the result is poverty and with poverty comes crime.
That’s my point…
But I see by your post, that you don't want to even discuss this. It's easier to ignore it. I now live in the burbs and I can even say, I'm part of the problem for doing so.
Most of the people that move to KC are from the rural states around KC. They don’t want anything to do with the city and are generally intimidated by it.
Here we go again. Not wanting city life is not the same thing as being intimidated by it.
If most of the people moving into the area are from more rural areas, it surprises only you that they would prefer a more suburban or rural lifestyle.
The growth pattern of the KC metro area doesn't surprise me at all, nor do I see it necessarily as a "problem". The problem is in the (lack of) response to the pattern of growth that should have been anticipated. The "problem" is in the continued attempts to make the city something other than what it is.
Mass transit will not happen in the near future. It is not wanted nor needed on any larger scale than we already have it. As you say, there are no mountains or oceans in our way, we are free to spread out and we come from backgrounds that make us more apt to want that. Hence, we spread. Instead of mass transit, we built uncongested highways. Because it's what we wanted here.
Our hustle/bustle/yuppie urban life area is proportionate with the exact percentage of the population that wants it. That's how these things work you see ...
Not wanting city life is not the same thing as being intimidated by it.
They do go hand in hand usually.
I've mostly lived in smaller towns/rural areas in my life. The city was fun for a while, but I'm ready to go back to the simpler life. Moving to freakin' Grain Valley isn't going to solve anything. I'll still have neighbors sleeping 15 from me. I'll still end up going into the "city", be it southeast Independence, or downtown KC every day for something.
Oh yeah, GV will be as big as Blue Springs someday, Blue Springs will be as big as Independence one day.. and so on. Moving further out, eating up farmland.. it only adds to the chaos. There's no peacefulness in that for long.
Personally, I'm not running away from the crime. I'm not easily intimidated. I go to the downtown/midtown areas frequently. I just want to live somewhere where people give a crap about one another. That is hard to find here, on any level, be it the suburbanites who couldn't care less about the ghetto, or the average folks at Target who won't acknowledge your existence long enough to say "excuse me".
As a city person (this applies to me in the suburbs, too), I want everything to be convenient. I want amenities and excitement. I don't want a commute. I don't mind close neighbors. I don't want a 20 minute drive just to go to the mall. As a country person, that stuff is an non-issue.
Sprawl is annoying and pointless and useless. Why on earth would anyone live in the exurbs? Why not just move to podunk north-central Missouri?
I don't understand people.
KC is the way it is because somebody either wanted it this way, or not enough people cared enough to do it right. Probably both, probably more to it than just that.
Point is, KC has problems.
Huge swaths of undeveloped city go untouched while we build further and further out. That's a problem in my book. People spend less time at home with their families, and that's harder on the children than we want to admit. Suburban kids are often just as messed up as the ones who grow up in the inner-city.
On any level I look at it, sprawl and abandonment seem to only perpetuate the problems in our society and this city.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
