The Legends/Village West and what COULD have been.... (Kansas City: sales, apartment)

[capitalcityguy]

I'm a big supporter of downtowns too, but retailers put outlet stores a certain distance away from their "regular" counterparts. If they didn’t', they end up cannibalizing their traditional retail stores.

This is why (I've been told) you generally always find outlet centers out in the boonies (no matter what part of the country you are in).

[GraniteStater]

Originally Posted by capitalcityguy

I'm a big supporter of downtowns too, but retailers put outlet stores a certain distance away from their "regular" counterparts. If they didn’t', they end up cannibalizing their traditional retail stores.

This is why (I've been told) you generally always find outlet centers out in the boonies (no matter what part of the country you are in).

That is often true, but KC takes it to an entirely different level in terms of the "far removed sprawled out" factor. We will see how the VW does 10-15 years from now. Western WYCO might just end up being another beige suburban sprawlfest like JOCO, but more disorganized.

[aragx6]

Originally Posted by capitalcityguy

I'm a big supporter of downtowns too, but retailers put outlet stores a certain distance away from their "regular" counterparts. If they didn’t', they end up cannibalizing their traditional retail stores.

This is why (I've been told) you generally always find outlet centers out in the boonies (no matter what part of the country you are in).

Seems that must be beginning, at least somewhat, to change given some recent projects I'm aware of. The Mills in the St. Louis metro has been built qithin the last 10 years and is a bit "off the beaten path" in that it's outside of prime development areas but it's actually pretty central to the metro.

And now they're talking about building two more in Chesterfield -- which is certainly outisde the central corridor, but also the home of the fastest growth, most comprehensive shopping and some of the highest prooerty values in the entire metro: Outlet Mall Equals Jobs in St. Louis County « CBS St. Louis

[kcmo]

Mills mall makes me laugh at the great mall. They are the exact same layout. They used the same blueprints to build them, only the great mall never built out the entertainment part of the mall (where the ice rink etc is at StL Mills). It's still a grass patch if you look at google.

Another copy of Great Mall (and StL Mills) is here in Maryland. Arundel Mills. It's extremely successful as well and is labeled an outlet mall. I wouldn't call it the middle of nowhere, pretty built up around it, suburban DC and Baltimore.

The Great Mall is a great big FAIL.

[PVPete]

Originally Posted by denverian

I've been there once about 4 years ago and while it was nice, I felt the same way. Why would they build this way out in the middle of nowhere? But then everything in KC seems so unnecessarily spread out to me, it seems typical for KC.

What galls me isn't so much that (although that bothers me too), its that everything at the location is soooo spread out. I want to like the place, believe me, as a native Kansan and a supporter of WyCo. But its ridiculous that if you want to make a day of it out there, you have to park your car in one place, and unless you're willing to hike across lagoons of parking, you have to get back in your car and drive to another place. I don't understand why they made all the restaurant stand alone places when they could have integrated them better into the shopping area. They could have made a really neat New Urbanist "lifestyle center" or something like that, but instead they followed the same model as old school 80s retail centers which is why the place will eventually fail because 75% of the stuff there is stuff you can find down the street in any KC area suburb, so why go all the way out there and have to drag your car around?

[aragx6]

^Exactly! That's why I vastly prefer Zona Rosa.

[PVPete]

Originally Posted by aragx6

^Exactly! That's why I vastly prefer Zona Rosa.

Exactly right. Wonder why SKC didn't want to build a stadium out there instead? Seems like there is more money in the northland. I guess they didn't want to be so far from JoCo?

[kcmo]

Originally Posted by PVPete

Exactly right. Wonder why SKC didn't want to build a stadium out there instead? Seems like there is more money in the northland. I guess they didn't want to be so far from JoCo?

Because KCMO wasn't going to super tiff all the retail at I-29 and Barry road to pay for a soccer stadium. Smart move. None of that up there is even a tif, let alone a supertiff/star bond (which is city and state taxes). So all that sales tax that goes to kcmo city hall (and jeff city) would have gone to build a soccer stadium for the next 10-20 years.

It's the same reason SKC didn't go to South KC. No retail down there to super tif. Retail had to be a part of the project and getting that retail in place during a recession wasn't going to happen. So they went where the retail is and where the star bonds are in place. Again, smart move. If they use supertiff at bannister, I hope it's to build some new residential housing, not stadiums.

It's really stupid though that KS has spent all that money on VW and the vast majority of KCK is still rotting away.

Zona Rosa was a 100% privately fiananced project BTW. I have zero problem with ZR, not to mention its urban design.

Had KCK and Kansas built a ZR type project at Indian Springs or a P&L type project downtown, then you bet, STAR bond the **** out of stuff.

[Blue Earth]

Originally Posted by kcmo

Because KCMO wasn't going to super tiff all the retail at I-29 and Barry road to pay for a soccer stadium. Smart move. None of that up there is even a tif, let alone a supertiff/star bond (which is city and state taxes).

Had KCK and Kansas built a ZR type project at Indian Springs or a P&L type project downtown, then you bet, STAR bond the **** out of stuff.

Reading this type of rant, which is a usual repetition of the same thing that you have been saying here and elsewhere, reminds me of Tea Partiers ranting about "getting the government out of my Medicare!". It only sounds right unless you don't know what the hell you are talking about.

Most people don't even know what a STAR bond is, so in their stupidity they follow along with your typical rants. You make people believe that somehow it involves massive amounts of city and state taxes funding these developments, when in fact STAR bonds are not funded by city or state taxpayers at all.

STAR bond stands for sales tax and revenue. Wyandotte County funded the Village West development by selling STAR bonds to private investors. The capital for the project came from the money that those investors paid when they purchased the bonds. The investors are paid interest and principal on the bonds from sales tax receipts collected from customers who make purchases at Village West businesses. Investors purchased STAR bonds, providing capital for the project, because they believed that the project would be successful enough to generate the sales taxes needed to pay the interest and principal on their bonds.

These projects require large numbers of wealthy and influential stakeholders to come together and put large amounts of money on the line to finance a project. There is a very specific reason that Village West was built at I-435 and I-70 in Wyandotte County. It's because that's where those who had the money to finance such a project and those who wanted to locate businesses in such a development wanted it to be. They did not want to build it in downtown KCK or downtown KC. The traffic patterns, urban blight issues, and lack of open land ruled those areas out.

These type of threads go on because people would rather live in fantasy worlds than study the history of how something actually got built and why it was built. "Village West is so cool. But like, it would be soooo much cooler if it was downtown!". Like that was even a proposal. Like the developers who specifically wanted to build at the corner of I-435 and I-70 because of traffic patterns and open land were even interested in some decaying urban cesspool that would have turned off 90% of the out of town shoppers that they were targeting for the project.

[kcmo]

^ it's public money, you can spin it any way you want. People are buying things at VW. Those people are not new people dropped by god onto VW, they would have bought the same things somewhere else, possibly a place that is not star bonded and therefore HEAVILY SUBSIDIZED by the city and especially the state of Kansas.

It is what it is.

I think most people understand what a star bond is. It’s a TIF or Missouri’s version of Super Tif. Regardless of where the state gets the money to fund the tif cash that goes to the developer upfront (bonds, general funds whatever), it’s a state level TIF that is paid back with money that would have otherwise gone to the states and cities to fund schools, roads, police etc. Many restaurants have closed in KCK east of 435 since VW opened. The ones that closed paid full taxes. Nebraska Furn Mart shut down many taxpaying furniture stores across the metro, including the massive furniture super store in Olathe (forget name). Tax revenue was moved from Topeka to RED development. Pretty straight forward.

If you knew me you would know that do not support such Greenfield tifs in ANY part of metro KC. I have blasted both Lee’s Summit and Blue Springs for using them as well as many KS suburbs. Using them to develop greenfields in the hinterlands dilutes, if not ruins their original intent. If metro KC was not tiffing greenfield shopping centers, maybe the metro wouldn’t be pot marked with vacant malls and brownfields where malls once stood…