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The other city I lived in (and really liked) - Winter Haven/Orlando - does not have nearly the assets that KC has, aside from the weather. I don't understand why we residents would want to throw good money after things that we don't want just because some people in other cities have determined that they are "cool"...A.K.A super high density, light rail, gentrification, carless access, etc...
Exactly. If we wanted those things we could go somewhere else to find them. What we like about KC is that it is NOT like those other places. I don't know why that's so hard for some people to understand.
Yes, but aside from schools and crime in the inner city, what does KC really need to improve? We have great things here already...I have lived in Overland Park for about a year now and it really doesn't seem to be lacking much for most the metro (including both sides of the State Line). I would bet if you polled most people here, they wouldn't want to be like DC..or Pittsburgh...or those other cities. And why should it matter if a neighborhood is "vibrant"...we have enough vibrancy in many parts of the city here (for the people that like that style of neighborhood).
Vibrant is a new catchword kcmo learned since moving to DC. If "vibrant" means urban, I don't want it!
The other city I lived in (and really liked) - Winter Haven/Orlando - does not have nearly the assets that KC has, aside from the weather. I don't understand why we residents would want to throw good money after things that we don't want just because some people in other cities have determined that they are "cool"...A.K.A super high density, light rail, gentrification, carless access, etc...
Right. KC is just fine with lots of sprawl, lots of blight and a sprinkling of (really good) cultural destinations sprinkled the city in that you can drive to. There are a few people there that do want more than that and I wanted that when I lived there. So it does happen, but it's just a very slow process there.
It is what it is.
Luz, I follow development in cities all across the country, not just kc. Honestly not much happens in KC, it's pretty easy to follow development there. There is a single apartment tower (cordish) that's been trying to go up since 2007. Once that's up the city might see another follow it by 2020. Pretty easy to follow that.
A few smaller apartment developments near the plaza and river market, small hotel in crossroads.
IKEA, Village West, Cerner Project at Bannister, random JOCO office parks and maybe metro North Mall?
I like it, so I am not trying to knock it...I have considered moving to a more urban neighborhood...but I also recognize that we don't need it everywhere throughout the city. The cool thing about KC is it offers the best of both worlds for what different people want. In Winter Haven I had to drive north for an hour to get into the city for the best nightlife...(or go to Tampa which I rarely did). Here in KC, the few "vibrant" neighborhoods we have in this city seem to serve the population well and are close enough to get to from most parts of the city.
Best of both worlds? KC's urban areas are not that great comparatively speaking. I'm from Brookside and I love the area and it's one of the best urban hoods in the midwest, although it's almost suburban really and it's small and one of the only major intact urban neighborhoods in KC that is truly walkable and livable with groceries, retail, recreation etc. There are pockets of decent areas in the rest of KC, but they all lack major components of working urban neighborhood. There is just not that much demand in KC or most of Midtown KC would have transformed by now. It took an out of town developer and bank to bring back the Armour Blvd buildings and even give people an option to live there and it will take decades to rebuild the image of Armour in metro for most area residents.
KC has nice suburbs. They look great on paper, good schools, safe and all that. But they are not any different than the suburbs of any other city.
You can get away from any city just as easily as KC and hit the countryside, but most cities have far more lively recreational opportunities in the actual city and metro than KC does. KC's urban parks and empty, and urban recreation is nearly non-existent there compared to most large cities. The parks and greenways the city does have are almost ignored. (Brush Creek corridor, Berkley Park, Penn Valley Park, Swope Park).
It would cost money to build those fancy pedestrian bridges that other cities have, you know, more worldly and deserving cities like Omaha and Des Moines...
It seems silly to run down the list of every thing that any city has and compare it to KC. There is no real reason to benchmark KC against those cities if most of the KC residents are happy with the city as is. We are not Des Moines or Omaha...I am sure those are fine cities, just as Orlando is a fine city. But I didn't expect KC to be like Orlando...
KC has its own unique qualities and those are what should be celebrated and enjoyed by residents - not how we "stack up" against other cities in rather arbitrary categories.
And we can just leave it at that! It was a pleasure. I enjoyed my rant.
Yea, way out by Dulles. They are actually building mixed use near the beltway now and if you really know DC, you would know that there are many true mixed use and transit friendly suburban developments and business centers in the suburbs of both MD and VA. Even Baltimore has more livable and vibrant urban neighborhoods than KC and even Baltimore is seeing major corporate investment in the downtown area, something totally lacking in KC.
While Baltimore has more true urban neighborhoods than KC you can't even begin to compare DC to KC as far as urban gentrification.
And urban recreation, transit use, walking etc? Different worlds.
Oh and an area with DC plus TWO states gets along better than the KC area does on regional issues. Trains and buses actually cross state and county lines.
And corporate welfare? You can find cases of it being used, but very few and they are nothing like KC. Even in Baltimore where you would think they would use it they don't. A company wants to build a new office tower in downtown Baltimore and the city doesn't want to give them a simple tif. We are not talking the stuff that KC does like supertiff, star bonds, earnings tax reimbursements, overlay sales taxes or just a lot of cash (kansas). Just a little tif or property tax abatement.
Regardless, more goes on in one tiny area of a tiny part of central DC than KC sees in decades.
You don't want to compare KC to the DC area. They don't compare.
What I do see is cities like Pittsburgh and Cincinnati and Columbus, Nashville and Charlotte and Indianapolis and Austin and even Denver or Minneapolis doing things that KC should be doing. Those are peers to KC.
Those cities have better regional corporation and civic minded corporate communities. Check out how metro Denver gets along so well regionally, how the twin cities are on the same page, how northern KY works so well with the Ohio side of Cincy.
KC has plenty of missed potential.
And one of KC's best attributes is that they have the good sense to keep missing it.
I think those promoting 'the' airport being in JoCo have talked about using New Century, not building a brand new airport. I'm guessing that would only take expanding the terminal and beefing up the 56 interchange into Gardner, which could be done for around or under $1.2 billion. No one is promoting this $20-30 billion nonsense of tearing down half of KCK (or wherever) to do this.
And for the 'but our airport is fine' crowd, it's totally possible to have a small terminal that isn't the cluster that is OHare, DFW, or Atlanta.
As for the DC comparisons, not everyone wants total government control, an insanely high cost of living, and the nation's worst traffic, just because the two or more sides of the metro 'get along'.
This thread is way down the classic KCMO rabbit hole of woe-is-me-KC-doesn't-do-anything-right, NOWHERE-else-has-these-problems, or if they do, they are NOWHERE NEAR AS BADDDD!!!! hyperbole and negativity.
For a guy that travels a lot, you sure do get sucked into your own vortex of lack of perspective quite easily.
Poor public schools, aging infrastructure, limited vibrant urban neighborhoods, suburbanization, population loss, resistance to transit, and all that are neither unique to KC nor particularly worse than its peers.
KC schools are absolutely no worse than DC schools, blowing your vibrant neighborhoods theory. Also, who in their right mind would compare a midsized regional city in the midwest to the Capital of the ****ing Country (or for that matter an old industrial city in the same metro) in the densest most urban region of the US. Why in God's name would they be similar in culture, amenities, neighborhoods or anything else.
KC parks are well-used, often teaming with people, Swope is the 39th most visited City Park in the country, The Trolley Track Trail is never empty in any weather, the suburban trails and parks are well used, Loose is a destination park for residents all over the metro, Mill Creek is constantly used, the Northeast parks are promenades for Hispanic couples and picnickers throughout the warm weather months, there are people in Rosedale Park, Waterworks, Antioch, Penguin Park, and Theis all the time. Are big, wild parks have great, well-used trails for bikes and hikers and wonderful topography and nature.
Many of the peers you listed have just as much trouble as KC, some more with certain issues, some less with others, but none of them are universally "doing things KC should be doing" except a few that aren't really peers at all (MPLS, Denver). And for every one of those, I can show you something KC is doing that they should be.
Cincy has of late had a little trouble with big, new ideas and their implementation if I'm not mistaken.
Columbus doesn't have any fixed rail transit or a good airport, either.
Charlotte is a poor comparison culturally, but evenso its not without many of the same suburban tendencies and wild examples of corporate welfare.
Austin is a particularly poor comparison, almost laughably so, but its as sprawling, suburbanized and poorly served by transit and vibrant neighborhoods (outside of the Texas-sized college-town pockets) as KC.
Nashville isn't doing a damn thing KC isn't or hasn't already done.
Ditto Indy, even less so in fact.
Minneapolis and Denver are exemplars of new-economy urban regional centers and are both quite a bit bigger than KC, and its not because of their airports or light rail. It's because of their demographics.
KC is a very nice regional center, has a great urban core, with lots of functional urban neighborhoods besides Brookside (in fact, better ones than Brookside). Its small, it suffers from its poor relationship with its suburbs, and its not a boomtown, it never will be, its stable, and most of the wild swings of fortune are mellowed by that civic conservatism, but its thriving, its losing less population in its core than most of its midwestern peers, its building rail transit, has done transformative things with its downtown and it shows, its neither sleepy nor bustling, its fairly mellow and its going to remain that way. Seems like your not really into that lifestyle, and that's cool. I never thought Annapolis was particularly bustling, vibrant or fun either, and the DC metro outside of Baltimore is one of the least interesting places in America to my mind. I'm sure many people feel the same way about KC, and that I can understand, but the idea that KC is exceptionally dysfunctional is just full-on wrong.
This thread is way down the classic KCMO rabbit hole of woe-is-me-KC-doesn't-do-anything-right, NOWHERE-else-has-these-problems, or if they do, they are NOWHERE NEAR AS BADDDD!!!! hyperbole and negativity.
For a guy that travels a lot, you sure do get sucked into your own vortex of lack of perspective quite easily.
Poor public schools, aging infrastructure, limited vibrant urban neighborhoods, suburbanization, population loss, resistance to transit, and all that are neither unique to KC nor particularly worse than its peers.
KC schools are absolutely no worse than DC schools, blowing your vibrant neighborhoods theory. Also, who in their right mind would compare a midsized regional city in the midwest to the Capital of the ****ing Country (or for that matter an old industrial city in the same metro) in the densest most urban region of the US. Why in God's name would they be similar in culture, amenities, neighborhoods or anything else.
KC parks are well-used, often teaming with people, Swope is the 39th most visited City Park in the country, The Trolley Track Trail is never empty in any weather, the suburban trails and parks are well used, Loose is a destination park for residents all over the metro, Mill Creek is constantly used, the Northeast parks are promenades for Hispanic couples and picnickers throughout the warm weather months, there are people in Rosedale Park, Waterworks, Antioch, Penguin Park, and Theis all the time. Are big, wild parks have great, well-used trails for bikes and hikers and wonderful topography and nature.
Many of the peers you listed have just as much trouble as KC, some more with certain issues, some less with others, but none of them are universally "doing things KC should be doing" except a few that aren't really peers at all (MPLS, Denver). And for every one of those, I can show you something KC is doing that they should be.
Cincy has of late had a little trouble with big, new ideas and their implementation if I'm not mistaken.
Columbus doesn't have any fixed rail transit or a good airport, either.
Charlotte is a poor comparison culturally, but evenso its not without many of the same suburban tendencies and wild examples of corporate welfare.
Austin is a particularly poor comparison, almost laughably so, but its as sprawling, suburbanized and poorly served by transit and vibrant neighborhoods (outside of the Texas-sized college-town pockets) as KC.
Nashville isn't doing a damn thing KC isn't or hasn't already done.
Ditto Indy, even less so in fact.
Minneapolis and Denver are exemplars of new-economy urban regional centers and are both quite a bit bigger than KC, and its not because of their airports or light rail. It's because of their demographics.
KC is a very nice regional center, has a great urban core, with lots of functional urban neighborhoods besides Brookside (in fact, better ones than Brookside). Its small, it suffers from its poor relationship with its suburbs, and its not a boomtown, it never will be, its stable, and most of the wild swings of fortune are mellowed by that civic conservatism, but its thriving, its losing less population in its core than most of its midwestern peers, its building rail transit, has done transformative things with its downtown and it shows, its neither sleepy nor bustling, its fairly mellow and its going to remain that way. Seems like your not really into that lifestyle, and that's cool. I never thought Annapolis was particularly bustling, vibrant or fun either, and the DC metro outside of Baltimore is one of the least interesting places in America to my mind. I'm sure many people feel the same way about KC, and that I can understand, but the idea that KC is exceptionally dysfunctional is just full-on wrong.
First off, I didn't bring up DC, I responded after somebody else did and I said there is no comparison. Quality of life etc is obviously a personal preference, I personally am able to overlook the negatives of a more crowded and expensive city because I think the positives outweigh the negatives. Traffic and what not does not bother me as much as it does some people. People like cities like KC for the opposite reasons (cheap, accessible, easy, laid back etc) But again, I didn't bring up DC and yes, it's a different world than KC. End of that discussion.
I also didn't say a single thing about KC being the only urban city with terrible urban schools. I said the main reason they are so bad is because KCMO's urban demographics are extremely poor and that will have to change first before the schools get much better. Although if you really want to drill down on that subject, you will find that in cities with more livable urban neighborhoods there are better schools and DC is no exception to that rule.
The schools ARE broke in central KCMO (they should at least function in areas like Brookside) and KCMO does not have that many full service urban neighborhoods. It has some, but it should have a lot more than it does. But as I said, that is changing it's just a very slow process. Very slow.
I mentioned other city's positive aspects as places KC should improve on. I NEVER said Indy or Columbus or Nashville or Baltimore is better than KC overall. Never said that. There are things about and things in KC that all of those cities would LOVE to have.
And yes, cities like MSP and Denver and Seattle are really in a different tier than KC and so it's not always fair to even compare them, but I always have. Why?
Because I have always looked for ways to improve and make a city better. I wouldn't compare KC to Denver if I didn't think it had the POTENTIAL to take itself to the next level.
Now I know that the vast majority of people in KC have zero interest in how KC can improve. Every time you even mention things like light rail, new airport terminal, or street cars (don't kid yourself, most people in KC think that streetcar is a waste of money) or any other major civic project that might cost money, the people in KC have always turned into this old fart stubborn mentality and get all angry and defensive. "KC IS JUST FINE", "WE ARE KC, WE DON'T NEED ALL THAT", "KC IS TO SMALL, TOO POOR, TOO..." "WE DON'T WANT TO BE SOME OTHER CITY" "WE DON'T CARE WHAT OTHERS THINK OF US" and a bunch of other BS negative thoughts.
I honestly think we are on the same page as far as what KC offers. I think you know that I know and promote KC's positives all the time. But I also am very loud about what is wrong with KC and I try to give scenarios of how those things can be improved using other cities as examples. If it were not for people like me, KC wouldn't have what it has today to be proud of. From the Nelson to the Kauffman Center, it takes forward people saying negative things and pushing sensitive buttons to get things done, especially in a city like KC where it's so difficult to get anything done.
KC's parks are not busy nor utilized well. You can cherry pick Mill Creek and Loose all you want. And swope has attractions making it a destination, it barely functions as a true urban park. Penn Valley and Berkely should be bustling parks like Forest in St Louis. That needs to change and yes, I know the city has made improvements to PVP, a great start. PVP has the potential to be one of America's greatest true urban parks. Swope will never be that due to location and its vast mostly undeveloped size.
KC needs a new airport terminal. Maybe not a 1.5 billion dollar terminal, but the airport needs a major overhaul and or replacement and it will be expensive no matter what is done, so try to do it right the first time. At what point do you stop putting 200 million dollar band-aids on a 50 year old airport? And why not at least try to give visitors a good first and last impression of the city while you are at it?
KC needs better transit and the city is FINALLY starting to see some progress on that. But a 1 mile streetcar line needs to be expanded using a regional tax so that the entire area (including KS) side is part of the system and helps fund it and so that sales taxes along the limited routes are not 15% in ten years.
KC needs better recreational infrastructure. Build up all those river levees with trails, build some iconic pedestrian bridges over the rivers or restore old ones (ASB, Lewis & Clark etc) and connect the parks together with seamless well marked and well lit trails.
Downtown KCK needs attention. Strawberry Hill should be one of KC's most desirable neighborhoods, downtown KCK should have a small fraction of the corporations poached from KCMO using all that corporate welfare. If Kansas is going to do that, then why not use it to rebuild downtown KCK rather than build an office park at 135th and Nall.
Speaking of a wasted opportunity of corporate welfare, is there no pressure at all to leverage a project like the Cerner complex at Bannister to do a little more than a bunch of office boxes and a zillion acres of surface parking? I mean, the city and state are contributing like 1.8 billon to the project. Why is it too much to ask for a little urban planning so it can actually help the south kc area rather than just be another walled off drive to your job office park?
Why are these questions and many other so difficult to bring up or ask in Kansas City?
KC has plenty of good things about it, but you never improve if you don't also address the negatives.
Back in the 90's I was the same way and many of the things I was constantly ripping on KC have been addressed. Rebuilding Downtown was my personal pet project dating back to my high school years and back when I was constantly screaming about how bad downtown KCMO was, I got the same responses. We can't fix downtown, it's too gone, it's too crime ridden, kc is not like other cities bla bla bla.
Luckily there was enough people with passion and progressive thinking to get that ball rolling. I was one of the pioneers of getting that ball rolling when most everybody else in metro kc and even kcmo couldn't care less about downtown.
It's okay to think a little bigger kc. It really is.
Vibrant is a new catchword kcmo learned since moving to DC. If "vibrant" means urban, I don't want it!
Which is probably why I left KC 25 years ago. It just doesn't seem to change much, and I prefer both urban and vibrant. To me, that means a dense urban core that's walkable, has great ammenities, decent public transportation, nightlife, people actually living and walking around, and a sense that you're in an actual city. KC is overall, just too slow a pace for me. But I can see why people like it.
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If "vibrant" means urban, I don't want it!
