Strong Towns in Kansas City: Using Data to Tell a Place's Story
Image via Unsplash.
In the second half of the 20th century, America undertook a massive experiment. With copy-paste development codes and road design standards, with cheap home loans and federally-funded freeways, we radically remade a continent around the still young technology of the automobile. And we built a whole lot of stuff that we can't afford.
The consequences of this fateful experiment, though, are experienced not in the abstract but in the concrete and specific. In your community, you know which neighborhoods have slipped into blight, where the vacant lots are. You know on which streets they can't keep up with filling the potholes, or keep the streetlights on. You know about your city's budget woes. You know the names of the neighborhoods that were paved over for freeways or urban renewal projects, the histories of longtime residents and displaced local businesses. And you are a better advocate for your own place when you can focus the story on those specifics.
What we at Strong Towns want to do is help you tell that story. We give you context, data, and a framework to understand the choices that created the world you see around you. Strong Towns made a decision back in 2015 not to do direct consulting, because we can't visit every city that needs our message, and our reach is better magnified as a media organization.
We can't be experts on every community at once, but we can demonstrate the power of digging deep into the data in one place in order to tell a larger story, one that all Americans should understand. One of our proudest achievements in 2020 was getting the chance to zero in and do just that in Kansas City, Missouri, thanks to a generous grant from the Enid & Crosby Kemper Foundation, and a partnership with our longtime friends, the geospatial data wizards at Urban3.
You can read all of the articles in our Kansas City series here. And on Wednesday of this week, we’re going to release our brand new, free e-book, Kansas City: The American Story of Growing Into Decline.
Here are three things we've seen as a result of this work:
1. The numbers don't lie.
Graphic via Urban3.
How do you get people to the table with each other who don't have the same vision of what an ideal future for their city ought to look like? One powerful way is to start with data. From the amount of parking and roads the city is responsible for, to whether those tax incentives are actually paying for themselves, to how much prosperity the city has forsaken with its redlining policies: data doesn't tell you what the future should look like, but it tells you what the present does look like. Including the hidden patterns or problems you weren’t quite able to articulate before.
The numbers don't lie, but it's up to your community to figure out what to do with them.
2. It’s working. We're starting conversations.
We hear all the time from Kansas City residents who've been influenced by our work there to nudge the civic conversation forward toward a better, more solvent future. At City Hall, they’re talking. In the business community, they’re talking. There’s a huge amount of momentum and enthusiasm for correcting some of the mistakes of the past 75 years, and we’re proud of the part we’ve been able to play in that.
In a reader survey, we asked our KC-based audience how our work there has impacted them. A few noteworthy responses:
81% of respondents have shared Strong Towns ideas, articles, podcasts or other resources with others in Kansas City.
73% agree that “Strong Towns has changed the way you understand Kansas City.”
72% agree that they “wish the city would make [implementing a Strong Towns approach] a priority.”
Asked to describe the ways in which they think the Strong Towns message is relevant to Kansas City, majorities of respondents favored each of the following steps:
Investing in historically disinvested neighborhoods that have been negatively impacted by practices like redlining
Strengthening core neighborhoods rather than expanding outward in a suburban development style
Focusing on maintenance of existing infrastructure over building new infrastructure
Prioritizing walking and biking infrastructure
Individual readers also wrote to us with their feedback. Here is a small sampling:
“The series has been insightful, helpful, and specific. I very appreciate this focus as a taxpayer and as a consumer of the lifestyle of Kansas City. I’ve been here my whole life, and served on a number of civic and nonprofit boards. I’m interested in saying, ‘Okay, how do we keep from making these kinds of mistakes?’”
“It was enlightening to learn the history. I’m not from the region, but do visit KCMO often enough to wonder how it got from a bustling city to a more suburban town, and the path it’s taking back.”
“There are some great pre-war neighborhoods with vibrant cultures in Kansas City (and KCK) that just need a little nudge, or a little help from City Hall to get to the next level. I think downtown KCMO and Midtown have a bright future, but I’d like to see some of the hardcore re-development happening in those places scaled down or split up to smaller scale, more granular mixed-use/apartment projects.”
3. There's no shortage of Kansas City pride out there.
As a writer, I can say one thing you worry about whenever you start to write about someone else's community is, "Am I doing the story justice? Will they think I'm out of touch, or will they be insulted or defensive?" Our work on Kansas City has been critical of the city's history of questionable development decisions. But it's been well received by audiences in Kansas City nonetheless.
I believe this is because we also worked to make clear in our writing that Kansas City has everything it needs to do great things. A brilliant planning legacy and world-class cultural achievements deep in its DNA? Check. Data on what has worked in the past and what has not? Check.
Most importantly, passionate, civic-minded residents willing to look their city’s flaws in the eye not despite their love for the place, but because of their love for it? Check.
Do you love your city enough to fight for a better future for it?
Many thousands of Kansas Citians clearly do. And Strong Towns is here to help those people both understand the stakes, and become more effective champions for a place that needs and deserves them.
This is Member Week at Strong Towns. We’re trying to reach as many towns and cities as possible, to help champions there build stronger and more financially resilient places. Will you help grow this movement by becoming a member today?
Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is also a founding member of the organization. His work at Strong Towns focuses on housing issues, small-scale and incremental development, urban design, and lowering the barriers to entry for people to participate in creating resilient and prosperous neighborhoods. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota, with a concentration in Housing and Community Development.
Daniel’s work with Strong Towns reflects a lifelong fascination with cities and how they work. When he’s not perusing maps (for work or pleasure), he can be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods on foot or bicycle. Daniel has lived in Northern California and Southwest Florida, and he now resides back in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, along with his wife and two children.