Kansas City Has Everything It Needs
Editor’s Note: This article is part of a long-term series exploring the history of Kansas City and the financial ramifications of its development pattern. It is based on a detailed survey of fiscal geography—its sources of tax revenue and its major expenses, its street network and its historical development patterns—conducted by geoanalytics firm Urban3. These are the previous articles in the series:
Kansas City's Fateful Suburban Experiment • Is Kansas City Still Living on Its Streetcar-Era Inheritance? • "Kansas City's Blitz": How Freeway-Building Blew Up Urban Wealth • The Road to Insolvency is Long • Asphalt City: How Parking Ate an American Metropolis •
The Local Case for Reparations • Ready, Fire Aim: Tax Incentives in Kansas City (Part 1) •
The Opportunity Cost of Tax Incentives in Kansas City (Part 2) • The Numbers Don’t Lie •
Kansas City Has Everything It Needs
The Kansas City region is a poster child for America’s troubled suburban experiment. And its largest city of Kansas City, Missouri, now faces a painful reckoning with the cost. Decades of misguided decisions have thinned out the city’s population, destroyed the wealth of formerly vibrant neighborhoods, and incurred unsupportable liabilities.
The fiscal geography of the city assembled by the data experts at Urban3 makes that much clear. And we hope that a Strong Towns approach, coupled with data-driven insights about where Kansas City’s most concentrated financial productivity really lies, provides the outline of a path forward. It is one that would see local leaders steer away from overcommitting public resources to new infrastructure, tax incentives and white elephant projects.
Rather, Kansas City needs to do something simple yet profound in its implications. It needs to recommit to its own strengths: the same ones that built the city in the first place.
The good news is that that means Kansas City has everything it needs to turn this ill-conceived experiment around.
Don’t Try to Beat the Suburbs at Their Own Game
One thing to understand is that when Kansas City embraced the postwar gospel of freeways (more of them, per capita, than any other major U.S. city), free parking (oceans of it), and tax-subsidized malls and big box stores, it was turning its back on its own biggest strengths. And it wasn't alone: nearly every city did this to some extent in the second half of the twentieth century. Kansas City proper encapsulates the resulting problems more than many cities because of its annexation practices, which brought huge tracts of suburban land into city limits.
Unfortunately, the city has dug itself deeper every time it has tried to rebuild economic strength by playing the suburbs' game, instead of standing in contrast to suburbia as a different kind of place. Consider just a few economic development missteps:
A giant stadium complex, situated at a junction of freeways on the outskirts of the city: an ideal location to attract suburban Kansas residents, but one that produces few spillover economic benefits for surrounding neighborhoods as a result of its design as an isolated, drive-in island. And this complex has enough parking to fit one-fifth of the entire city at once, at four to a car. Unsurprisingly, it has drawn controversy over the years over its repeated use of public subsidies.
Tax incentives used for suburban retail: $27 million to redevelop a shuttered mall as a cluster of chain retail stores with less square footage than the mall it replaces, and now worth less than half of the public investment alone.
Tax incentives used to replace a fine-grained urban neighborhood with a Home Depot and Costco that are substantially less valuable to the city than the surviving small buildings adjacent to them.
Population decline in the urban core of Kansas City (pre-1946 boundaries). Graph by Kevin Klinkenberg.
Kansas City is not going to thrive by out-suburb-ing its own suburbs. This is especially true since the border-straddling metro area’s dueling tax structures, as dictated by state laws, provide an incentive for people who work in Missouri to live in Kansas. The assessment rate for residential property—the percent of its value that property tax is calculated on—is 11.5% in Kansas versus 19% in Missouri.
But even without the tax differential fueling westward expansion into the Kansas suburbs, it would be true that suburban-style development is a money loser, producing less concentrated wealth while infrastructure liabilities such as roads, water and sewer are proportionately higher, sometimes by more than tenfold. And in a city that has not seen rapid population growth since the 1950s, and has experienced massive depopulation in its core, spending public money to do things that further suburbanize Kansas City is not a tenable path forward.
Rediscovering a Legacy to be Proud Of
Fortunately, the tides are turning, and have been for a while now. Kansas City-based urban designer and planner Kevin Klinkenberg wrote in 2019:
For much of my adult life, it was the voices of those content with suburbanizing the city that dominated the conversation. From elected officials through local government staff and deep into the business community, this was the case. As much as anything, I’m delighted that other voices are now being heard that recognize what it takes to build a thriving urban community. The more we learn to trust those who understand the difference between a successful urban neighborhood and a successful suburban neighborhood, the more the city and its people will thrive.
There’s also still much, much more to do. We are very early in a long game to restore and revive the city.
Want a prosperous and resilient future? Embrace being something the suburbs can't match. That something is already in Kansas City’s own DNA. We said early on that Kansas City was a showpiece for City Beautiful ideas and thoughtful pre-automobile planning. But we didn't really illustrate what that meant. Here are a few strengths Kansas City can draw on that are rich parts of the city’s own inheritance.
Kansas City is a veritable alphabet of Missing Middle buildings. Duplexes, fourplexes, townhouses, small apartment buildings, all of various sizes and shapes: all of them are here, and they comprise much of the residential fabric of the older, originally streetcar-anchored neighborhoods that make up a disproportionate share of the city’s wealth.
Newer, more contemporary buildings, too, have sprung up that fit into or build off of the same basic forms and patterns.
This development pattern is the backbone of Kansas City’s wealth and its ability to accommodate the population it once did on a far smaller infrastructure footprint than it has today. Embracing, and broadly legalizing, the Missing Middle would open countless possibilities for Kansas City neighborhoods to evolve and to fill development niches that are comparatively unfilled in the region.
Kansas City has walkable neighborhoods, and the potential to improve on this strength. It's natural for a city to develop mini-downtowns, and secondary centers of retail, entertainment and culture outside of its downtown. Sometimes these can grow quite large: the Country Club Plaza area is Kansas City’s example of a secondary center that has become almost a second downtown, with the city’s second-highest concentration of property values and tax revenue.
But of equal importance are the smaller neighborhood centers that provide a focal point, a sense of place and identity, and a clustered community of local entrepreneurs who can complement and support each other. There is abundant evidence that walkable neighborhoods are both highly desired and more financially productive as places. And it is difficult to produce them out of whole cloth in a landscape that was designed around driving with separated residential and commercial areas.
Kansas City has a leg up on its suburbs, again, if it embraces its urban DNA. Here, as in other cities built around streetcars, the areas where the stations once were often retain their status as walkable neighborhood hubs. These are major generators of wealth, and will only become more so if additional housing entices new residents into these neighborhoods: as Klinkenberg points out in an essay titled “I Wish My Neighborhood Had…” you need customers to support a thriving business community.
In a previous era, the neighborhood and this part of the city used to have substantially more residents. Quirky, unique places need to draw from a large population base in order to survive. The more that can walk there, the better. This particular area used to house over 23,000 people in 1950. Many more were connected easily by the city’s excellent streetcar system. Today, it’s under 10,000 in the same area…. It doesn’t take a PhD in Economics to surmise that the area simply can’t support the same number of small businesses as it used to.
Kansas City has the bones to support excellent transit, reducing the demand for costly and disruptive car infrastructure. The new KC Streetcar is a sign of resurgent interest in transit, but it's a costly project that it’s unlikely could be copied again and again and again. But there are things that can be incrementally built out and expanded upon, such as improved and more frequent bus service. What Kansas City still has going for it is the thoughtful grid laid out by the city’s original planners, which provides natural corridors for transit connections between the city’s centers of activity, and easy transfers to crosstown routes.
Kansas City has a tremendous amount of land to work with. Land is the base resource for community prosperity: it’s the one thing they aren’t making more of. And Kansas City has it. Not just in the areas it should never have annexed but now, for better or worse, owns. There is also land in the form of vacancies in its most disinvested and damaged neighborhoods. As we discussed in The Local Case For Reparations, this fact is the product of historic mistakes and grave wrongs. But it also presents an opportunity now to right those wrongs in a serious way—without waiting for federal or state intervention.
Kansas City has the data on what works. What is needed now is a serious and ongoing conversation throughout the community—not just within government—of how to apply it.
Data is a tool that can make this conversation more productive, less polarizing, more honest and less reactive. Data doesn’t remove the need for politics. Serving the city’s many constituencies, while grappling with budget shortfalls and the need for difficult choices, will never be an easy job. Bringing a critical mass of residents around to the idea that the city needs a new path to follow is even harder.
But data provides a starting point for shared understanding. At the end of the day, here’s the most important story it has to tell:
Those purple spikes in downtown Kansas City, Missouri (and, to a lesser extent, downtown Kansas City, Kansas) represent places that were built in a certain way. That way—the traditional development pattern that prevailed before the Suburban Experiment—is a time-tested means of producing places that grow more prosperous over time, enough to sustain the costs they incur.
That pattern is in Kansas City’s DNA, so much so that the place was once an example to the world of cutting-edge urban planning. To those Kansas Citians who would like to make it so again, just know: you already have everything you need.
Developers often have to jump through hoops to get their projects approved by a city. When a Costco branch in California was faced with lengthy waiting periods and public debate, it decided to take a different approach: adding 400,000 square feet of housing to its plans so it qualified for a faster regulatory process.