"Kansas City's Blitz": How Freeway-Building Blew Up Urban Wealth
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. Here are all the 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
Downtown Kansas City, MO in 1957, showing the area cleared for the Downtown Loop freeway. Source: Missouri Valley Special Collections, Kansas City Public Library.
The story of Kansas City is the story of America's Suburban Experiment in microcosm. By the end of World War II in 1945, a city not yet a century old had become an internationally famous hub of music, theatre, and food, and built a proud heritage of elegant buildings and parks, providing wealth for a city that was steadily growing denser and taller within its existing footprint. And the skeletal system of the city during this time was its expansive streetcar network. As we saw in the previous installment of this series, the streetcars laid the foundation for neighborhoods that still harbor a disproportionate concentration of Kansas City's real-estate value and architecture heritage today.
After World War II, Kansas City made a drastic pivot in its development approach. Today, its state-line-straddling metropolitan area is a contender not for the streetcar capital, but the freeway capital of the United States. For years, metro Kansas City had far more lane miles of freeway per capita than any other. (It now comes in a very close second to Nashville on a per capita basis, and Kansas City still has 50% more total miles.)
Every city is shaped by its prevailing transportation technology, but freeways have affected Kansas City's development pattern in a completely different way than streetcars. Unlike a streetcar, which is an asset to the surrounding blocks and serves to connect the people and businesses in its immediate vicinity, a freeway damages the wealth of its surrounding blocks. It functions like a moat, dividing neighborhoods and depressing the value of the land right next to it (where people have to endure constant noise and exhaust) for the benefit of those driving at high speed from relatively far away.
In many ways, the choice to carve up Kansas City and to encircle and wall off its downtown with freeways is the most cataclysmic planning mistake in the region's history. This is when Kansas City began to squander and dilute its wealth instead of continuing to build upon its rich heritage. You can't understand Kansas City's suburban experiment without understanding the world that the freeways built.
The Crucial Mistake: Freeways in the Urban Core
A 1947 map of highway plans for the Kansas City region shows “proposed rights of way” slicing up the city, including what would become the Downtown Loop. Click to view larger.
There is an important distinction between two different types of freeways with two different purposes. There are the true interstate highways, built for inter-city travel: long-distance trips and shipment of goods. Then there are the local freeways built for intra-city commuting and other trips that start and end within the same metro area. The former have provided immense economic benefits since their construction. The latter, though, have often been incredibly destructive of collective wealth and community stability.
The early vision for a national highway system was of freeways that would connect major metropolitan areas but terminate at ring roads around cities, rather than penetrating the downtown core. (The ring-road model is the norm in Europe to this day.) This debate occurred nationally, but in almost every city, the forces that wanted a downtown freeway—including influential real estate and business interests—won out. (Something that President Eisenhower, who signed the 1956 Highway Act, was reportedly surprised and dismayed by.)
A detailed historical overview published in 2019 in the Kansas City Star illustrates that this debate was alive and well in Kansas City. From the article:
Previous generations of highway planners thought that those highways should avoid urban areas, reasoning that the merging of long-distance and local traffic would create congestion. By the late 1930s, a new approach had taken root: Run the freeways right through cities, where congestion was attributed to short, daily trips made by locals and not the pass-throughs of long-distance travelers.
...
[An] early plan for its Downtown Loop was written into the City Plan Commission’s 1943 report “Suggested Location of Inter-Regional Highways.” Beyond a lengthy verbal description of the route, it suggested passing the freeways through blighted areas that would be cheap to acquire. The highways, it said, could boost those areas economically. But it also warned of a potentially disastrous impact on already-prosperous areas.
And unfortunately, that "disastrous impact" became reality. Kansas City embarked on a multi-decade highway-building binge, including freeways which sliced up the existing city, displacing existing buildings and communities. In particular, a loop of freeways encircling downtown—the "blighted areas" identified in 1943—completely cut off downtown from the urban neighborhoods around it.
This had three devastating consequences.
Three Consequences of Urban Freeways
1. Direct destruction of property and community assets.
The area that would be destroyed for the 6th Street Expressway, photographed in 1949. Missouri Valley Special Collections, Kansas City Public Library
Downtown Kansas City's freeway loop itself required the direct destruction of more than 100 blocks of prime real estate. While many of these areas were believed in the 1940s to be "blighted," the opportunity cost of what they could have been today is monstrous. (While it would take some digging through historical property records to estimate that cost numerically, a similar analysis conducted by Urban3 in Minneapolis found that merely the buildings directly displaced for downtown freeways would be worth $655 million today.)
From the beginning, Kansas City's urban freeways were deliberately routed through areas that local leaders wanted razed and redeveloped. They were as much a tool of urban renewal and land speculation as of mobility. For example, the northern edge of the Downtown Loop follows what was once 6th Street, despite that a nearby, parallel route along the Missouri River was an option.
A 1972 Star article on the completion of the last portion of the Loop refers to the infamous nickname that locals gave the construction zone along what would be the 6th Street Expressway:
For a time the area was referred to as Kansas City’s blitz. The mounds of fallen bricks and the gaping holes suggested that enemy bombers might have passed overhead the night before.
Even a park with one of the city's most commanding views, West Terrace Park, was not immune to freeway mania. In 1966, Interstate 35 was rammed along the base of the bluffs west of the downtown-adjacent (and, not coincidentally, deemed "blighted") Quality Hill neighborhood, effectively splitting the park into three units. A full history can be read here.
Vine and 24th, near the US-71 freeway. This is an area described in Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience as having formally been an economic center for Black businesses. (Image source: Google. Click through to explore in Google Maps.)
In the eastern, historically Black, portion of Kansas City, the economic and cultural damage wrought directly by freeways was severe. Over the course of 50 years, the Highway 71 freeway was built through historically Black, redlined neighborhoods in order to, according to a recent KCUR retrospective, "connect people in Lee’s Summit, Grandview and the Northland to downtown." That is, to serve suburban commuters. More than 10,000 people would be displaced for Highway 71's construction.
More details on displacement for freeways are included in Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900-2000 by Kevin Fox Gotham. Gotham documents more than 12,000 households displaced from the 1950s to the early 1970s alone for urban renewal and freeway construction. 28.6% of those households were Black, even though only 12.2% of the city's population in 1950 was Black. Gotham recounts residents' memories of Black businesses in the Lincoln-Coles area destroyed for freeway clearance:
There had been semi-economic centers for black businesses that were around 12th street, 18th street, coming up Vine, say to 25th street because I remember Barker's Market, Johnson's Drug Store, and a cab company and a bunch of stuff like that. And all of the clientele was in walking distance, mainly because in the 1940 and early 1950s,... people lived closer together. With urban renewal and people moving out, they lost their clientele. (Mary Jacqueline, interview with Author)
2. Indirect loss of value and vitality in adjoining areas.
The damage done by urban freeways is not limited to the exact land on which they sit. Freeways also exert a depressing effect on land values and economic activity in surrounding areas, because they are unpleasant to be around and can be formidable barriers to walking and other local travel.
This map from geoanalytics firm Urban3 of land value per acre in the vicinity of Kansas City's modern streetcar (with added labels in green and red) is illuminating in this regard:
The gray rectangles immediately adjacent to the Downtown Loop (2) represent parking lots—extremely low-value land uses. This adds to the "no-man's land" effect already caused by the freeway itself. But the parking crater is not all. Notice the depressed value of the properties in the area numbered (3), compared to areas immediately to the south, or to the downtown core to the north of the freeway. This steep drop-off in value represents the moat effect of a freeway, which tends to stop prosperity in its tracks, limiting the example of downtown’s productivity into the rest of the city.
3. A vicious cycle of outward expansion and dilution of the region's financial productivity.
Large parts of Kansas City began to suffer population decline as residents moved to newly-accessible suburbs, now a 20-minute commute from downtown on a wide-open freeway. Soon the freeways were not serving the "long-distance travelers" some planners envisioned, but predominantly suburban commuters.
Kansas City's freeway binge occurred over time and in tandem with the city's annexation binge, described in the first installment of this series. That is no accident: it's a classic chicken-and-egg scenario. Again, from the Kansas City Star:
[A 1951 report on freeway plans] also noted the 1950s shift in residential population to the suburbs. [City Manager L.P.] Cookinham knew new suburbanites would need high-speed roads to get them in and out of the city as efficiently as possible.
The city manager also began aggressively annexing unincorporated land south and north of the river to retain taxpayers who were moving. With that came greater city control over the area’s expressway system.
Kansas City had committed, by the end of the 1950s, to an ideology of rapid, outward growth. And the linchpin of this approach was the urban freeway network: the only thing that made it possible to link a vast belt of commuter suburbs to office jobs still concentrated downtown.
Downtown Kansas City, walled off from surrounding areas by the Loop. Photo: MODOT via Flickr
Today, fewer people live in Kansas City's pre-1946 borders than did in 1946. The core cities of both Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas, have seen stagnant populations even as they have dramatically expanded their borders and infrastructure obligations. And the dilution of public wealth relative to private liability is even more dramatic when you look at the metro as a whole, where nearly all growth since World War II has occurred in the suburbs. The small towns visible on the 1947 highway map above—Olathe, Lenexa, Lees Summit, et cetera—are all bedroom communities of tens of thousands of people today.
It is here that it becomes clear who stood to benefit from urban-core freeways: Large-scale developers and land speculators, who reaped an enormous windfall over the decades. The freeways enacted a net transfer of land value to the builders of those bedroom communities, which found themselves with faster access to Kansas City than ever before. It was Kansas City itself that lost out, where land values flatlined, including in many of the "already-prosperous areas" where that outcome was feared as early as 1943.
A certain class of downtown high-rise developers and commercial interests also gained: they were able to, for a while, cement downtown's primacy as the region's job and retail core. But even downtown Kansas City has not always kept pace with the suburbs, where an increasing share of jobs and retail have shifted to cater to suburbanites who no longer wish to drive into Kansas City proper at all.
In a 2019 interview with KCUR, Matt Staub, chair of Kansas City's Parking and Transportation Commission and vice president of the River Market Community Association, expressed regret that the Downtown Loop was ever built:
"Where we put highways and where we tore down buildings was all about: We're going to create a city for another generation, but really we just killed it for a generation.”
Cover image via Wikimedia Commons.
Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is a founding member of the Strong Towns movement. He is the co-author of Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis, with Charles Marohn. Daniel now works as the Policy Director at the Parking Reform Network, an organization which seeks to accelerate the reform of harmful parking policies by educating the public about these policies and serving as a connecting hub for advocates and policy makers. Daniel’s work 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. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota.