Urban design and economic disaster.

Looking at the history of my longtime home town, Kansas City, you are struck
by how the city has fled the river particularly after the ACE channelized the Missouri river.

The early town was a river trading town, and embraced the highly unpredictable river while climbing the bluffs to get away from the river and the railroads and stockyards that filled the bottoms.

The city came out of the twenties a major meat packing, transport and manufacturing center. During this time, and through the thirties the town moved south, but suburban neighborhoods in the pre automobile period, development was in small rectilinear blocks of kit houses and tudor bungalows.

Then the fifties came, and Jessie Clyde Nichols bought out the old brush creek uplands and created suburbia as it had never been seen before. A swanky white community for swanky white post war college g.i. bill grads. TWA and highways replaced the local trollies. My neighborhood was cut in half and is now mostly superhighway. Other neighborhoods were completely encircled by interbelts and made impossible to get to on foot.

Surprisingly, not all of them turned into ghettos. In many parts of the old urban core, reuse is starting to take place, and the core of a smaller, more urban KC is emerging.

In the fifties and beyond, white flight chased the new American dream of a quarter acre lot eventually being a 3 acre minifarm and a two car garage, soon to be a 4 car garage.
The metroplex has a sixty-five mile diameter now. Until recently the Urban core was dying, then dead. The previous mayor lost because the exurbs though she was too obsessed with the downtown. Now they are starting to get it.

The current mayor is trying to create a public transit and low energy transit city out of what might be the archetype for oil addicted America. The key conflicts are occurring in two areas. The resistance to planning over unregulated development and development standards for community building over development excreting. As suburbia loses the last of its lustre, support for rapid metro transit gains rapidly. It builds as enthusiasm for Kit Bonds pork barrel Paseo Bridge project wanes.

Without oil taxes, there is no funding to build new roads, indeed to maintain current milage. Without the willingness to build new roads, exurbia stops spreading.

And that begs the other problem, how to fund a functional transit system that can unite this squamous urbanity and preserve some semblance of economic vitality in an era of 6 dollar gas.

MoDOT is a joke. They have recently decided to become the Missouri Highway Department again.

The missing piece is the funding authority to build this structure. It is about a thirty billion dollar job. It will pay for itself before we emerge from the long emergency a dozen times over. The State is going to have a big enough problem subsidizing Amtrak to run new routes. OR whatever replaces MoDOT will be building interurban rail down the major interstates. Goodbye passing lane, hello high speed rail.

So what is needed is new law empowering longer bonds, larger bonds, and the willingness to trust the idea of urban and economic planning for the future of Kansas City, regional metropolis for the old wheat and cattle zone for America before oil. In order to trust it, our urban planning must reflect reality. Most of our planners want the future to look like a bigger version of the past. That would mean that they would not have to take on the developers, who pwn KC.

But that ain't gonna happen. The developers are losing their shirts. They built a lot of units way out in nimbyville for which formerly rural communities were tasked with improving roads and infrastructure. Sherwood atte Soyfield is a ghost town. They will not be allowed to drive reurbanization.

Agriculture will be labor intensive in the long emergency, but mostly in a seasonal way. Factory Farming will be gone, and exurbia may yet sport corn and soy. Kansas City will have to contract in a post peak oil future, but some exurbias will survive as bedroom agricultural communities.

But they won't be considered as swank when the air conditioners done run and most units are empty over winter. A redesigned KC will remove half its interstate from downtown, and fill in with light rail. It will have mixed economic communities. It will start trapping water in the spring, and the river will require a lot of money too.

The question comes down to guns or butter. And man do we need a little butter round here.

It is sad that it will take an economic disaster to change Kansas City. But we are oil junkies with a big habit.

It's everywhere. New cities like Las Vegas and old cities like Augusta, GA. Only a handful of cities have bucked the suburbanization trend and are actually livable without a car. Zoning has become the enemy of civilization as homes are kept away from shopping and both are kept away from jobs. The requirement for parking fuels the expansion as space is allocated to machines instead of people.

I was a Kunstler fan early on.

I believe suburbia is part of what is wrong with America.
But getting out of that paradigm is going to be the challenge
that America could have faced in 1973, but didnt.

it is going to hurt. a lot.

I was happy to see you mention building rail links along our interstates. I have long felt that this project needs to be undertaken in both inter-urban and intra-urban capacities. This would be a huge undertaking costing billions but so is our defense department budget.

I live in North Jersey, which at one time was criss-crossed with light rail. That of course is long gone, as is much of the commuter rail. Millions of dollars and many years have been spent trying to recreate just a small portion of what once was.

While sprawl has blighted much of the landscape over the past 40-50 years, North Jersey has a number of decayed urban areas and small towns that predate our car culture. I have some small hope that they could once again become thriving centers based upon mixed-use and a more pedestrian lifestyle.

Believe it or not, there were also many small farms here, many lost only in the past few decades and replaced by the blight of suburban/exurban development. It probably is too much to envision these developments being plowed under and the land returned to agricultural use but you never know. Once people realize that importing all our food from California and South America is no longer tenable, there may be need for radical solutions.