Celebrating Sprawl

Given all the catterwauling, you'd think that Tom "Benedict" Hoenig was planning to move the whole dang Federal Reserve to, oh, North Carolina.

Not true. In fact, the mild-mannered Kansas City Federal Reserve President plans to take the Fed no further south than 29th Street, a point on the map that to the residents of, say, Archie, Missouri looks all the world like downtown anyhow.

So why the anguish? Well, for a variety of historical reasons, we have all come to expect as a given that every city should have a downtown with lots of tall building and almost no parking.

Now, if Hoenig were some kind of fast-buck, wheeler-dealer who happily decamps to some cheesy office park in a paved over cow pasture and congratulates himself for "having arrived," we could live with the move. But no, Hoening is a not-for-profit guy, a sensitive, central city, anti-sprawl, civic-minded guy, "one of us." I include myself among the "us" because ten years ago I would have been one of those leading the catterwauling.

We in general, have adhered with keen devotion to a series of beliefs about how cities should be arranged--not just Kansas City, but all cities. These beliefs have spread across North America like Islam across North Africa, and in both cases the more prudent part of the population has gone along for the ride.

For the benefit of Kansas City, this orthodoxy has been recently codified in a glossy and no-doubt pricey report, "Growth in the Heartland," produced by Washington's famed Brookings Institute. In no uncertain terms, the report lays out the area's true path to eco-civic righteousness and hectors us for having strayed off track as far as we have.

The Regressive Part

As one might expect, the Brookings people are deeply troubled by growth patterns in KC. At the heart of our deviation is what they call "job sprawl." Apparently, only 12% of area jobs are located within a "three mile ring" of downtown.

To feed our collective appetite for sprawl, Brookings tells us, "The Kansas City region has been consuming huge amounts of land as it spreads out." In total, 189 square miles of "fields and forests" had to be "ploughed under" between 1882 and 1897 alone, "a massive 121,000 acre expansion."

This land-gobbling offends the earth gods. According to Brookings, Kansas City uses land less efficiently even than our "peer cities" in the Midwest. "Population dispersal," the report writer scolds, "is scattering the region's traditional sense of community and compromising the region's natural integrity."

Now before we start time-sharing condos in the old President Hotel to atone for past sins, we might ask ourselves one essential question: who are these people and why do they spell "plowed" "ploughed?" Okay, two questions.

The answer, I think, speaks to all that is wrong with the Brookings Institute and the whole east coast zeitgeist it represents. I know the zeitgeist well. Heck, I went to high school in Manhattan. For many years, I, like they, wanted to impose Manhattan on the rest of the world. And then I, unlike they, began to see how Kansas City works.

Although the Brookings Institute is allegedly "liberal," the report shows Brookings to be as archaic in its thinking as it is in its writing. "Ploughed?" Say that in a Mound City diner.

Truth be told, these folks are worse than merely archaic. They're mother-loving Luddites. They want to strap Kansas City into a 19th century urban straightjacket and keep us there presumably for the rest of eternity. Damn those infernal horseless carriages!

Nor is Brookings shy about its agenda. The Brookings' web site describes the first priority of its urban policy center as "creating healthy metropolitan regions by reinvesting in central cities and older suburbs." What's the model here? Washington? The truth is, the Brookings people came with an answer even before they knew the question and cookie-cuttered it onto a metropolis that has accidentally stumbled its way a wonderfully fluid urban paradigm, one that the Brookings people refuse to comprehend.

Like some useless, lake-district poets, these folks pine for a pre-sprawl Kansas City that ceased to exist the moment the first white guy moved to town. One can imagine an 1836 "Growth in the Heartland," anguishing that newcomer Pierre Chouteau has "ploughed under flourishing native grasses and caused a massive 40 acre expansion."

The truth is we have no "traditional sense of community." Just 150 years ago Kansas City consisted of a few hundred glorified lean-tos slung together along the Missouri bottoms. Speaking of uncontrolled growth, the city's population multiplied by a factor of 40 over the next 40 years. If it hadn't, today we'd be Arrow Rock, and our major industry would be souvenirs.

If we do have a tradition, it is a tradition of glorious, uninhibited sprawl. Indeed, we still celebrate the memory of J.C. Nichols, the sprawl king of his era, who, in the imagined Brookings retelling, would have "recklessly ploughed under the native swamp grasses of Brush Creek and replaced them with commercial establishments and so-called 'parking' lots."

As to "natural integrity," have these people ever been here? Have they ever seen Kansas? If so, they could not possibly wax nostalgic for a Johnson County cornfield when there are still 600 miles of corn between Shawnee and Denver. Nor would they ever fret about destroying a "forest." We don't have any. Damn, in some stretches, we're lucky to find two trees back-to-back.

Let's do the math: If 2/3 of the development is on the Kansas side, and this "massive expansion" continues at recent rates, metro Kansas City will not develop half of the available Kansas acreage until the year 7003, and even then Kansas will still not be as crowded as New Jersey is today. Good God! What do 5,000 acres a year mean in a state with 52 million of them, 95% of which are begging to be "ploughed under."

The Progressive Part

To be fair, the Brookings' people do show some progressive traits, most notably their utter difference to the sentiments of the people affected by their planning. Like all good utopians, they consult only with other utopians.

For starters, they could not have asked a single civic leader in the surrounding metro counties how they felt about "job sprawl"? Do you think the folks in Cass and Miami and Buchanan want all the metro's new jobs to remain in that precious "three mile ring?" No, of course not. They want those jobs to come sprawling their way. Pronto.

Nor could they have consulted with the ultimate decision-makers, the homeowners. If they had, they would understand sprawl in a heartbeat. It is not hard to figure out why a parent would prefer a four-bathroom house with a three car garage and a big backyard for the kids on a quiet Olathe cul-de-sac to a cramped Arlington, Virginia high rise.

Hoenig Figured it Out.

It wasn't difficult. The problem with Kansas City's "inner ring" is not that there is too much job sprawl in the area but too little. If anything, the very center of Kansas City is still too dense. This density manifests itself in two relevant variables, traffic and parking. For an organization with a seven state reach, that's a problem. Truth be told, the average Midwesterner sees traffic jams as a communist plot and would rather pay for sex or psychiatry than to park. Our challenge as a city is not to sit like King Canute and deny sprawl.

Our challenge is to embrace it. By staying in the central city, but by leaving the inner loop, the Fed is helping to equalize downtown's density with the rest of the metropolis. We need to take it another step.

If the city were mine to recreate, I would thin out downtown even more and landscape it to the max. I would make the parking free and the streets auto-friendly. As a final step, I would eliminate the phrase "downtown" and re-christen this new greenbelt "Civic Park," one hub out of many in a fluid, easily traversed new metro.

To make this all work, I would do the obvious and build the next convention center just east of Troost along the renovated Brush Creek. Here, it would open on to the most attractive cultural, educational, and entertainment vista in this part of the world. And I would position the city based on this vista.

Tom Hoeing is ahead of the curve here not behind. It's time for the rest of the city to throw off the shackles of Washington and New York and catch up.

Jack Cashill is Ingram's Executive Editor and has affiliated with the magazine for 25 years. He can be reached at jcashill@aol.com. The views expressed in this column are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram's.