Breaking New Ground

Downtown KC, has well in excess of $2 billion in construction either underway or soon to be. If we look a little beyond, still within the urban core, there is nearly $3.5 billion in projects. If one looks a little closer, at street level, there are hundreds more under way.

It's been a long time since we've seen the hustle and bustle that we now see in the redevelopment of Kansas City's urban core and Downtown. While there have been many individual projects over the last few decades, there was not enough coordination among them to create anything like critical mass or momentum.

But that's all changing.

Downtown Kansas City, for example, has well in excess of $2 billion in construction either underway or soon to be. If we look a little beyond Downtown, still within KC's urban core, there is nearly $3.5 billion in projects being built, and this just on large-scale projects alone. If one looks a little closer, at street level, at the level of the small entrepreneur, there are hundreds more projects under way contributing that much more to the buzz around Kansas City.

To be fair, it's difficult to gauge the success of a metro area just by the extent of its sprawl. If, as the "donut" expands, the whole in the middle only grows wider, the end product becomes less appetizing, not more. What is encouraging about KC's current growth is that now the donut continues to expand while the hole in the center fills in nicely.

That hole, by the way, is really more of a rectangle than the traditional urban circle. What most people don't realize is that Kansas City, Missouri's urban core runs from the river approximately 6 miles south to the Country Club Plaza--an area comparable in size and share to the island of Manhattan from the south end of Central Park to Battery Park.

To keep this area hopping is not easy. Those here in the 1970s remember a boom unlike any other. Projects like Bartle Hall, KCI, the Truman Sports Complex, Crown Center, Kemper Arena, and the River Quay all came on line in the early part of that decade, the result of planning that started in the last half of the previous decade.

Kansas City was hot in the 70s. The city hosted the 1976 Republican Convention, and Major League Baseball's All Star Game a few years before that. At the beginning of the decade, the Chiefs won the Super Bowl. By mid-decade, the city had four major league sports team--football, baseball, basketball, and hockey--plus Tom Watson.

What drove development then was a unified coalition of leaders. Now, after three decades of Interstate-spawned divide, leaders through the metro are coming to recognize, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, that we either hang together or hang separately. The population of this greater 20-county Kansas City region is currently 2.35 million residents. At Ingram's we understand first hand the importance of each community's desire not only to recruit economic investment locally but also to play a role in the prosperity of the metropolitan Kansas City area.

There has been a healthy evolution of attitude in the last five years. This new multi-county and bi-state cooperation, however, has faced challenges. One was the vote to approve a bi-state tax in 1996. Once passed, this Bi-State tax became the first such tax of it's kind in America. The result of this effort has restored KC's Union Station into arguably the city's proudest icon.

This November, citizens will be asked to approve Bi-State II, a tax that will enable public facilities to be built and further enhanced. We hope the people of the Kansas City area rally behind this cause as it enables us not only to restore facilities but to restore a larger sense of community. As in the 1960's, though, leaders will have to step forward.

Many already have.

Editor-In-Chief & Publisher

JSweeney@IngramsOnLine.com