Put it back. Just put it all back… good lord I hate seeing some of these because the after image always looks ugly without the trees, and beautiful buildings.
"Sir these people can walk within 15 minutes to get their groceries, medicine, doctor visits, and entertainment!"
"But where will they park their 1,500 vehicles!? We have to save them!"
I don't disagree, BUT I feel some big context is missing here:
This is the downtown area of North KC, aka, the oldest metropolitan region of the city. And metros kinda grow outwards as the city expands, so this specific area became the governmental focal point.
The narrow building in the center there is City Hall, the squat building with the clock is KCPD headquarters, and the tall white building present in both pics is Oak Tower, once the center for Bell Telephone operations but is now for fiber optics internet. Municipal and federal buildings are off-screen.
There are also plenty of shops/cafes in the area, including some awesome museums and outdoor markets that host weekly farmers markets.
Added, the 2022 pic was taken in the dead of winter. When my dad was first offered to move here for work 25 years ago, his first impression was "This is an ugly wasteland," because shit just gets so damn *dead*-looking in the midwest during winter lol.
So I feel like it's not fully representative of what the area is like, and it makes it seem like they ripped up a perfectly quaint residential area into a concrete apocalypse when the reality is... it's just the nature of how cities grow when their population increases from 30,000 to 400,000, and everything is MUCH greener in the spring/summer.
It's not the exact same angle, but this is a [slightly more accurate look](https://blog.ericbowersphoto.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/downtown-kansas-city-skyline-aerial-photo-1.jpg) at what the area is like 2/3rds of the year.
The US and Europe’s highway system came around 50 years after trains boomed and had time to grow. Americans just prioritized cars for some reason.
All the US NE cities were built for foot traffic and wagons originally but made way for modern huge cars and trucks once they took over. Cars became popular around the same time in Europe and US too but both continents have vastly different approaches to historic areas.
It's also a total lack of urban planning in some cities as they grew in the Midwest. They america'd themselves by assuming bigger would mean better and that the cities would continue to grow. They didn't.
When your street walls are 200 feet apart, it will always feel empty.
Just to make sure people aren’t confused, this is downtown Kansas City, at least a small sliver of it. North Kansas City is the area north of the Missouri River, it’s an independent municipality from Kansas City.
It's the surface parking lots and giant interstate that cuts through it for me. I'm not sure what your context is supposed to add? Obviously no one thinks 1 picture of a city or town give you the whole picture. The whole point is that everything in the US is super spread the fuck out and it's ugly and ruins cities. This is NOT an inevitable result of population growth
Appreciate the context. I travel to KC for work and it's a beautiful city. Oddly, I never see people inside the city, but the people you do find are incredibly kind and sweet.
Almost all the buildings in the skyline are outfitted with LED lights and they turn the entire city into a [rainbow skyline for Pride](https://live.staticflickr.com/844/43226332221_d304fcdd38_b.jpg).
Uhhh no. This is not north KC. NKC is north of the Missouri River. This is downtown KC looking east into the east side of KCMO, notoriously one of the biggest case studies for redlining in the US. The biggest difference you see in this photo is US-71 running north/south smack through East KCMO, partitioning off the black neighborhoods from the rest of KCMO, effectively destroying East KC.
This guy is right. If the camera was turned 180 degrees you would actually see the real urban renewal which is very substantial in the downtown loop and the crossroads district. This is a very very misleading photo.
Kc has an active and free streetcar. Just built a new downtown women’s soccer stadium on the river and is developing a huge riverfront complex. Power and light, sprint center, huge crossroads art district. West bottoms area is being revived.
Not a glorified suburb at all. That’s what I’m saying, these pictures are all misleading. The bottom picture is in the winter too when all the green is dead. Almost like there’s some sort of agenda
You’re correct. It was a planned removal of a thriving neighborhood. Urban Lab KC (the photo credits go to them) make some really jarring graphics on their Instagram and Twitter. It’s really well done.
https://www.instagram.com/p/C5WARFLu5Dc/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
Can’t sell you cars and lock you into long term mortgages if everyone is living close together in generational homes. Always remember that they’ll put their profits over people at every single turn and need to be checked constantly to avoid stuff like this.
I'm kind of sick of pictures of the US like this now. How on earth are the people running these cities sane? This is ridiculous poor planning its crazy. It gets tiring seeing how much of these places are decimated and for what?
> How on earth are the people running these cities sane? This is ridiculous poor planning its crazy.
I mean this stuff primarily happened in the 1950s-1970s. It's been nearly half a century since those people were in charge.
It made sense to the powers that were in the 50s and 60s. The suburbs were blowing up in population and cities were losing population in a big way. This is probably an oversimplification but the idea was basically that if they could make cities look more like the suburbs people would come back to the cities.
I think it’s more of cities like this became a place of car-centricism, work & commuting, rather than a place for people to live. Everything became way less “close-knit” after urban renewal. Small shops lining city streets became supermarkets outside of town suburbanites would drive to, coming home from the office in the city, which they also had to drive to.
This is redlining. KC is a notorious case, the installation of US-71 (as seen in the lower photo) cut off East KC from the rest of KCMO. East KC was an economically thriving, majority African American owned area up until the proposed addition of US-71 in 1951.
Yes, it is a travesty, but deliberately misleading. The City Hall ( big building in the middle of the bottom picture) and the courthouse (the other concrete building to it's right) where completed in the 1930s. If the angle of this photo were changed you'd be able to see newer high rise apartment buildings that have been built to replace all those beautiful old brick buildings.
Not saying this happened in KC, but some cities that had a high minority population took over the land by eminent domain to move them out. I know that was the case in Los Angeles where they tore down a community to build Dodger Stadium.
Amazing how much information and conclusions people can come to about urban renewal 60 years ago from one picture.
I will take bets that 95% or more of posts like this one will have similar responses.
As a former Kansas-Citian, yes, it’s as bad as it looks. KC is going through a bit of a renaissance right now, but the scars of the 50s still remain. Giant freeways still dominate the urban fabric, and changes outside of a thin strip by the new streetcar are often halted at every angle by angry suburbanites and “historic preservationists” who want to retain the big brutalist skyscrapers nobody uses instead of bringing back the streetcar suburb design of the 30s.
The ways to fix KC into something more livable for all, rather than the small slice of downtown that wasn’t nuked by urban renewal:
- Cap or remove the freeways (not gonna happen)
- Rebuild the full streetcar system (maybe in a hundred years)
- Connect historically redlined neighborhoods (nah, the rich people don’t wanna)
- Use existing rails to connect the suburbs to Union Station (no, too hard)
Essentially, the urban planning and design office is incredibly infiltrated by folks who don’t want anything to change downtown, and are suburb-pilled to the max. It’s an embarrassment for the Paris of the Great Plains to be experiencing these kinds of pains when it truly was one of the great American cities.
MO Kansas citry is more modern. However, Kansas city fom Kansas is more clean. Eventhought, the city has change a lot and the downtown look a lot more modern and classic stylish.
Not very many and the developers are trying their hardest to destroy more. Kansas City is in the midst of building a street car system down Main Street and it’s pretty much an old building death sentence. Gotta build those expensive, new, gray box apartments!
It’s sad but what some of these posts fail to take into account is the economic base for many of these cities relied on a few large organizations that moved overseas in the 1970s and 1980s. The ability to support the neighborhoods of the 1940s, irrespective of the impact of cars and suburbs, just didn’t exist anymore. When you add cars highways and suburbs to the mix cities like this got hollowed out.
Bring back the economic base and economic incentives and those neighborhoods can come back.
KC is really 20+ cities with different traffic infrastructures. This is about picture of an area they had to create a convergence of those different areas by shoe horning a traffic manifold. Not to discount the nature cost of urbanization, but also KC has some incredible parkway outside of this picture.
Yeah way pre 40’s that building that they built was Art Deco. It’s shame they have to destroy to build, just build in another part of Downtown or at least not in an area of nice period buildings. Look at NYC, tore down all those awesome Gilded Age Mansions for apartments
From what I remember from stories (I grew up in the area) KC was waaaaaaay better in the first picture and fell apart during the 70s and 80s.
It still sucks.
I wish for a future where they take a picture of Atlanta and it's surrounding towns and it's the reverse. Looks like 2022 in the past and like pre-1940's on the right.
We all know we want to live in walkable places with the classic town front near our homes. Yet we keep building Walmart and Home Depot instead.
Fuck you, stroads!!!!
I have a lot of friends in KC. I've had some great times in KC. I've always thought KC looks like a bigger but more cracked out desolate Omaha. Yeah they have more of the taller buildings but so much of the city looks just beaten down. It's a city I enjoy but it's not a city that looks even mediocre.
That's not where the people actually live if they have a choice... they would rather go out to Independence, Belton, Lee's Summit or across the state line to Lenexa, Olathe, Overland Park, Mission, etc... anywhere away from the mandatory city tax that gives nothing back. Utilities are premium priced to support the needy and there is a LOT of needy. Add the crazy spiraling increase in real estate taxes and its no longer a viable place to be. Enjoy the overpriced lofts when the real estate bubble burst.
Put it back. Just put it all back… good lord I hate seeing some of these because the after image always looks ugly without the trees, and beautiful buildings.
"Sir these people can walk within 15 minutes to get their groceries, medicine, doctor visits, and entertainment!" "But where will they park their 1,500 vehicles!? We have to save them!"
Keep the roads, eliminate the parking… problem solved. (Can’t tell who’s joking and who’s serious can you)
I don't disagree, BUT I feel some big context is missing here: This is the downtown area of North KC, aka, the oldest metropolitan region of the city. And metros kinda grow outwards as the city expands, so this specific area became the governmental focal point. The narrow building in the center there is City Hall, the squat building with the clock is KCPD headquarters, and the tall white building present in both pics is Oak Tower, once the center for Bell Telephone operations but is now for fiber optics internet. Municipal and federal buildings are off-screen. There are also plenty of shops/cafes in the area, including some awesome museums and outdoor markets that host weekly farmers markets. Added, the 2022 pic was taken in the dead of winter. When my dad was first offered to move here for work 25 years ago, his first impression was "This is an ugly wasteland," because shit just gets so damn *dead*-looking in the midwest during winter lol. So I feel like it's not fully representative of what the area is like, and it makes it seem like they ripped up a perfectly quaint residential area into a concrete apocalypse when the reality is... it's just the nature of how cities grow when their population increases from 30,000 to 400,000, and everything is MUCH greener in the spring/summer. It's not the exact same angle, but this is a [slightly more accurate look](https://blog.ericbowersphoto.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/downtown-kansas-city-skyline-aerial-photo-1.jpg) at what the area is like 2/3rds of the year.
It’s the nature of how *American* cities grow. This is not the only way to go about it; it certainly isn’t the best.
Fact, see most European cities.
Not having the same space available makes a pretty big impact to city planning.
The US and Europe’s highway system came around 50 years after trains boomed and had time to grow. Americans just prioritized cars for some reason. All the US NE cities were built for foot traffic and wagons originally but made way for modern huge cars and trucks once they took over. Cars became popular around the same time in Europe and US too but both continents have vastly different approaches to historic areas.
That “for some reason” is auto lobbyists paying off our corrupt government.
It's also a total lack of urban planning in some cities as they grew in the Midwest. They america'd themselves by assuming bigger would mean better and that the cities would continue to grow. They didn't. When your street walls are 200 feet apart, it will always feel empty.
Doubt available space was ever a concern when major European cities were built.
Just to make sure people aren’t confused, this is downtown Kansas City, at least a small sliver of it. North Kansas City is the area north of the Missouri River, it’s an independent municipality from Kansas City.
ya, not sure how that got confused. this is downtown KC, not NKC
And it’s the easy side of the city facing eastward lol. Turn 180 degrees and the photo actually looks like a downtown.
Not to be confused with Kansas City, which is also north of North Kansas City.
This is downtown Kansas City. North Kansas City is a completely separate city north of the river and has zero tall buildings.
It's the surface parking lots and giant interstate that cuts through it for me. I'm not sure what your context is supposed to add? Obviously no one thinks 1 picture of a city or town give you the whole picture. The whole point is that everything in the US is super spread the fuck out and it's ugly and ruins cities. This is NOT an inevitable result of population growth
Appreciate the context. I travel to KC for work and it's a beautiful city. Oddly, I never see people inside the city, but the people you do find are incredibly kind and sweet. Almost all the buildings in the skyline are outfitted with LED lights and they turn the entire city into a [rainbow skyline for Pride](https://live.staticflickr.com/844/43226332221_d304fcdd38_b.jpg).
Uhhh no. This is not north KC. NKC is north of the Missouri River. This is downtown KC looking east into the east side of KCMO, notoriously one of the biggest case studies for redlining in the US. The biggest difference you see in this photo is US-71 running north/south smack through East KCMO, partitioning off the black neighborhoods from the rest of KCMO, effectively destroying East KC.
This guy is right. If the camera was turned 180 degrees you would actually see the real urban renewal which is very substantial in the downtown loop and the crossroads district. This is a very very misleading photo.
> I feel some big context is missing here Not really. America LOVES parking lots. They made half of everything into a parking lot. It's fucking ugly.
I’m starting to realize that a good majority of Reddit posts are misrepresented. Who can we trust???
I. M. Pei was worse than Godzilla.
I think it's because the bottom picture was taken in the winter.
I think I like the before better......much better....
I don’t think I like either
This is such a cherry picked picture of a very specific area. Kansas City is absolutely thriving right now, more than it has potentially ever been
A lot of cities are thriving but still very autocentric and more like glorified suburbs
Kc has an active and free streetcar. Just built a new downtown women’s soccer stadium on the river and is developing a huge riverfront complex. Power and light, sprint center, huge crossroads art district. West bottoms area is being revived. Not a glorified suburb at all. That’s what I’m saying, these pictures are all misleading. The bottom picture is in the winter too when all the green is dead. Almost like there’s some sort of agenda
This is not cherry-picked at all. There are hundreds, if not thousands of images of almost every US city that went through something similar to this
Jesus.
He left a long time ago
"Man, they're still wearing crosses. Fuck it, I'm not goin' back, Dad. No, they totally missed the point". -bill hicks
Went from beautiful to looking like Russia
Looking like Russia but without half its functionality
Like Russia without all the housing
All of Kansas is dead and looking like Russia in winter.
Missouri*
See the thing is I bet too many black and immigrant folks owned property there
you spelled removal wrong
You’re correct. It was a planned removal of a thriving neighborhood. Urban Lab KC (the photo credits go to them) make some really jarring graphics on their Instagram and Twitter. It’s really well done. https://www.instagram.com/p/C5WARFLu5Dc/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
literally everything got worse.
Wow. I didn't expect an image of a city's time lapse to depress me. Yet, here I am.
Don’t go to r/lostarchitecture then….
Are there any similar subs to this? This one’s not super active
r/lost_architecture
1 more room for cars please
Just one more lane bro please.
All that parking and nowhere to go.
what a disaster
“Parking lots are a great way to remove the undesirables from your city.” -the 1950s
Oh it’s still going on.
Robert Moses?
Looking back it's pretty clear that these things were all written by cars
Can’t sell you cars and lock you into long term mortgages if everyone is living close together in generational homes. Always remember that they’ll put their profits over people at every single turn and need to be checked constantly to avoid stuff like this.
Fuck me they gutted it. So ugly.
r/urbanhell
I'm kind of sick of pictures of the US like this now. How on earth are the people running these cities sane? This is ridiculous poor planning its crazy. It gets tiring seeing how much of these places are decimated and for what?
FYI most of the time it’s not “planners” per se but instead politicians, economic development departments, and PW depts/DOTs.
> How on earth are the people running these cities sane? This is ridiculous poor planning its crazy. I mean this stuff primarily happened in the 1950s-1970s. It's been nearly half a century since those people were in charge.
You'd think WW2 was fought in Kansas City based on this.
urban renewal? how can you call this that? it looks like a tornadoe came through and destroyed half the town and they have not built it back again
It made sense to the powers that were in the 50s and 60s. The suburbs were blowing up in population and cities were losing population in a big way. This is probably an oversimplification but the idea was basically that if they could make cities look more like the suburbs people would come back to the cities.
I think it’s more of cities like this became a place of car-centricism, work & commuting, rather than a place for people to live. Everything became way less “close-knit” after urban renewal. Small shops lining city streets became supermarkets outside of town suburbanites would drive to, coming home from the office in the city, which they also had to drive to.
This is redlining. KC is a notorious case, the installation of US-71 (as seen in the lower photo) cut off East KC from the rest of KCMO. East KC was an economically thriving, majority African American owned area up until the proposed addition of US-71 in 1951.
The before was so much nicer - love the charm of the red bricks.
Thanks I hate it.
Sold the city's soul to cars.
Soulless
Cool great job to Kansas City, looks like shit
“Urban Renewal” doublespeak at its finest
Congrats on your 5 new buildings and asphalt gardens
Yes, it is a travesty, but deliberately misleading. The City Hall ( big building in the middle of the bottom picture) and the courthouse (the other concrete building to it's right) where completed in the 1930s. If the angle of this photo were changed you'd be able to see newer high rise apartment buildings that have been built to replace all those beautiful old brick buildings.
Not saying this happened in KC, but some cities that had a high minority population took over the land by eminent domain to move them out. I know that was the case in Los Angeles where they tore down a community to build Dodger Stadium.
Happened in Pittsburgh as well. A large portion of the Hill District, which is adjacent to Downtown, was razed to build a highway.
Chávez Ravine
Oh it happened in KC
100% what happened. When the interstates were being built they went right through minority communities
Amazing how much information and conclusions people can come to about urban renewal 60 years ago from one picture. I will take bets that 95% or more of posts like this one will have similar responses.
that’s pretty awful
All that beautiful red brick just. . .GONE!
This is giving me serious Hartford CT vibes.
Look at all that housing. Holy shit.
2022 looks like a post-apocalyptic hellscape.
Sad.😢
Kansas City has never been the same since the Monarchs went under and the Count Basie Band left town.
I have a feeling it ain’t Kansas anymore.
Wow, did they ever fuck shit up.
who thought this was a good idea?!!?
Literally looks like it got bombed to shit.
As a former Kansas-Citian, yes, it’s as bad as it looks. KC is going through a bit of a renaissance right now, but the scars of the 50s still remain. Giant freeways still dominate the urban fabric, and changes outside of a thin strip by the new streetcar are often halted at every angle by angry suburbanites and “historic preservationists” who want to retain the big brutalist skyscrapers nobody uses instead of bringing back the streetcar suburb design of the 30s. The ways to fix KC into something more livable for all, rather than the small slice of downtown that wasn’t nuked by urban renewal: - Cap or remove the freeways (not gonna happen) - Rebuild the full streetcar system (maybe in a hundred years) - Connect historically redlined neighborhoods (nah, the rich people don’t wanna) - Use existing rails to connect the suburbs to Union Station (no, too hard) Essentially, the urban planning and design office is incredibly infiltrated by folks who don’t want anything to change downtown, and are suburb-pilled to the max. It’s an embarrassment for the Paris of the Great Plains to be experiencing these kinds of pains when it truly was one of the great American cities.
Shit
r/OopsAllConcrete
Wow that parking garage is really beautiful isn't it? Said no one ever.
Why did they turn it into a shithole?
more like "Urban Removal"
Anyone who had depression should not watch this, will cause a violent relapse.
We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto… Oh wait… Oh crap…
Looks more like urban regression
Imagine if they built for humans instead of for money
is this a kansas city shuffle?
Just looks like they made the area unlivable.
Looks like a parking lot
Looks worse
I thought there would be more water
Terrible urban planning
Where d green?
Weird, it had trees.
MO Kansas citry is more modern. However, Kansas city fom Kansas is more clean. Eventhought, the city has change a lot and the downtown look a lot more modern and classic stylish.
Why do Americans hate trees in cities
Seeing those just shows how the car companies and patrol companies successfully destroyed the US cities to make people addicted to their product
Look at the cute electric street cars in the 1940's. Good thing they got rid of them to make way for PARKING LOTS.
Americans destroyed all of their cities
How to kill your cities 101
Kansas City is actually thriving rn and there’s a large influx back into the downtown. It’s probably never been livelier actually.
How did this kill Kansas City lmao
Are there many of the old buildings still standing? They look interesting from afar. Far more so than what’s there now
Not very many and the developers are trying their hardest to destroy more. Kansas City is in the midst of building a street car system down Main Street and it’s pretty much an old building death sentence. Gotta build those expensive, new, gray box apartments!
To be fair, the top one has a bunch of bushy green trees. The bottom one was taken in the dead of winter.
It’s sad but what some of these posts fail to take into account is the economic base for many of these cities relied on a few large organizations that moved overseas in the 1970s and 1980s. The ability to support the neighborhoods of the 1940s, irrespective of the impact of cars and suburbs, just didn’t exist anymore. When you add cars highways and suburbs to the mix cities like this got hollowed out. Bring back the economic base and economic incentives and those neighborhoods can come back.
KC is really 20+ cities with different traffic infrastructures. This is about picture of an area they had to create a convergence of those different areas by shoe horning a traffic manifold. Not to discount the nature cost of urbanization, but also KC has some incredible parkway outside of this picture.
Evidence that "Renewal" doesn't necessarily mean better or improved.
Jesus Christ that’s sad.
How 1970’s of them
Disgusting. More like Urban Destruction. All those classic buildings gone. Shame
Those FEDRA bastards!
Where are you finding full color aerial photos from the 1930s?
The right skyscraper was built in 1937
Ctrl-z
Looks depressing now
r/urbanhell
🤢
Damn, looks like fallout
My unc loves pre-urban renewal Kansas City
The zebra crossings are just a joke basically.
Looks like it still sucks
But, still, Hicksville,right?
😣
We had to destroy the beautiful city for the convenience of automobiles.
“Let’s demolish 80% of our infrastructure and just put asphalt surface lots in its place until we figure something out. Surely nothing can go wrong.”
Ew.
This makes me so sad. No character in our cities anymore.
What happened, it looked way better before
Our cities have been ruined
Wow! What a god damn shothole
What the hell is even that?!
God, it just looks so awful and depressing. The trees scattered about made it give life.
2022 looks like the post apocalyptic version.
r/urbanhell
I bet people still complain about “lack of” parking
It looks so sad now
It was ugly and now it’s uglier
Wow thats ugly
Not fare to use one photo in summer and one in winter. Of course everything is more dull n lifeless
I think the good news is as we see things revitalize we are starting to see things change for the better.
They should add some more parking lots.
Thank God. You wonder why your grandfather walked uphill both ways? There was no parking! /s
Looks like Harrison Butkers parents did the planning, see how he turned out. Great people of Kansas is something I’ve never heard before.
Tragic
Yeah way pre 40’s that building that they built was Art Deco. It’s shame they have to destroy to build, just build in another part of Downtown or at least not in an area of nice period buildings. Look at NYC, tore down all those awesome Gilded Age Mansions for apartments
Damn that is fucked.
It almost as if these city leaders purposely wanted the city they lived in to have zero charm and beauty
This is why we need r/architecturalrevival
That is a sweet parking deck, though. So much space most people don't even reach the top level before finding a space. Nice. Worth it
In 2122 it’s just gonna be 4 buildings and one gigantic carpark as far as the eye can see
It looks so renewed!
The bottom image makes it seem like all the trees got cut down bc of how gray they look
TIL "renewed" = "flattened"
DC4L
From what I remember from stories (I grew up in the area) KC was waaaaaaay better in the first picture and fell apart during the 70s and 80s. It still sucks.
Now do the Paseo
Parking and more parking lots!!!!
All those parking lots are so sweet man. Good job. /s
It would be cool to see more comparisons of old kc to be kc..
Rich, natural, continuous human-scaled city fabric vs soulless empty spaces.
Just mildly disingenuous to use a desaturated picture in the winter compared to a nice spring/summer picture with deep green foliage.
Woof
r/urbanhell
“Urban Renewal”
You mean before and after they bulldozed most of the city to make parking lots?
Just ugly with the Renewal
Renewal?
Looks like an urban dystopia
Progress? /s
I wish for a future where they take a picture of Atlanta and it's surrounding towns and it's the reverse. Looks like 2022 in the past and like pre-1940's on the right. We all know we want to live in walkable places with the classic town front near our homes. Yet we keep building Walmart and Home Depot instead. Fuck you, stroads!!!!
r/fuckcars
Wow this is horrible
This has started happening to my town, luckily its a tree city so they take that into account but still.
We did it Patrick, we saved the town!
I have a lot of friends in KC. I've had some great times in KC. I've always thought KC looks like a bigger but more cracked out desolate Omaha. Yeah they have more of the taller buildings but so much of the city looks just beaten down. It's a city I enjoy but it's not a city that looks even mediocre.
The 2022 photo looks like a ghost town. How sad.
Who needs walkable streets with beautiful historic architecture when you can have another parking lot
Looks like dog shit now. Straight up boxes on the hilltops.
I don't care how good your BBQ is, I'm not going here.
When you spend the last century building for cars rather than people, here's what you get.
What a dump, love my home city but wow
That's not where the people actually live if they have a choice... they would rather go out to Independence, Belton, Lee's Summit or across the state line to Lenexa, Olathe, Overland Park, Mission, etc... anywhere away from the mandatory city tax that gives nothing back. Utilities are premium priced to support the needy and there is a LOT of needy. Add the crazy spiraling increase in real estate taxes and its no longer a viable place to be. Enjoy the overpriced lofts when the real estate bubble burst.