KCRag Forum

surprised this hasn't been posted, but i know some of you are active on the mindmixer site.

http://www.kcmo.org/CKCMO/Depts/CityPla ... /index.htm
http://midtownplaza.mindmixer.com/

Planning is the process by which a community assesses what it is and what it wants to become, and then decides how it can make that happen.

Area plans are designed to realize the community's vision for the future and provide elected officials with a proactive framework to make decisions about housing, development, and economic growth of the area.

Area plans provide a single, comprehensive plan for an area of the City and provides policies to guide public decisions on land use, infrastructure, public services and zoning.

The Midtown/Plaza Area Plan will:

- Recommend guidelines and strategies related to development, housing, neighborhoods, economic development, transportation, capital improvements, open spaces and urban design.
- Serve as the "plan of record" for the area and will be fully integrated with other adopted plans resulting in a single, coordinated policy for the area.
- Build on the foundation of previous planning efforts in the area.

first public meeting is 6-8pm jan. 24 at st. paul's:

http://www.kcmo.org/idc/groups/cityplan ... invite.pdf

Meeting is tonight. I can't go, so I hope to see what some of your impressions are.

Boundaries of the Planning Area:
North: 31st St.
South: 55th St.
West: State Line
East: Paseo Blvd.

Public Meeting #1
Jan. 24, 6-8 p.m.,
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
11 E. 40th St., Kansas City, MO

Background and Orientation

Planning is the process by which a community assesses what it is and what it wants to become, and then decides how it can make that happen.

Area plans are designed to realize the community's vision for the future and provide elected officials with a proactive framework to make decisions about housing, development, and economic growth of the area.

Area plans provide a single, comprehensive plan for an area of the City and provides policies to guide public decisions on land use, infrastructure, public services and zoning.

The Midtown/Plaza Area Plan will:
•Recommend guidelines and strategies related to development, housing, neighborhoods, economic development, transportation, capital improvements, open spaces and urban design.

•Serve as the "plan of record" for the area and will be fully integrated with other adopted plans resulting in a single, coordinated policy for the area.

•Build on the foundation of previous planning efforts in the area.

http://www.kcmo.org/idc/groups/cityplan ... invite.pdf

take it from a downtown stakeholder: the city is no longer interested in area plans that collect dust. GDAP still has an active implementation committee that is going strong, years after that plan was adopted.

if you care about midtown/plaza, GO TO THIS MEETING. if you can't make it tonight, there will be another one soon.

If anyone can make it, please suggest we need to stop turning midtown into suburbia. No more stripmalls/fast food with front parking, need more streetfront dev with parking in rear or side if rear not doable.

Turn Frontier Park at Westport/Bway into a well manicured pocket park with plenty of benches. And the almost pocket park in front of Thriftway @Main/Westport could be a true pocket park with more benches. Mill Creek Park also lacking of enough benches.

I'm planning to go; I'm chock full of ideas.

I'll be there as well. It will surprise me if there are ideas floated at the meeting that I hadn't seen suggested here first.

chaglang wrote:I'll be there as well. It will surprise me if there are ideas floated at the meeting that I hadn't seen suggested here first.

Unless that idea is more parking.

Video: City, residents work together to shape the future of Midtown

It was standing room only at Thursday night's public meeting on the future of Midtown.
Nearly 200 people turned up at St. Paul's Episcopal Church to share their ideas with a team of city-hired consultants.
"I am pleasantly surprised by the turnout," Midtown resident Lynday McClelland said. "A lot of people care about this area."...

The hands rapidly flew up as people commended the area's parks, diversity and history.
When the discussion turned to the concerns, Zach Flanders said he'd like to see more access for cyclists.
"I've actually been hit by a car before," Flanders said. "I'd like to see some bike lanes or some separation between myself and traffic."

The group I sat with, when asked about problems in Midtown, got most of the way through the second page of ideas before anyone said "crime". Schools were the first item mentioned, and though the order the complaints were made in obviously wasn't prioritized, I thought it was very interesting that wasn't the one of the first things people thought of. Transit (streetcar & bike), and better development (mixed use, less parking, etc) were topics that generated a lot of ideas.

pretty much every group agreed on three things:

- improve schools/public safety/perception
- safer/complete streets
- historic preservation

i heard a LOT of praise for the main street streetscape and a lot of veiled criticism of highwoods and st. luke's.

there was even positive talk of streetcar phase 2!

Oh, the criticism of Highwoods and St. Luke's wasn't veiled at all where I was sitting.

Ha, that was me on the TeeVee.

To be fair, I was hit at 47th and Mission (Outside of the Midtown Area). I was wearing a bright yellow jersey and had three blinking lights on me. Some old lady passed me and then turned right into me. (she was turning into the now defunct Apple Market parking lot). When I followed her to her parking spot (she didn't stop after hitting me), she started yelling at me and said "Some of us actually have places to go and it's annoying when slow cyclists get in the way. You should have been on the sidewalk." I was on my way to work, so I responded "Some of us have to get to work and it's annoying when drivers decide to mow us over."

Your restraint is impressive. She arguably deserved physical harm.

mean wrote:Your restraint is impressive. She arguably deserved physical harm.

She was buying food at the Apple Market, so she probably did receive physical harm.

Meeting #2 tonight.

Public Meeting / Work Session
6-8 p.m.
Thurs., Feb. 28
The Kauffman Foundation
4801 Rockhill Road

neighborhood people really hate southwest trafficway. i'd expect that to be addressed specifically in the plan.

also, streetcar!

Streetcar had a good night last night. The totality of our parking conundrum came into focus in the group that was discussing density along Main St. There were some older people who wanted density and more surface parking and thought a streetcar would get in everyone's way. Tried explaining that more surface lots and more density are counter to one another, but without improved transit we just keep bouncing back and forth between these options. Reply: "I like driving".

Downzoning, density, and overlay districts also had a good night. There was a good discussion about appropriate levels of density is almost a block-by-block undertaking. The example of South HP having apartments on the E-W streets and SFH on the N-S streets came up as an example of how neighborhood determinations of density is too broad a brush. Personally, I love that model.

The people I recognized from the previous meeting all seemed to be on the same page in terms of development, transit, etc. That's a good sign.

from that description, it doesn't sound like streetcar fared well at all. or were those folks who "like to drive" the minority amongst the pro-streetcar contingent?

chaglang wrote:Downzoning, density, and overlay districts also had a good night. There was a good discussion about appropriate levels of density is almost a block-by-block undertaking. The example of South HP having apartments on the E-W streets and SFH on the N-S streets came up as an example of how neighborhood determinations of density is too broad a brush. Personally, I love that model.

Did anyone bring up form based codes? Isn't the city supposed to be trying to move to form based codes in areas like midtown?

http://www.formbasedcodes.org/

kboish wrote:

chaglang wrote:Downzoning, density, and overlay districts also had a good night. There was a good discussion about appropriate levels of density is almost a block-by-block undertaking. The example of South HP having apartments on the E-W streets and SFH on the N-S streets came up as an example of how neighborhood determinations of density is too broad a brush. Personally, I love that model.

Did anyone bring up form based codes? Isn't the city supposed to be trying to move to form based codes in areas like midtown?

http://www.formbasedcodes.org/

I didn't hear anyone suggest them, and I don't know enough about them to stump for them. A motivated individual could always put them up on the mindmixer site.

The people advocating for more parking were uniformly much, much older and far less mobile than those arguing against it. Because of mobility issues, parking is like gold to the people I talked to and the prospect of more businesses in midtown worries them because it carries the potential reduced parking availability. I suspect that this is going to be a huge issue in selling the streetcar extension to Midtowners. Probably moreso than the presence of crabby NIMBYs.