14 Story apartment tower - Westport

[kcjak]

Make the apartment residents enter the garage from the Mill St side and reserve a section of the garage for only Westport visitors to enter on Penn.

[DaveKCMO]

A million ways to skin this cat. There are four lanes in the Mill Street side!

[chingon]

A bunch of you big, bad, densy-dense, walkscore, car-shamer, citified midtowners are acting like some Brookside fuddy-duddies. SHAME!

This plan adds residents WHERE NO ONE LIVES! The fuck is wrong with you guys?

[mykn]

A bunch of you big, bad, densy-dense, walkscore, car-shamer, citified midtowners are acting like some Brookside fuddy-duddies. SHAME!

This plan adds residents WHERE NO ONE LIVES! The fuck is wrong with you guys?

Where are you seeing this?

[chaglang]

There aren't 4 lanes on the Mill Street side. The are two. I'm looking at both of them right now.

So sure, other cities put up 3000000 story towers on unpaved cowpaths and there's no associated car traffic. It's just how real cities work and god what's wrong with these NIMBY rubes in Kansas City. I get all that.
I'm sympathetic to the argument that midtown needs more residents. We're down 30%+ in population over the last few decades and that drop has a real impact on the quality/quantity of goods and services available. But in other development discussions, I've often heard the complaint that KCMO is so desperate for development that it will approve anything that comes along, whether it is a good idea in the long term or not. The Broadway Jimmy John's, for example. This tower and the arguments for it fall along those lines. What's the primary argument for it? It's big. What's the secondary argument? It's big... and other cities do it. I'm not seeing a lot of consideration given to whether this project does anything but be big. Giving that consideration is important in any situation, but more so in a thriving area with a strong preexisting architectural character. Rushing ahead and building what's essentially density for the sake of density and damn everything else is begging to be regretted later.

Where's that discussion go? For me it's something like this: midtown might be citified, but from a scale standpoint it has a lot more in common with bad, evil, no-good Brookside than Downtown. The buildings that do go above 5-6 floors are mostly grouped onto major streets, and the side streets are lower scale. It gives a formal legibility that works really well for both scales. Doing something like that - smaller building/same site or same building/larger site - in Westport would be contextual and add density. That kind of medium-level density could be added to every vacant lot in Westport and not disrupt the small-scale, walkable character of the area. It's an obvious middle ground that maximizes the benefits to the area and minimizes risk of disrupting the existing architectural context. And no, it's not the project that's proposed, that's never stopped any discussions here before. Ha.

[JBmidtown]

No way. Go big or go home.

[FangKC]

It's the walkable nature of the neighborhood that makes the argument for a higher density residential zoning there. But the other significant arguments are that it adds housing near a grocery store, a drug store, a bank, a post office, a movie theater, and restaurants. It's near two bus routes, and two of the major hospitals in the Metro. Thus, this location makes the apartments very desirable and needed for older people as well as anyone who wants to take mass transit to work. There are few locations in the city where all of these things are already in place. These apartments are going to be very appealing to independent affluent seniors planning for the day they no longer drive.

[kcjak]

I heard a rumor the owners of Char Bar are taking this to court.

[chingon]

A bunch of you big, bad, densy-dense, walkscore, car-shamer, citified midtowners are acting like some Brookside fuddy-duddies. SHAME!

This plan adds residents WHERE NO ONE LIVES! The fuck is wrong with you guys?

Where are you seeing this?

Mostly the twitters.

[chaglang]

It's the walkable nature of the neighborhood that makes the argument for a higher density residential zoning there. But the other significant arguments are that it adds housing near a grocery store, a drug store, a bank, a post office, a movie theater, and restaurants. It's near two bus routes, and two of the major hospitals in the Metro. Thus, this location makes the apartments very desirable and needed for older people as well as anyone who wants to take mass transit to work. There are few locations in the city where all of these things are already in place. These apartments are going to be very appealing to independent affluent seniors planning for the day they no longer drive.

Sure. But if the problem we all agree on is that the area needs more residents, and there are multiple solutions to that problem, I'm arguing for the one that has the least potential to screw up what's there now. Distributing lower-height density throughout Westport does all of the things that you cite as positives for the tower, but it does them more effectively. It can put people closer to the drug store, closer to the bank, closer to the post office, closer to restaurants. It supports the eastern end of Westport Road better. It puts people close to the (fingers crossed) streetcar extension on Main - and within the likely TDD boundaries. It puts people closer to the developments at Westport Jr/Sr High. And the risk of ruining the scale of what's successful is minimized.

[Critical_Mass]

I heard a rumor the owners of Char Bar are taking this to court.

on what grounds?

[kcjak]

I heard a rumor the owners of Char Bar are taking this to court.

on what grounds?

I don't have any details other than the development would remove the outdoor patio and the owners aren't pleased.

[kboish]

Apparently, this project is sailing through its approval process (although the title of this thread should probably be changed because it is now two towers at around 7or 8 stories)

http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics ... 69374.html

It calls for 215 apartments and a 120-room hotel, plus 12,100 square feet of restaurant space; 24,150 square feet of retail space; and 11,500 square feet of office space. The Tivoli Cinemas would remain and have its own dedicated entry.

Buildings currently on the site remain but exterior walls and facade will be modified, and the Char Bar, 4050 Pennsylvania, will remain. The roof of a 700-space parking garage will have grass and plantings on about three-quarters of an acre to create a park-like courtyard setting.

[flyingember]

Opus is too dense, this one isn't.

Really makes you think that it's not about density, that someone has a financial reason to be against one project and not another.

[kcjak]

Cue Mary Jo Draper...

[DaveKCMO]

the least complex explanation is that the opus project triggered a stronger response because it will demolish an old building. that's my vote.

[mykn]

the least complex explanation is that the opus project triggered a stronger response because it will demolish an old building. that's my vote.

That's probably true for the initial response. They definitely dropped the "save the old building" thing towards the end and went with density and parking as their main concerns. To me, going to some of the opposition meetings and going to the PZE meeting, density and parking was the main concern all along. It's just strange that this project, which needs to be featured on McMansion Hell, gets very little push back.

[kboish]

...and went with density and parking as their main concerns...

The truly "historic" issues HistoricKC should be focusing on.

[earthling]

There were some (raising hand) pro-density and pro-development where it makes sense but don't tear down 'the essence' of Westport as there is no one building that defines it - so the older buildings, especially since this was a functional one. It is a reasonable stance to encourage keeping the building and developing the gigantic lot as tall as logistically possible. And then there are the CAVEs (Citizens Against Virtually Everything) who don't want development or change at all.

[mykn]

There were some (raising hand) pro-density and pro-development where it makes sense but don't tear down 'the essence' of Westport as there is no one building that defines it - so the older buildings, especially since this was a functional one. It is a reasonable stance to encourage keeping the building and developing the gigantic lot as tall as logistically possible. And then there are the CAVEs (Citizens Against Virtually Everything) who don't want development or change at all.

I'm with you on not ruining the "essence of Westport" and we should be very careful of any building that gets removed for new development. The BOA building, from everything I've seen, really isn't anything more than an old building with about 7 facelifts. If you were at the PZE meeting, one of the presenters had a slide showing every single exterior remodel of the building. I believe it was sometime in the 60s-70s where the building actually looked like a generic suburban cube bank. The current facade is relatively recent and is really just "old-timey" in appearance, in my opinion.

That being said, I don't think the current look of the building is bad, I actually think it's rather handsome if it were fixed up a little. To me, on the OPUS project, on one hand there was an old building that doesn't retain it's original character but looks nice and fits the neighborhood aesthetic but is also mired in a sea of parking and on the other hand was a modern development that greatly improved density and kills a huge parking lot. To me, that was enough to be in support of the project. If they could have incorporated the existing building into the design it would have been better, but I wasn't going to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.