pash wrote:We already know suburban growth and urban decline have characterized Kansas City since about 1950. If you're interested in why gains for the 'burbs are losses for the city, and especially if you're interested in the counterfactual—what KC might look like today if it had followed a different pattern of growth—it's necessary to take a closer look and try to isolate variables that are broadly associated with urban and metropolitan growth and decline in cities across the country.
That's what some of the studies I summarized above have done. And they all suggest that suburban growth of the type that's dominated the KC metro over past sixty years comes at the expense of the city and the metro as a whole. And one can find specific factors like the construction of hub-and-spoke freeways that are closely correlated with suburban growth, even in the presence of many control variables, including temporal controls that strongly suggest building highways spurs the growth of suburbs, and not the other way around.
This illustrates a point. People decry $100 million to build a starter streetcar line to encourage density, yet few people think twice about spending $600 million on a highway project in a metro area that has among the shortest commute times already in this country.
I also wonder how much economic development this will actually create? Will it just allow people, and jobs, to move further out to places like Olathe and even Lawrence? At what point will Overland Park realize that they are losing jobs to these cities? And as Overland Park ages, will its' northern neighborhoods become hollowed out like in eastern KC, or subdivisions of poverty like Ruskin Heights?
Instead of adding more highway lanes, why not begin to encourage more commuter rail travel into the more denser parts of the metro?
