I'm all about downtown and increasing our rental market, which is very strong. I'm just quoting the statistics and projections.ignatius wrote: Please show your source, JaxCo and KCMO still have more jobs than JoCo. KCMO has about 1/3 of the metro jobs. Downtown has more jobs than any one JoCo city, except OP, which is about the same. But downtown jobs are in a 2x3sq mile area.
http://forum.kcrag.com/index.php?topic=14421.0
JoCo will get a lot more apt development because it's the cheap wood frame crap built among surface lots and strip malls. Downtown would mostly be highrise development or urban sensitive, not cheap to do. Downtown rental occupancy is over 94% as good as any suburb.
For now, by 2030 JoCo will be the jobs and population leader:
http://www.metrodataline.org/xls/Foreca ... recast.xls
Here's a population history that goes a long way back:
http://www.metrodataline.org/xls/popula ... e_1830.xls
I see a lot of data and can't always remember where I see them whether it's Chamber, KCADC, etc., but the trends are against KCMO and JaCo. I saw something the other day for the first time that showed JaCo losing 25,000 jobs from 2000-2005. That stunned me because that's the first time I've been exposed to that if its true.
I'm the biggest downtown backer in the world and definitely hope it returns to being an economic juggernaut. Right now, it is not. The only real jobs it has gained have been other KCMO relocations. It's not really gaining net new jobs. There really hasn't been anything of significance from the Kansas side. Because it hasn't become a location of choice for work, you have high vacancies and relatively low lease rates. I'm really concerned about it because despite the early success of Power & Light, there doesn't seem to be much momentum in the downtown office market.