Guess the suburb!

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GRID
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Re: Guess the suburb!

Post by GRID »

Not sure what PG county has to do with how KC’s suburbs interact with KCMO. PG County has suffered because of DC’s gentrification. Nothing like that is going on in KC.
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Re: Guess the suburb!

Post by brewcrew1000 »

chaglang wrote:The KC suburbs were built at the expense of the city. They were never meant to coexist with a vibrant urban core, because that's where the black people are. I have a problem with that. If anything their extreme proximity is more irritating, because it highlights the underlying racism. The state line proved to be the bulwark that restrictive covenants were meant to be.

They also embody the notion of disposable housing, which I also have a problem with.

Other things I have a problem with: irresponsible land use patterns, extraordinary aversion to public transit, shitty design quality.
PG County has to do with this post because aren't suburbs just being built at the expense of other suburbs?

Disposable and crappy housing is being occupied by a lot of black people/lower income people in various inner ring suburbs throughout the nation like PG, parts of Long Island, Southern Chicago Suburbs, even KC like Western Independence, Northern JoCo, Raytown, Grandview/Ruskin.
Aren't you just going to have this same cycle again in the inner suburbs?
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Re: Guess the suburb!

Post by chaglang »

Okay, but none of that changes the fact that the inner ring suburbs - or any of the rings of suburbs - were/are built at the expense of the city that they surround. If the newer suburbs are also draining other, older suburbs, it only reinforces the idea that they are not intended to coexist with suburbs/cities, etc.

Bad land use, transit, and design quality are common to both new and old suburbs.
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Re: Guess the suburb!

Post by FangKC »

aknowledgeableperson wrote:
chaglang wrote:The KC suburbs were built at the expense of the city. They were never meant to coexist with a vibrant urban core, because that's where the black people are.
Most of KC is made up of what were originally suburbs. One could even say KC was a suburb of Independence or Westport if you go back to before 1850. KCMO didn't expand past 20th Street to the south until 1873. And didn't expand much east past Woodson until after 1880. Many of those early streetcar lines traveled to areas (suburbs?) outside of what was then KCMO in the late 1880's to early 1900's.
However, when KC was founded, it was miles away from Independence and only connected by a roughed out dirt road surrounded by farms. Using the mode of travel of the day, it took several hours to travel by horse or wagon. People didn't move to KC to commute back and forth to Independence. It was just a separate town, and never really met the definition of a suburb.
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Re: Guess the suburb!

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chaglang wrote:The KC suburbs were built at the expense of the city. They were never meant to coexist with a vibrant urban core, because that's where the black people are. I have a problem with that. If anything their extreme proximity is more irritating, because it highlights the underlying racism. The state line proved to be the bulwark that restrictive covenants were meant to be.

They also embody the notion of disposable housing, which I also have a problem with.

Other things I have a problem with: irresponsible land use patterns, extraordinary aversion to public transit, shitty design quality.
Johnson County really doesn't want to be part of the urban core. Thus its' reluctance to buy into a regional transit system. Mass transit would bring in the "undesirable elements" associated with urban centers. Suburbanites here appear to have the mindset that mass transit is not as much an alternative way to travel back and forth to the urban core as much as its' a method for crime and poverty to enter their bubble.
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Re: Guess the suburb!

Post by aknowledgeableperson »

My point was that what was then the start of KC was just a small outpost/riverboat landing compared to Independence and Westport, and that KCMO itself is relly a collection of many different suburbs. But if you want to talk about what were once separate towns that would describe many of the communities that KCMO expanded out to that are now connected to it, like Belton (established 1872), Lees Summit (started as Strother 1865), Liberty (1822). Other cities not actually attached to KCMO also have long histories.
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Re: Guess the suburb!

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Many eastern Jackson County and Johnson County municipalities were founded in the mid 19th century. No argument there. But until just after WW2, they were more or less the same places they had been for the previous 100 years. Unless they were directly on a commuter rail like the Strang Line they weren't realistic places for large numbers of urbanites to commute to and from. The buildup of these towns after the 1940's transformed them and made them completely different places than they had been, essentially making the year they were founded irrelevant. Most of every town you mentioned was built after 1945.
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Re: Guess the suburb!

Post by aknowledgeableperson »

While those communities did change there were many reasons for those changes. Not just your blanket statement of
The KC suburbs were built at the expense of the city. They were never meant to coexist with a vibrant urban core, because that's where the black people are.
You put racism at the heart of the change but that is just one of many reasons. Look at the large employers that were on the fringe or outside of the "urban core". Ford Claycomo, TWA Overhaul base, KCI Airport itself, the Bannister Federal Complex, Western Electric, even many of the businesses that were along the Blue River, the two munitions plants, and RG Airbase are a few that come to mind. People moved to be close to those jobs and sometimes those residences were even further away from the core.
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Re: Guess the suburb!

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Then explain why those suburbs were hypersegregated when compared to the urban core. It seems strange that this desire to be closer to jobs was exclusive to whites. Or that the desire to remain in the city was exclusive to minorities.

To simply say that people moved to the suburbs for many reasons creates an equivalency between reasons that are not close to being equal. People have always moved because of jobs, but never before did entire cities empty out because of that. The businesses you mentioned all existed and employed people before WW2 and there was no mass migration on the scale of what happened after the war.
Last edited by chaglang on Tue Oct 30, 2012 9:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Guess the suburb!

Post by brewcrew1000 »

Even some of the subdivision names are racist. There is a subdivision in Overland Park near 83rd and Metcalf called White Haven. There is also a town near fort worth called White Settlement
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Re: Guess the suburb!

Post by studentper »

brewcrew1000 wrote:Even some of the subdivision names are racist. There is a subdivision in Overland Park near 83rd and Metcalf called White Haven. There is also a town near fort worth called White Settlement
I hope I'm missing your sarcasm. The OP builder's name was "White."
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Re: Guess the suburb!

Post by aknowledgeableperson »

Whites had a huge majority of those jobs #1.
The black community in KC was still rather small compared to now. For KC itself it wasn't until 1970 or so that the majority of the students in the KCMOSD were minorities. Figure in the number of white kids going to Catholic grade schools located within the KCMOSD and you have a population that is still mostly white inside your core #2.

Now one could ask why was the black community so concentrated into one area. An answer can be found here.
http://www.benross.net/Public%20School% ... d%20the%20...
The State of Missouri Constitution of 1875 stated that “Separate (public) schools shall be provided for white and colored children, except in cases otherwise provided for by law” (Matheny forward). In 1896, the Plessy v. Ferguson case, school segregation was reaffirmed by the Supreme Court, provided that the schools for black and white children were “separate but equal.” The outcome of the decision was that schools were indeed separate, but the standards were far from equal. The state of Missouri typified this institution. In 1948 the state of Missouri had over 6,000 school districts, many of which contained only a single school with an average of thirty students and no high school. Because the state required separate schools for blacks and whites, most districts could not accommodate for the two or three black students in the area who showed up for class. Only in the urban centers of Kansas City and St. Louis were there sizable enough black populations to sustain black high schools. As late as the 1930’s the state did not require that blacks receive tuition or transportation to schools which they could attend. Thus black children in Missouri often had no access to schools whatsoever (Benson).
So if you were a black parent who wanted an education for your kids you were limited to where you could live. And it took awhile for Blacks to move out of that area in KC. Now, an example of the education that Blacks received.
In 1968, a physics teacher at Paseo High School, which was originally all-white, but had a rapidly growing black student body, was transferred to Southwest, which at the time was practically 100% white. To take his place, Paseo received a principles of sanitation teacher. In essence, the physics class had been modified into a pre-janitorial vocational course (Benson).
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Re: Guess the suburb!

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aknowledgeableperson wrote:Whites had a huge majority of those jobs #1.

So the argument is that blacks did move and follow jobs, but in such small numbers that there were largely unnoticed? I don't buy that, because it doesn't explain why a population would suddenly and along racial lines decide to move en masse closer to work. These weren't new jobs. The factories had been there for years. And it in no way explains the movement of whites who were employed downtown from the urban core to the suburbs. They moved further from their jobs.
aknowledgeableperson wrote:Figure in the number of white kids going to Catholic grade schools located within the KCMOSD and you have a population that is still mostly white inside your core #2.

Not relevant.
aknowledgeableperson wrote:And it took awhile for Blacks to move out of that area in KC.

Hmmm. Why? By comparison whites were able to leave at warp speed.
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Re: Guess the suburb!

Post by aknowledgeableperson »

The population didn't just suddenly get up and move. The growth of the suburbs has taken decades. Now, if you consider 30 years and more warp speed then there is nothing else to do.
Not relevant.
Just shows that the black population was still concentrated. But at that time the inner burbs may have been mostly developed but the other burbs were far from it
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Re: Guess the suburb!

Post by chaglang »

aknowledgeableperson wrote:The population didn't just suddenly get up and move. The growth of the suburbs has taken decades. Now, if you consider 30 years and more warp speed then there is nothing else to do.
Not relevant.
Just shows that the black population was still concentrated. But at that time the inner burbs may have been mostly developed but the other burbs were far from it
Come on. You're basically arguing that white flight didn't happen.
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Re: Guess the suburb!

Post by aknowledgeableperson »

No, I am not. You made two points:
The KC suburbs were built at the expense of the city. They were never meant to coexist with a vibrant urban core, because that's where the black people are.
I don't buy that, because it doesn't explain why a population would suddenly and along racial lines decide to move en masse closer to work.
The white population did not suddenly desert the urban core, unless you call 30 or more years suddenly. And the GI Bill had probably more of an effect on white flight than racial attitudes, just look at the movement to the burbs before Brown v Board of Education in 1954 and the advent of busing.

Did race come into play? Yes, but it was far from being the sole cause of white flight. Race riots, teacher strikes, jobs, etc all played a part in that movement.
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Re: Guess the suburb!

Post by chingon »

Teachers strikes caused suburban flight. Ha. The fucking historical rewriting and scapegoating never ends with you people.
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Re: Guess the suburb!

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aknowledgeableperson wrote:The white population did not suddenly desert the urban core, unless you call 30 or more years suddenly.
The growth of the suburbs in the late 1940's and 1950's began suddenly and has continued largely unabated. I get that you seem to love semantic arguments, but this point is really beyond dispute.
aknowledgeableperson wrote:And the GI Bill had probably more of an effect on white flight than racial attitudes
It's strange that only white GIs took advantage of moving to places like Prairie Village and Shawnee Mission. It's almost like minorities were unable to buy houses in some places, and steered toward others. Weird. Oh, right: I forgot about redlining.
aknowledgeableperson wrote:just look at the movement to the burbs before Brown v Board of Education in 1954 and the advent of busing.
Meaning, what? That suburban expansion before 1954 wasn't racially driven?

Anyway, we both know that the KCMSD did a nice job of partitioning attendance boundaries along Troost as a way of maintaining property values on the west side. Such a good job that they eventually got sued for it.

And busing came to KC much, much later.
aknowledgeableperson wrote:Did race come into play? Yes, but it was far from being the sole cause of white flight. Race riots, teacher strikes, jobs, etc all played a part in that movement.
Race riots: 1968
Teacher strikes: 1974, 1977

I'd buy an argument that none of those events helped things, but they came almost 20 years after white flight began. The horse was out of the barn. And none of it counters my argument that the suburbs - particularly places like Prairie Village (created wholecloth in the 1940's) - were built on a racist premise. Everything you've mentioned - that suburbs were really towns that existed before Kansas City, that people were spontaneously and independently moving closer to their jobs, that whites didn't suddenly leave urban areas, that minorities were simply slower to leave the urban core are either beside the point or a misreading of history.

I stand by my other argument, that suburbs are an inherently parasitical creation with no interest in coexisting with the urban core or even other suburbs. Their effect on the urban core and, in the last 30 years, on first ring suburbs bears this out.
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Re: Guess the suburb!

Post by mistervinix »

I read an article years ago that lakes (say Shawnee Mission Park size) were proposed in the 1960s in the area of what is now Indian Creek parkway and College. They supposedly were never built partially over fear of "them" coming from the inner city to Leawood to use such lakes. The small ponds near the trails in that area are the legacy of that. I believe I read this in the old Squire weekly newspaper. There is no doubt in my mind that white flight is a huge reason for the growth of the Kansas side suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s.
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Re: Guess the suburb!

Post by GRID »

PG County aside, my point was that the Kansas suburbs of KC despite being the closest to the city, are some of the most hostile and anti-cooperation suburbs I have seen in any metro. The KS burbs take things much further than friendly economic competition with KCMo and frankly I think that is the primary reason that KC often is rather stagnant in growth for a large established metro west of the Mississippi. Metro KC is so busy handing out tax breaks to companies to move around the metro (mostly subsidizing sprawl at the urban core’s expense), that nothing much else gets done.

JoCo has pretty much ruined KC and kept the metro as a whole down regardless of what’s going on in JoCo (because so much of it has just moved from kcmo over the past 40 years). KC has one of the most affluent and fastest growing large suburban counties in the nation and yet the metro as a whole has almost fallen off the national map. While at the same time, JoCo has refused to cooperate with the rest of the region in almost any way and more often than not has only inflicted harm on kcmo and even kck or even its own inner ring burbs. How is it even possible for a city like KC to go from being like the 18th largest metro to the 30th? KC is not Buffalo. There is a reason cities like MSP and Denver have blown past KC and cities like Charlotte, Nashville, Indy, even OKC are breathing down its neck. It didn't have to turn out like that, but everybody in KC thinks everything in KC is just fine because JoCo is doing great. Now even the crap by the speedway is praised as a great thing. No...it's not a great thing. It's an island of heavily subsidized sprawl 20 miles outside the city and you drive past 20 miles of blight to get there. I can't possibly see how that area is impressive to anybody outside of Kansas or the nascar/anti-city/exurban-country demographic.

The two largest counties in the metro can’t even get a decent bus route established along one of the main east west arterials.

People in KC just don’t realize just how bad the state line situation is there and how much it has affected the greater KC area’s ability to compete as a region on a national playing field.
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