kcmetro wrote:
That's along the lines of what I was going to post. We should just leave that area alone because there's no reason to put a soccer stadium in the middle of the "ghetto". Who goes to Wizards games? Rich white folks from JOCO, not Deandre and Lonzell from Raytown. So there's no need to push that crap on an area that isn't going to support it. North KC, fine, Joco, fine, VW, fine, but Bannister Mall??? You think developers would be jumping at the opportunity to invest in that? Nope.
First off.
Johnson County doesn't want a soccer stadium. The residents of JoCo have been ripping the new owners of the wizards a new one since the day they bought the team. They couldn't wait to tell a big time big league team to go to hell, they are not building a palace for them to play in. It's a suburban, conservative county that is more than willing to let poor old jackson county build palaces so they have a place to be entertained but by god, they are against the idea themselves and they took that out on the little old wizards and their new owners who wanted nothing more than to keep the team in KC. And the people that do want a stadium, will vote for it as long as it's not within 10 miles of their homes. NIMBYS...
Second.
Why not banister mall? It's right on the freeway in a very high profile location, the area around the mall is getting a ton of infrastructure upgrades. All those ramps modot built as part of the triangle project for those massive shopping crowds they had in the 80's could very well serve a soccer complex and other new mixed use development. Plus 87th is being widened into a parkway from 435 to 71 and the stretch from 435 to Blue Ridge is being rebuilt.
Third.
The area around Bannister Mall was far from "ghetto" when the area went down the tubes. It was a very nice, working class, even middle class area. They don't just throw 3 million sq ft of retail up in five years anywhere. KCMO did screw the area up by putting way to many HUD houses in the areas of Hickman Mills and Ruskin and that scared off white people in droves, brought a home building boom to a screeching halt (you can still see that around James A Read and Bannister where the building just stopped) and gave Raytown and Grandview a horrible and undeserved reputation at the same time because people associated those areas with bannister mall. The press had a freaking heyday over car thefts that were no more common than Oak Park Mall etc and bannister mall overeacted by installing "security towers". This is another issue that KCMO faces. Where do they put all the HUD and section 8 housing? There is even a lot of it in the northland and far east KCMO as they were forced to spread out the housing throughout the city. These kinds of issues are not even imagined in most of the suburbs, especially the JoCo suburbs.
Fourth.
Why not rebuild Bannister. It's still not "ghetto" and the area around it still has a ton of potential, especially now that those inner city bus lines will be taking people to the next shopping area that will soon face similar urban problems that simply don't exist in JoCo...The Blue Ridge Mall.
The Bannister Mall area should be a top priority now for KCMO and Missouri. Screw all the "City Walk" crap in Lee's Summit and use those supertiffs and modeasa incentives to rebuild this area.
This area still has a ton of