@BlogKCTwo big issues facing our neighbors in Overland Park:
1. Overland Park is on the verge of approving it’s first-ever TIF project to redevelop an abandoned strip mall on 95th Street. Another TIF is anticipated for the proposed redevelopment of the dead Metcalf South shopping mall.
2. Overland Park is involved in a controversial annexation plan that would extend it’s borders to 203rd Street, some 14 miles south of the decaying shopping centers.
Anyone see a connection between numbers 1 and 2?
The developers are out-schmoozing the leadership’s common sense. If you keep hearing something that’s wrong, sometimes you start to belive it.
Inner-ring suburbs are the new slums. The end of cheap and abundant energy=the beginning of the end for far-flung suburbia. Most people move there because they perceive it as “safe” with “good schools” and you get “a lot of house for the money”. As far as that last one, it’s true, but the reason is it’s built out of shit, and people can always build further out than you. Hahaha, what an “investment”. All this as the core city is making a comeback and urban property values are holding steady while suburban (“sub” being the key prefix here) properties are losing value by the day. Bottom line: suburbia was the ghastly by-product of an energy glut that is now passing into a bygone era.
thank you tim howard kunstler
the connection is both involve denial.
Keep dreaming, Chris. Compare comparably-sized homes in Overland Park v Brookside, or even Overland Park v Prairie Village, and you’ll see that you still get more house in Overland Park, and even more in Olathe. Move north of the river and you get even more than in Olathe, etc.
People perceive suburbs as “safe” and having “good schools” because they are safe and have good schools. KCMO schools are abysmal and always will be abysmal, and slightly more expensive gas isn’t going to cause people to move to Waldo and send their kids to horrible schools. Young families and singles don’t care because they don’t have school-age kids, but most parents with a choice will always get the hell out of the city core.
This is not a matter of cheap gas. For the most part, people like living in big houses in nice neighborhoods with good schools, good city services, and low taxes. KC’s city core has some nice neighborhoods but large houses are terrible expensive. KCMO has horrible city services, horrible schools, and taxes no more attractive than other communities.
Marginally more expensive gas isn’t going to lead people to move to smaller houses on crumbling streets with 75 metal plates on it, down the block from an unaccredited school that might close next year, with the city government getting ready to jack up their taxes (again) for a $3 billion sewer project they know the city will screw up.
I live in OP and I’m against the annexation and I agree with some of your concerns about sprawl, but suburbs aren’t some temporary thing. As soon as people could afford cars they have been moving out of cities to get bigger houses. That’s not going to change.
hey hippstar, the commenter’s name appears ABOVE their post.
just sayin’
There are “crumbling streets” in every major city because there is a large population that actually use the streets a lot. In Kansas, a smaller population use mostly a handful of selected streets, and the rest of the time they’re on a highway going to and from the city they’re a parasite of. And yes, those suburbs will change as the poorly constructed “newer” homes continue to fall apart and develop problems like black mold. The occupants will be faced with three expensive choices: patch it up and hope for the best, tear it down and build again, or move waaaay out where property is cheaper (although the now-old “new” house has poor resale value). Oh yeah, and “slightly” more expensive fuel doesn’t just hit you at the pump. It affects the cost of heating/cooling that big house, the price of all goods including food, etc. Will it eventually prove prohibitively expensive for most people to live with this combination of circumstances? Of course it will. Maybe not overnight. But to pretend this is sustainable indefinitely ignores a lot of cold hard facts. And don’t get me started on how selfish and irresponsible that level of overconsumption is.
Gas is marginally more expensive for now. Do you really expect that to stay stable? For how long? What price level would gas have to hit before it becomes something to consider in a long commute? Then of course there are the cities where the commute takes more time and burns more gas than we do here…but this is BlogKC and I digress.
Hippstar, another question is how far will the sprawl go before it combines with higher gas prices to change the situation you describe? I’m not referring to the existing suburbs but to the kind of people who are looking at driving forty miles or more out I-70 in either direction or down I-35 that far.