Value per acre failures in Topeka and elsewhere
Downtown is our best prospect for economic growth
We have worsened our city’s economic outlook by spreading out our population into suburbs easily-accessed by city highways. This ever-expanding outline has created massive maintenance liabilities for our city budget without expanding our tax base. Topeka’s population has been the same for 50 years, but our square mileage has steadily increased in that same time. That’s more miles of streets, sewers, and water lines for the city to maintain, on functionally the same property tax revenue from decades ago. At the same time, we wrecked a high-performing district in downtown and gave up taxable, private land to non-taxable uses like infrastructure and government buildings.
Urban Renewal became “Urban Removal,” sending thousands of residents out of the downtown district, and building a highway express route to the suburbs. Commercial properties have proliferated on the fringes of Topeka. We grew our city on the edges, rather from the middle, and we are financially suffering as a result.
If you’re curious to learn more about massive maintenance liabilities, the example of Lafayette, Louisiana may sound familiar. (https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason-your-city-has-no-money) Lafayette is a city of 125,000 (about the same as Topeka) that would have to raise taxes by $3,300 per household today just to maintain the roads and drainage systems they have already built. We’re in the same situation. Topeka has a $60 million liability on water lines alone. (https://www.cjonline.com/news/20200307/city-seeks-to-replace-aging-pipes-without-soaking-taxpayers)
Census Year | Topeka Population 1860 759 1870 5,790 1880 15,452 1890 31,007 1900 33,608 1910 43,684 1920 50,022 1930 64,120 1940 67,833 1950 78,701 1960 119,484 1970 125,011 1980 115,266 1990 119,883 2000 122,377 2010 127,473 2019 (est.) 125,310
Instead of urban renewal, a better bet in the 1950s would have been to help residents of The Bottoms improve their properties, block by block. After all, poor neighborhoods make the best investments. (https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/10/poor-neighborhoods-make-the-best-investment) The biggest gain in value for Topeka would have been to build and improve incrementally within The Bottoms district. Downtown creates some of the best property tax revenue in the city, with many parcels bringing in the highest value per acre compared to any other part of Topeka. (https://biketopeka.com/2020/05/20/value-per-acre-what-did-we-learn/) Sadly, investing in The Bottoms neighborhood is not an option any more, but maybe we can still make good on the destruction that urban renewal caused.
As we look at KDOT’s plan to rebuild and expand the Polk-Quincy Viaduct section of Interstate 70, it’s time to pause and consider what happened when this highway was built. The highway project and the Keyway Urban Renewal Project pulled the plug on downtown Topeka and drained it of significant, valuable population and commerce. Now, we are desperate to add residents and businesses to the area, but it’s a slow project. Maybe there’s a better way.
Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it
The real problem is right in front of us, and it’s not the noisy, polluting highway. That’s just a nuisance. The real problems are the silent struggles of our neighbors and residents who live within reach of the most valuable real estate district in all of Shawnee County, but don’t have enough food to eat, don’t have stable employment, and don’t have access to the power needed to make change in the future of their city — all because we cut apart communities of color in the 1950s.
These wounds will never be fully healed; we will never have the community like we might have had. But the pain and damage can be acknowledged, and we can work to give today’s generations a better start. We need to do that with real, physical acknowledgement — with money and land for economic development.
Because The Bottoms was the most affordable place to live in Topeka, many families had nowhere to go when urban renewal started. The Topeka Housing Authority was founded, and the Pine Ridge housing project was built. In its first year, it had 300 applications for just 100 apartments. We took a housing challenge from one part of the city and moved it to another area.
In 2016, black families nationally had on average 1/10th the wealth of white families. That is not to say that white families are necessarily wealthy — just that black families have significantly more barriers to education, employment, healthcare, and homeownership. Black families have been left behind, because they were legally prohibited from securing loans to buy homes in the 1940s and 1950s. At the same time, white families were investing in property and land, most of which appreciated significantly in the last five decades. Furthermore, in Topeka, the unemployment rate for black men in 2018 was 12.9% and only 5% for white men. (https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining-the-black-white-wealth-gap/) and (https://www.khi.org/assets/uploads/news/14815/ib1807_socio_final.pdf)
Despite a promising start as a free state, and a sort of ‘utopia’ for black families fleeing continued harassment after the Civil War, Kansas has not delivered on the promise of equality that our Constitution guarantees. From the late 1800s to the 1950s — a span of about 70 years — black families built community, built businesses, and built their families in Topeka. But the Keyway Urban Renewal Project, in about four years, shattered that dream for thousands of people. The racist policymaking of redlining, urban renewal, and urban highways exacerbated inequalities in Topeka, and ensured that our downtown would be less diverse in the future than it was at the turn of the 20th century.
Right now, we have the chance to do something different than KDOT’s proposed plan for rebuilding the Polk-Quincy Viaduct. We don’t have to add lanes (and add traffic) and bulldoze more buildings to keep our city on track for progress. We can tear down the highway and route traffic on boulevards instead. Streets like 10th Street, 8th Street, 6th Street, and Topeka Boulevard are all designed to carry plenty of traffic. If you’re just passing through, Google Maps reports that I-470 is only a minute different from using I-70. We can fill in the hole left by the below-grade highway downtown, and resurrect land where it used to be. We can offer that land, and capital, to former residents of the area, and any current resident of Topeka Housing Authority who writes a business plan.
One city’s path to rebuilding downtown
Topeka is far from the first city to consider closing part of an interstate. Take a look at the Inner Loop East project in Rochester, NY. (https://rbj.net/2019/09/18/inner-loop-projects-beginning-to-take-shape/)
Rochester closed a section of below-grade highway, filled in the hole, and developed new construction on top of that land.
Instead of rebuilding the highway, they closed it and filled it in with dirt, and the Mayor led the charge to encourage new development. The city saved millions of dollars in maintenance. And now, more than $200 million has been spent in private investment for housing and retail. In the near future, Rochester will be earning new property tax on land that has been un-taxable for decades.
The rebuild of the Polk-Quincy Viaduct is expected to cost more than $300 million to complete, mostly federal and state funding, with $20 million coming from Topeka (all debt). But if we close the highway, how much will we save? How much will we gain? It makes sense that Topeka should invest in land, especially its most valuable downtown land. After all, they’re not making any more of it.
Kansas was once a land of opportunity for people of color. Today, our teachers still proudly educate students about the state's role in the Brown v. Board of Education decision. While that court case helped to make life more equal for black people in the U.S., urban renewal, which happened just after the Brown decision, made life worse.
Growth Ponzi scheme
Topeka malls
Urban Renewal failed to deliver on its promise to keep downtowns relevant to the suburbs, and in all likelihood, accelerated the drain of urban dwellers to larger residential lots and commuter lifestyles.
As the population ebbed outward, new neighborhoods developed along commercial corridors. US-75 highway, also known as Topeka Boulevard, was a direct link between downtown and Forbes Air Field three miles south of Topeka. The Air Field was one military base in a national network, developed as a rapid response to the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. At one point, as many as XXXXXX enlisted people lived at the base, with XXXXX others living off the base in nearby Montara area - enough to support a full-size hospital on the grounds and dozens of ancillary businesses on The Boulevard.
The city's existing housing stock could not accomodate the post-war population boom, and new neighborhoods were being developed in all directions, especially along commercial corridors like Topeka Boulevard. In conjunction with some of these developments, along with new schools, grocery stores, hardware stores, and nightclubs, Topeka opened its first suburban mall, White Lakes, in 1964. Set behind a massive parking lot off Topeka Boulevard and 37th Street, the retail center was poised to capture the cash of passing travelers between downtown Topeka and the once-bustling Forbes Air Force Base.
Downtown was dying off, the suburbs were surging, and White Lakes was the place for retailers to be. Sears and Woolworth's both left downtown for White Lakes Mall.
In 1980, Topeka's population had started to slide from its 1970 peak of 125,000. The pain of that slight decline was just the start of the city's woes while trying to get back to the glory days of the baby boom, which would never happen again in history.
In 1988, Hypermart was built. Surrounded by corn fields and dirt roads a mile west of the city, the massive new store concept combined retail shopping with grocery shopping, a pharmacy, and fast food. The same year, West Ridge Mall opened, a quarter-mile away down Wanamaker Road. Montgomery Ward, the biggest retail development of Topeka's Urban Renewal project, left downtown for West Ridge Mall.
Catering to suburban spending, developers built more and more along the Wanamaker corridor. The city responded in kind, paving roads, adding stoplights, widening roads, adding more stoplights, and in recent years, adding roundabouts, but not more stoplights.
more notes - Topeka modern day https://www.cjonline.com/story/news/local/2021/01/30/topeka-east-central-hi-crest-neighborhood-say-investment-has-left-them-behind/6701840002/