First, we built the suburbs. Then, we built highways leading to those suburbs. Then, we built malls in the suburbs, and drained downtown of retail. Then, we built roads from suburb to suburb, and put strip-malls in between them. Then we had to build schools and fire stations and parks in the suburbs. Pretty soon, we were spending just as much of the city's taxpayer money on sprawl as we were on the original town.
Suburban development is an inefficient method for a city to disperse its tax dollars. With wider roads, bigger land parcels, and neighborhoods far away from existing infrastructure - it costs more and more for a city to maintain these areas.
But humans didn't evolved to crave efficiency. Our brains have been devoted to knock-down, drag-out survival for more than 100,000 years. The industrial revolution didn't make us decide that we'd be happy with less. No, ours has been a story of more, more, and more. So when the wealth and opportunity of World War II presented us with the opportunity for almost everyone to have more land, more houses, more space, and more stuff - we naturally chose that course without consulting our enlightened sides to consider the consequences.
Before the days of plenty, humans were always hoarders, but we hedged bets more carefully.
Old neighborhoods near downtown tend to be more compact and more efficient for a city to fund. The infrastructure is smaller. The streets are narrower and require less paving. The sidewalks already exist, so there aren't costly design phases to build new sidewalks.
Right now, Topeka is like many other cities in the U.S. - a doughnut. Much of the city's wealth, especially residential wealth, is concentrated in neighborhoods that ring around the fringe of the city. In the middle of the city - downtown and its immediate surrounding neighborhoods - is the hole. Disinvestment, displacement, and vacancy are the rule. Retail and office buildings constructed of brick and stone sit vacant while new developments are being built every season on the edge of town. Why should buildings, intended to last 150 years, sit vacant, while new buildings, built to last no more than 20, see full occupancy? In Topeka alone, we love to rebuild our fast-food restaurants. Typically we build a new one right next to the old one. You can see this pattern with Pizza Huts, Taco Bells, McDonald's restaurants, and more. The city's forebears put real investments into bank buildings, office buildings, and towers downtown - investing hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions - in sturdy buildings meant to last for generations. But we don't build this way any more. We build cheap and fast because our economy has become based on short-term growth -- not longevity.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/8/3/cobb-county-addicted-to-growth
"..the Suburban Experiment is not a problem we can solve, but a predicament with outcomes we can only manage." https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/4/16/where-did-the-money-go
Kansas City example from Strong Towns:
"Kansas City in 1946 had approximately 12 feet of street for each of its 434,000 residents. Then the city began a massive annexation binge, gobbling up suburban and rural land even as the population of the core city plummeted amid postwar decline and white flight. Core neighborhoods saw whole swaths of land demolished for new highways to serve suburban commuters.
By 2018, Kansas City had added an additional 58,000 net new residents while more than quintupling its physical area. For each of those new residents, on average, Kansas City built a jaw-dropping 148 feet of new streets: over 12 times the per-capita street obligation of its prewar pattern. In total, the city added 1,625 miles of streets and roads in the post-war era, a 169% expansion of its street network to accompany only a 13% increase in population.
These statistics illustrate how the Suburban Experiment was a pivot point in the history of North American cities, a moment at which we started doing something fundamentally different and unprecedented. It's an experiment we've never been able to afford—though only nowadays, as much of our 20th-century infrastructure begins to need repair or replacement, are the bills coming due in an obvious way. And Kansas City exemplifies that as well as anywhere." https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/7/26/the-road-to-insolvency-is-long
Local thoughts on Kansas City
Getting to Kansas City from Topeka takes about an hour by car. Crossing the greater Kansas City metro area from say, Olathe, KS to Liberty, MO, also takes about an hour by car. Kansas City is huge. With the exception of downtown and some prewar neighborhoods, it's a massive nest of suburbs and a snarl of highways, with very little practical infrastructure.
Personal story about Kansas City - include anecdotes about mother's upbringing? And a note about shopping malls
As a kid, making a trip to Kansas City usually meant going to Oak Park Mall in Overland Park.
Checking the map for the Oak Park Mall area today, the mall is surrounded by modern chain-based retail and restaurants. Three of the 30+ businesses surrounding the mall are local; the rest are national chains. The intersection of 95th & Quivira is on par with Kansas City-style development: it's huge. Built like a divided highway that would be better suited for crossing rural farmland, these streets have eight lanes crossing eight lanes. Sidewalks are present, but only used when absolutely necessary. I've been visiting Oak Park Mall for 20 years and have never had occasion to use the sidewalks in the area.
Suppose I wanted to leave the mall and go eat at Bo Ling's across the street. From JC Penney to the front door of Bo Ling's is about 600 feet in a straight line, or a few minutes' walk. But crossing 8 lanes of 45 mph traffic is a bad idea for a pedestrian. Using the built-in pedestrian infrastructure and crossing the street at the stoplight almost triples the walking journey. So, driving across the street is the best option. But this is not convenience. Our car-based built environment has spread things out, and made life more expensive and more difficult. Humans have a natural capacity for extremely efficient bipedal locomotion - walking - but in this case, the easiest and safest option for crossing a distance of 600 feet is getting inside a 3,000-pound metal machine, starting its engine capable of propelling that machine to speeds of 80 mph, crossing traffic where hundreds of other people inside metal machines are competing for space, and driving for two minutes to get to the restaurant. This option is neither simple nor elegant.
Power of local vs. chains
https://ilsr.org/key-studies-why-local-matters/
Climate Change
Is climate change the new poor people's campaign? Probably not. The poor people's campaign encompasses more than that. But it's certainly one big issue. But like every natural disaster and man-made challenge, it tends to affect the poor disproportionately. Take the novel coronavirus COVID-19, a climate-change related pandemic. In the U.S., the virus has disproportionately affected people of color and people experiencing poverty. ( https://now.tufts.edu/articles/why-people-color-are-suffering-more-covid-19 )
In Kansas, we don't often discuss climate change. But we do talk about droughts, floods, and storms, which all affect the state's biggest industry, agriculture.
Ice Cream anecdote
On the way to pick up some Dole Whip from the Pineapple Dream food truck parked at 29th & Urish in Topeka, a deer darted between my car and another car on Urish Road. It was a near miss. Developments in this area are more than 20 years old, but they are still on the fringe of the city, where the transition to rural is clear. Wildlife were here first, and we have encroached upon their territory, without much care to practical and safe management between the types of developments. The residential areas to the east of Urish between 21st and 29th don't have many street lights. Urish Road doesn't have sidewalks. To the west of Urish Road is former agricultural land, now a golf course, and some additional parcels being developed into parkland. To wildlife, it's not clear what's safe or what isn't. Clearly, it's not very obvious to human residents, either. Just look at the squirrel, skunk, raccoon, and opossum roadkill count on any street in the county.
Urban-Rural
About 99% of Kansas is farmland. We are a very rural state. We have a population of almost 3 million people, and we are not densely populated - we average about 35 people per square mile. We're in the top ten of rural states in the country. Despite our rural roots, more than two-thirds of Kansans live in cities and urban areas. Half of the state's urban population lives in Johnson County alone.
Kansas was once even more rural than it is today, but as rural opportunities fade away, interest in urban living increases.
And yet, urban living in Kansas doesn't mean living in high-rise apartments and shopping at corner stores. The tallest apartment building in Topeka has ten stories. Kansans, even urban Kansans, are used to having plenty of space to roam.
renters and owners https://www.nmhc.org/research-insight/quick-facts-figures/quick-facts-resident-demographics/renters-and-owners/ county populations http://kslegislature.org/li/b2019_20/committees/ctte_h_rural_revitalization_1/documents/testimony/20190117_01.pdf
Note on farming
Farming has changed in Kansas, too. Before World War II, family farms were still practical. A family with modest acreage could grow a diversity of crops and might expect to do fine year over year. But after the war, munitions factories turned their surpluses of ammonium nitrate into steroid-level fertilizers for American farms. Crop yields exploded. Because nitrogen in the soil could be guaranteed, crop success, especially in corn and soybeans, could also be guaranteed.
The huge new yields led to a total shift in the entire North American food industry. Farming became an industry with factory-like inputs and outputs. Input fertilizer, output corn and soybeans. Input corn and soybeans into the food system, output high-fructose corn syrup, corn oil, paper industry starch, biodiesel fuel and ethanol, and more. Input commodity corn back into the food system, output enough beef for $1 hamburgers at all 15,000 McDonald's restaurants on the continent.
Because the food industry shifted its demand to shelf-stable products full of high-fructose corn syrup, farms got bought up and became bigger and bigger, owned by fewer and fewer people - mostly corporations. Without demand for diverse crops, the family farm made less and less sense.
("Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" - Barbara Kingsolver)
The feeling of victory after the war must have been intoxicating, because we sure made a lot of short-sighted blunders in the succeeding decades.
Car ownership In-town travel changed after the war, too. In the '30s and '40s, transit ridership was three times today's numbers in Topeka, despite the population being about half what it is now.
Almost every senior, adult, teen, and toddler could have a car in Kansas -- in this state, there are 9 cars for every ten residents.
But at one time, trains and transit ruled rural transport on the plains. Between 1870 and 1900, more than 20 different rail transit companies had been established in the Topeka area. Sending trains from Topeka to Kansas City, and Rossville to Eskridge, these private rail companies spanned an exponentially greater network than today's anemic transit services. Today, transit service covers only the city limits, with fewer lines and less frequency than service at the turn of the 20th century.
"Omnibus to Motor Bus" Bulletin of Shawnee County Historical Society, December 1969 - No. 46 car ownership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_vehicles_per_capita
To put car ownership in perspective - Kansas is somewhere in the middle. The way we've built our country, car ownership is almost a requirement for getting an education, getting a job, getting to health care, and visiting family and friends.
It's a complex issue. Our population - and our economy - blew up like a bomb after WWII. We were rich and had a massive population bubble. We built new neighborhoods, new roads, new cities, even - to house all the new people. And new schools, and new fire stations, and new shopping malls. But we didn't build sustainably. We didn't build incrementally. We started to build entire neighborhoods to a finished state - the whole 3-bedroom, 2-bath, 2-car house - was complete, and installed on a cul-de-sac. We wouldn't need sidewalks, because we would always have cars, now that we were wealthy. Plus, the neighborhood was built way outside of town, so each family could have plenty of space for a yard of their own, but that means it's a pretty far drive to get back into town.
Decades later we realize that the suburbs are the hardest place to make it. Unless you arrive in the suburbs with means, you may never get ahead. The cost of living is high in the suburbs, because the plots are bigger. The cost of transportation is high, because the suburbs are disconnected from the resources in the city. The grocery stores are more expensive, because it costs more to get goods delivered further away.
Car-based families, car-less seniors
And now, in 2020, wages have been depressed for nearly sixty years -- families are struggling to pay for rent, utilities, food, and transportation. Basic travel costs can now account for 20-40% of a family's budget.
The most exciting day in a teenager's life is getting the keys to their first car. No matter how old or rusty the car, it's a great day - it's an emancipation from geographical boundaries imposed by parents.
Parents are equally excited to hand over the keys. With school a few miles from home and soccer practice 10 miles in a different direction, it's a part-time job just to shuttle kids to their daily activities. As soon as kids can drive themselves, parents start to relax and make their empty-nest plans.
Americans value solo living above all else. White families in the U.S. rarely live with multiple generations in the home -- usually just parents and children. Rarely grandparents -- they're off in the nursing home, another few miles' drive away, most likely in a suburb without transit access.
While many of a person's needs can be met at a retirement home, transportation is still a challenge. Because our cities have been designed around car travel by independent drivers, we have eroded the support for good sidewalks, connected communities, and easy-to-use transit. As a result, our seniors are left behind. When elderly people can no longer drive, they mostly stay home. (need several citations here)
For seniors, transportation is often the biggest cost after housing - outpacing even health care. https://www.forbes.com/sites/josephcoughlin/2019/01/30/the-big-surprising-cost-in-retirement-no-one-plans-for-but-should/?sh=93d2b0d20f32
Bringing it back to Urban-Rural
Shawnee County's 2038 Comprehensive Plan suggests that the county's aging population will see the greatest growth in the unincorporated areas of the county, outside the city limits. Conversely, the City of Topeka's Land Use and Growth Management Plan 2040 hopes to capture some of this population growth within the city (which has not seen significant growth since 1970) by encouraging development within areas that already have established city infrastructure like water, sewer, and streets.
While the tone of each plan is markedly different, both have some positive overlap. The County plan proposes to "Ensure fiscally responsible administration of infrastructure investments" and to "Encourage industrial development to the most suitable locations."
While County residents have different interests from City residents, as they should, the two governing bodies have one big goal in common: bring in more money than they spend. http://www.snco.us/planning/document/snco_comp_plan_final_DRAFT_(FINAL%2010.15.18).pdf
- Habitat for Humanity builds several houses each year in Topeka, and gives people a path to home ownership - rebuilding the "missing teeth" in neighborhoods, and building community connections among families and neighbors.
- Cornerstone of Topeka builds and manages affordable housing throughout the city, working to combat homelessness and provide housing with dignity.
- The City of Topeka passed a Land Use & Growth Management Plan which cites population leakage, low density sprawl, unbalanced investment, and unplanned growth as the major problems with development and planning in the Topeka area. The plan proposes changes to make development in Topeka more fiscally sustainable and cost-effective with "all 5 city services." This is a great guiding document for the future of the city. https://www.topeka.org/planning/land-use-growth-management-plan-2040/
Compare stats to 1940s housing study