The Road to Insolvency is Long
Editor’s Note: This article is part of a long-term series exploring the history of Kansas City and the financial ramifications of its development pattern. It is based on a detailed survey of fiscal geography—its sources of tax revenue and its major expenses, its street network and its historical development patterns—conducted by geoanalytics firm Urban3. Here are all the articles in the series:
Kansas City's Fateful Suburban Experiment • Is Kansas City Still Living on Its Streetcar-Era Inheritance? • "Kansas City's Blitz": How Freeway-Building Blew Up Urban Wealth • The Road to Insolvency is Long • Asphalt City: How Parking Ate an American Metropolis •
The Local Case for Reparations • Ready, Fire Aim: Tax Incentives in Kansas City (Part 1) •
The Opportunity Cost of Tax Incentives in Kansas City (Part 2) • The Numbers Don’t Lie •
Kansas City Has Everything It Needs
Roads within Kansas City’s 1910-1946 boundary (black) versus areas annexed after 1946 (red). No land was annexed between 1910 and 1946. (Image source: Urban3)
By the end of World War II, Kansas City, Missouri had largely filled out the space within a boundary that had been unchanged for 36 years. The thriving city could boast a diverse mix of homes and businesses in walkable neighborhoods served by an enviable streetcar system. This was a city that economically used its existing infrastructure in support of a highly productive pattern of development.
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.
More Roads, Less Stuff
“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.”
Cities have always grown, and expanded their street networks along with their borders. But after World War II, Kansas City—like many other places—began to expand local streets, arterial roads, and major regional highways alike at a rate vastly outpacing the growth of either population or tax revenue.
This postwar expansion followed a new and unprecedentedly automobile-oriented pattern of development. This doesn't mean cars were new: they were around from the start of the 20th century, and Kansas City in particular had, by 1923, already seen the construction of Country Club Plaza, the first suburban retail development designed for shoppers to arrive by car. But KC prior to the end of World War II was still a city built around the human scale, in which cars could operate but were optional.
Kansas City after its postwar annexation binge became a city built around universal car ownership and universal driving, in which other ways of getting around were increasingly rendered difficult, dangerous, or impossible. And that shows in the colossal infrastructure required to make this experiment happen.
Why did road growth so outpace population growth? Here are the key reasons:
1. Larger Lots / Fewer Homes Per Block
Here is an aerial view of a typical residential block in pre-WWII Kansas City. As you can see, along one side of the street on a 1/8-mile (660 ft) block, we can count 17 houses.
Here, at the same scale (note the 220-foot scale in the very bottom left of each image), is an aerial view of a typical residential block in Kansas City north of the Missouri River, in an area annexed in 1962. Along 660 feet of street on the north side there are only 8 houses: less than half the number of tax-paying properties served by the same amount of asphalt. (Actually more asphalt, because the suburban-style street is wider.)
It’s worth noting, the wider roads and streets in newer development are not incorporated into the comparison of road mileage before and after 1946. If we were to instead compare square feet of asphalt, rather than miles of street, the increase would be even greater than the 169% cited above.
Furthermore, road mileage growth is even more out of proportion than it would be if larger lot sizes were the only difference. Here’s why:
2. Hierarchical Road Networks
In the traditional city, streets are arranged on a grid pattern. Some may be relatively major or relatively minor streets, but the grid fundamentally provides many routes from A to B, and disperses traffic at busy times as a result.
Under the suburban development pattern, there is a strict street hierarchy: neighborhood streets largely do not connect to each other outside the neighborhood, there are many loops and cul-de-sacs, and as a result, all travelers outside of a single residential neighborhood tend to be funneled onto the same small number of busier roadways: collector streets, arterial streets (very often stroads), and highways.
This requires these major thoroughfares to have more and wider lanes, and requires the construction of elaborate intersections and interchanges, which are disproportionately expensive to the rest of the network. Here is part of a freeway interchange located near the post-1962 aerial photo above. It is viewed at the same scale as the neighborhood photo: the image is a little less than 1/4-mile wide.
If we zoom out to a much larger scale (now the image is about a mile wide), here’s what the surroundings look like:
3. Separation of Uses and Commuter Focus
Under the suburban development pattern that dominated in the postwar decades, residential areas, commercial/retail areas, and office and industrial areas were all strictly separated from each other. The idea of the complete neighborhood, where you could meet many of your daily needs within a 15-minute walk and maybe even live walking distance from your job, was seen as antiquated and undesirable. Long-distance commuting to job hubs such as downtown became the white-collar norm. Road needs now ballooned even more because huge traffic volumes at peak times would be funneled onto the same relative handful of commuter routes.
The street in front of a few suburban homes, on the other hand, gets very little use at almost any hour: even at afternoon rush hour, it's quiet enough for children to play. It's the suburban arterial and the freeway—which, by one measure, the Kansas City region has more of than just about anywhere—that are the budget busters.
And all this budget busting is exacting a cost.
The roads built to accommodate Kansas City’s pre-1910 borders, if laid end-to-end, would stretch to Grand Junction, Colorado. They served a population that was almost as large as the number that live in today’s vastly expanded border.
The roads in only the post-1946 annexed areas, if laid end to end, would extend from Kansas City to Los Angeles. All of them will eventually hit the end of their lifespan and deteriorate. That lends itself to this thought experiment: “What if you were told that, every 50 years, your city must undertake a capital campaign to build a road all the way to LA? Would you tell your mayor he’s crazy?”
It's time for Kansas City to choose a new route.
Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is a founding member of the Strong Towns movement. He is the co-author of Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis, with Charles Marohn. Daniel now works as the Policy Director at the Parking Reform Network, an organization which seeks to accelerate the reform of harmful parking policies by educating the public about these policies and serving as a connecting hub for advocates and policy makers. Daniel’s work reflects a lifelong fascination with cities and how they work. When he’s not perusing maps (for work or pleasure), he can be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods on foot or bicycle. Daniel has lived in Northern California and Southwest Florida, and he now resides back in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, along with his wife and two children. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota.