Where Policy Finds Its Voice: Dennis Strait On the Making a Great City Event Series
The Making a Great City speaking series at the Kansas City Public Library is not just a forum for ideas; this series, now in its eighth year, puts necessary momentum behind the future of urban development.
Co-founded by Multistudio principal emeritus Dennis Strait and KCPL Deputy Director Carrie Coogan, these well-attended events welcome the best minds in city planning and development to demonstrate how cities can be transformed into vibrant, diverse, and financially healthy communities.
Echoing the work and ethos of our city planning studio, Making a Great City also advances larger discussions about issues facing our communities, including redlining, affordable housing, and our homelessness crisis.
We sat down with Dennis Strait to discuss how the history of Kansas City development fuels this event series, how our five studios participate in this discourse, and why new development patterns will fundamentally change cities for the better.
Dennis Strait: The series was conceived as a way of raising public awareness about a phenomenon that is counterintuitive for everyone, from city officials to the public. As Kansas City grew, everybody thought that the American Dream of suburban expansion was the way to build healthy cities. We all grew up thinking that was the road to prosperity. But the outcome of that dream is quite different than what any of us would have believed — we’ve built cities we can no longer afford.
Our goal with the Making a Great City series was to start a conversation about Kansas City’s financial health. Historically, financial health had not been part of the conversation. Yet we knew that talking about finances allowed us to have a more focused discussion about the kinds of growth that make you stronger and the kinds that just make it more challenging to be a city.
We started off the series with the Strong Towns organization, which is dedicated to development patterns with a resilient financial strategy behind them. Next, we invited Urban3 to talk about the analysis and modeling they do around the country to help cities see the reality of the economics of the growth patterns over the last 50 years.
Dennis Strait: Although the basis of our series was helping the community understand how the economics of cities work from a city management perspective, we began to realize that a lot of our problems are policy-based, and many of Kansas City's struggles could be reasonably reduced down to two mistakes. One was the process of redlining and discriminatory practices.
What began as an inequitable land-use policy with redlining was the practice of favoring certain parts of the city for investment. When the National Highway Act kicked in, and when the idea of expanding cities around the country through acquisition of land became more popular, it just allowed people to take advantage. Redlining and expansion are two things that work together to just push people to move away. And we're still moving away, which is the problem.
Dennis Strait: You have to look at the history of Kansas City over the last 80 years. In 1940, we peaked in terms of the vitality of the city, which I measure by the number of people sharing the city. In 1940, we had a fairly compact footprint of about 60 square miles and about 450,000 people sharing those. Many people sharing means you can do a lot more.
But then redlining kicked in, annexation kicked in, and outward growth kicked in, and we were still riding the wave of a new city that was prosperous as of 1940. We still had momentum. But after 1950, our population started to decline. Once you can move out, you don't necessarily have to stay in Kansas City. You've got lots of choices, and people started making those choices on the Kansas side. The population continued to decline until 1990.
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Dennis Strait: After 1990, the city had what I would call its only counter-expansionist policy, which was to reinvest in downtown. Reinvestment in downtown is the only real example of turning the tide on central city population loss since 1990. For example, the Central Library downtown, where we hold the Making a Great City series, just celebrated its 20th anniversary.
The library was a catalyst project for downtown revitalization. Kansas City’s Downtown Council and civic leaders came together and created the funding and the development strategy to make that renovation happen. The goal was to encourage reinvestment in the surrounding buildings that are in the downtown area.
What most people don't know, or don't think about, is that our downtown revitalization is not because we recreated the downtown we had 20 years prior or the vital one we had in 1940. We turned downtown Kansas City into something new: a vital urban neighborhood.
Before, it was more of a mixed-use urban center. But now it's primarily an urban neighborhood. And it's also one of the more diverse, if not the most diverse, urban neighborhoods, not just in terms of population, but also in terms of housing offerings. There are a lot of ways you can live downtown now. If you build diverse neighborhoods, you get a better place to live.
We're starting to feel really good about the amazing things we're seeing, particularly the transit-oriented development that we could really use. That's the key to turning the city back around. But the reality is we need 50,000 more people coming back into Kansas City over the next 25 years. Ideally, we start building back on the 250,000 people we've lost over the last 75 years.
That’s the only way we're going to get to a financially stable condition and be in a place where we can start to address all the things that we want to address as a city that we're all concerned about, from homelessness to affordability to crime, equitable healthcare, and much more. We’re trying to advocate for the kinds of reinvestment that can build us back toward financial health. Now, we need Kansas City to develop policy.
Dennis Strait: I will humbly say yes. I'm really encouraged and optimistic about the potential for our next City Council because there’s leadership there that understands we need to make a change. You need that awareness at the leadership level. However, awareness is still desperately needed at the public level because our elected officials are only going to do what we tell them to do.
Dennis Strait: One that comes to mind is the incremental development movement. We’ve had over 100 people for a full-day workshop on how to practice as incremental developers. That has led to an ongoing discussion on this movement that's still going strong today. Now local incremental developers here are offering presentations on how to put together pro formas. They're sharing insights and best practices at the incremental scale.
Dennis Strait: Because of the way that we've evolved our development systems, policies, practices, and financing, it's become harder and harder to build at a neighborhood scale. It’s just not economical to build small because this practice has almost the same amount of headaches and costs that you get from building large, and the return on investment is nowhere near the same. So everybody's building large-scale projects.
The idea of incremental development is a traditional idea about how cities used to just grow incrementally. They didn't grow by saying, “Let's go build this neighborhood, and then let's go build this urban center, and then let's go build this multi-family area.” That's a totally different way of building than we ever used to do.
Development used to start with a nucleus, like we did in the River Market, and you'd build a town around that, and as it grew, it would not just grow out, but up. You could replace an initial one-story wood building with a three-story brick building. That is the way cities over time have grown. They all have.
By creating systems that discourage that kind of growth from happening, we've lost the ability to generate vitality in central cities. Incremental development is all about how you make it possible to continuously grow and adapt, which ultimately leads to robust cities that provide people with choices of where to live and opportunities to build a better life for themselves and their families.
However, this kind of development is almost outlawed because of the way we've evolved our development policies and practices and because of the way that we regulate the banking industry. It’s nearly impossible to build at the smaller scale. Yet we’re continuing to build momentum and interest. It’s counter-market and counter-culture, but it’s the key to restoring a vital city.
Dennis Strait: There's a reason why Kansas City was so successful by 1940, going from a few thousand people to nearly half a million people over 90 years by that point. It wasn't because we were geniuses, and we just learned how to build an amazing city.
We simply followed the history, legacy, and practices of other successful cities all around the country and around the world. By that time, we had nearly 5,000 years of city-building experience to learn from — lots of trial and error and what works and what doesn't. So we just did that. There was no zoning code or master plan. There was just good practice.
I like to think that as humans, we've been building cities for long enough that we’ve figured out the right way to build a good human habitat. And now we unfortunately have to pay a lot of money to go visit those places. But there are pockets of good development throughout our city and throughout the country because these places are based on ways of developing that bring people together as opposed to the way that we've been building, which has unfortunately been a way to move people apart.
There's certainly aesthetics involved because we figured out how to build a city that was a delightful place to live and created a great opportunity for people. The monumentation you see at our parks and boulevards from that era and the buildings that we built, including the Kansas City City Hall and Municipal Auditorium, are just so different from what we can afford to do today. The idea of bringing people together allows so much more sharing of resources.
What you can do together fosters opportunity for a much richer urban environment than the suburban model. Suburbs are very expensive to make beautiful and very expensive to keep beautiful. The ones that really survive are the really exclusive neighborhoods. Everything else deteriorates pretty quickly.
Dennis Strait: That’s very fair to say. I've always been appreciative of my partners at Multistudio for allowing us to take a stand that, in some people's minds, is counter to the interest of some folks who could be considered clients of ours.
We’ve created a world in which we’re expanding away from each other. But we're encouraging people to rethink that. We're encouraging a stance that is counterintuitive to the work that they make a living off of. That’s not a popular position to take.
Usually, private practices don't get into these kinds of discussions because it's not good for business. But we're a community-based practice. In all our communities, we're very concerned about how healthy we can help our communities be. Folks here have not been shy about letting us put this message out there and continue to promote it.
Dennis Strait: It’s instinctive to people that get into this practice, either as planners, landscape architects, or architects, to shape the world they live in. But this used to be more common than it is because local practice was once the norm.
In Kansas City, more than in most cities, we have national architectural practices and engineering firms that provide opportunities for architects here in town. Yet Multistudio has maintained our connection to our city through the way that we've grown the firm over the years. We've maintained a local approach at all five of our studios. We can be a national architect in the ways that a lot of other firms are, but our local offices are also focused on their communities.
Our folks at Multistudio want to practice in that way. They want to be involved in their communities. Our studios are also located in high-density areas — that was an intentional move. All the neighborhoods where we have studios are navigable without a car, and many of our homes are close by.
Dennis Strait: Our discussion in May is about solutions for the unhoused. We've got to get to a place in the way that we build, manage, and think about our city so that we can be more caring and capable.
We’ve invited one young thought leader who has just published a book that is built on the optimism of what's possible if we just get ourselves to rethink the way that we are building. A local leader is ready to do a presentation on why housing should be considered an economic development opportunity for Kansas City. We're probably going to convene a panel with that discussion to help Kansas City leadership understand how housing can directly translate into economic development.
We also have an architect out of Arkansas who's doing beautiful work. Her company is working at an incremental scale. She's also helping communities figure out how to rethink their development policies so that they can allow that kind of development to happen more. We all have so little familiarity with the diversity of housing that we can build in neighborhoods because we made it so hard to build.
Dennis Strait: I would love to see the city redirect its efforts toward nothing other than developing housing that makes the city stronger. There’s a wide-open opportunity there, and the sooner the better. I don't know any other way out of the situation we're in than that kind of investment in ourselves.
I do think that we're getting there out of necessity. But it's always good to have a plan in hand when you have a crisis fall in front of you. We’re helping to put that plan together. We’re building a movement.
Before the next season of programming begins, visit the Kansas City Public Library’s Making a Great City event page, where you can view or listen to past programs and download relevant resources. Dennis Strait’s 2020 lecture, “We’ve Built Cities We Can’t Afford,” is available here.
