I have always loved the old veins of our beautiful Kansas City. Of course it will take more than a little paint and remodeling to bring back the zest and flair of these older commercial streets but the framework is there… its already there.
Taking this picture from my van while driving down Prospect Ave. As you can see there is 4 store fronts if you were to move these same store front locations to neighborhoods such as Waldo or Brookside they would be immediately restored and put to good use.
So what is different what is lacking…
Restoring the Health of the City
Have you ever taken time to think of the health of the different parts of our city.
What makes a neighborhood healthy?
Here are some thoughts:
a. Availability of gainful employment.
b. Family
c. Hope
d. Healthy Peer Pressure (if everyone’s lawn is mowed) What we see as we come to and from our homes really matters.
e. Vision/Dreams
Mixed Use Development?
So many of the new development in more affluent neighborhoods such as in Overland Park, or along the South 435 corridor include a strong use of Mixed Use Development.
You can also see this in the West Bottoms Industrial District KCMO.
For so many years when our Kansas City neighborhoods first began they had living areas on top of commercial spaces as in the picture above.
This allows for two uses for the same city real-estate.
You can read more about this type of thinking in Jane Jacobs book The Death and Life of Great American Cities or in Jeff Specks book Walkable City.
Here is a short definition from Wikipedia
Mixed use is a type of urban development, urban design, urban planning and/or a zoning classification that blends multiple uses, such as residential, commercial, cultural, institutional, or entertainment, into one space, where those functions are to some degree physically and functionally integrated, and that provides pedestrian connections
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-use_development
So Much Architecture
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Hi Nathan!
Hi Jann,
How are you doing?