Kansas City News Blog

It's the Kansas City metro's biggest problem -- the one no one talks about.

But on Monday, the president said it was over.

Earlier this week, Kevin Klinkenberg, one of Kansas City's cool and forward-thinking architects, sent around a link to the CSPAN video of President Barack Obama 's town hall meeting in Ft. Myers, Florida (unemployment rate 10 percent). At the end of the hour-long speech, Obama took some questions from the audience. The second-to-last question was from a city councilwoman who asked about the role of public transportation in fixing the economy.

The president gave a long answer -- the kind of detailed, rambling-but-with-a-point answer that's such a welcome change. It wound around to highways, high-speed rail and thinking differently about the way we plan our cities.

"The days where we're just building sprawl forever, those days are over," he said. "I think that Republicans, Democrats, everybody recognizes that that's not a smart way to design communities."

Hearing the president declare the end of sprawl was exciting for people who are paying attention to the issue.

"Kansas City is as spread out as any city in the world," Klinkenberg notes. "We've poured all of our collective and individual wealth into horizontal infrastructure, and it is literally bankrupting us." When we're so spread out, with so little mass transit, we're dependent on cars for all economic activity. "So if you lose your job, or if gas prices go up, you are hit especially hard since we essentially have no real functioning system for getting around other than driving. That's a tremendous waste of human capital."

Unfortunately, Klinkenberg says, "we are still stuck with this mammoth amount of infrastructure that we cannot afford, and still not enough popular suppport to do something different."

I wondered what people out in sprawl country would say about all of this, so I called up the guy who's in charge of the planning department in unincorporated Johnson County.

Dean Palos has been director of planning for unincorporated Johnson County for about twenty years. "Since I've been here," he told me, "our policy has been to manage growth in a way that discourages sprawl."

This was a little hard for me to believe, but Palos was very patient in explaining how suburban planners define this sort of stuff. The sprawl that he tries to discourage, he said, is development that is "inefficient, land-consumptive and makes it expensive for the county to provide services to it."

Out of the county's 477 square miles, he says, about 200 square miles is still unincorporated. "What we're trying to do is preserve as much of the rural character of the unincorporated area as we can," he said. "Our presumption is not that the entire county is going to be developed -- at least in the next twenty to thirty years. For years, our goal has been to encourage development to occur where there is adequate infrastructure to support it -- public utilities, roads, as well as public services [i.e., sewers]."

Palos understands that people like me look at Johnson County -- or Lee's Summit, or Kansas City, Missouri's northernmost reaches -- and see growth that's clearly "land consumptive and inefficient." How a person defines sprawl, he acknowledges, "all depends on where you're standing." Palos has watched his county's population grow by 10,000 people every year for the last 20 years, its cities continually annexing more land. So he welcomes trends such as the "new urbanism" that combines housing, commercial and office-park businesses so people can walk to work and the grocery store.

And where public transit meets a real demand, it makes a big difference: Palos notes that the K-10 bus to Lawrence has a ridership of well over 900 people every day; if you figure two-people-per-car might have made that drive before, that's 450 vehicles off the road every day. He also points out that more people are using Johnson County's extensive trail system not just for recreation but to ride their bikes to work.

"I think we're all becoming much more aware, and the public is demanding many more services like that."

Obama's stimulus package, he concluded, "is all very positive. It's supporting green development and there's a lot of money in it for transit. Highways aren't going to go away -- we're not going to get rid of the car in my lifetime, but automobiles are becoming much more efficient. It seems the new administration is talking about smart growth, building smarter so we're less dependent on foreign sources of energy."

OK, folks, you may have heard it here first. Johnson County is officially anti-sprawl.