Believe it, KC: We’re steadily improving

"This is the best-kept secret in Kansas City, that things have gotten so much better," Mack-Johnson said.

Indeed, while homicides spiked last year and raised alarms in some parts of the city, crime overall is on a long-term decline that is touching nearly every neighborhood in Kansas City.

Violent crimes, including rapes and assaults, have dropped this decade in more than 70 percent of neighborhood clusters in the urban core. They’re down 24 percent around the 18th and Vine district and in Grandview Triangle neighborhoods just west of U.S. 71.

But that’s just a small part of The Star’s neighborhoods report card. Here are other trends:

Average ACT test scores in public high schools have increased in 55 percent of neighborhood clusters. For example, East Side neighborhoods such as Blue Valley improved thanks in part to Van Horn High’s 5 percent increase in ACT scores so far this decade.

The net number of restaurants has grown in 56 percent of neighborhood clusters. Take a drive now along Independence Boulevard in the Northeast area, and there’s an assortment of ethnic eateries, from Vietnamese to Haitian, serving the growing immigrant population.

More than two-thirds of neighborhood clusters have gotten cleaner, based on annual litter surveys done by Bridging the Gap, a local environmental organization. The litter rating around the Swope Parkway Corridor on the southeast side has dropped by 22 percent just in the past three years.

The city is resurfacing 19 percent more miles of streets a year than at the dawn of the decade. One such stretch of road is the 5300 block of North White Avenue in the Maple Park neighborhood. It had ruts and dips and uneven patches of asphalt from water main repairs. Residents didn’t even like walking on it. Then it got repaved.

"It’s much nicer," said Georgene Harkrider, who lives on the block. "You don’t have to look down with every step and worry about stepping in a hole or a crack or something."

All these trends on the upswing represent a real resurgence in city living conditions. Taken together, they add up to a healthier, safer, better-looking and more stable city.

Except some city folks just don’t believe it.

Activist Cynthia Canady, who lives in a neighborhood with high crime, low services and generally poor conditions, put it this way: "I live on the East Side, and as far as I’m concerned, all of this is down."

Going it alone

Certainly, some of those upward trends have not reached her neighborhood. Other parts of town aren’t seeing some of the improvements either.

The city may be safer, for instance, but not in the Shoal Creek Valley way up north around Hodge Park. There, as the population has jumped more than 50 percent this decade, so has the total number of property crimes such as burglary and vandalism. Now Shoal Creek’s property crime rate is higher than in urban sections like Hickman Mills out south and 49-63 straddling Troost Avenue.

Likewise, the home ownership rate -- an important signal of investment and stability -- is rising in most neighborhoods, but not in Helen Bryant’s Swope Parkway-Elmwood neighborhood south of Brush Creek. While the streets are cleaner there, the blocks are dotted with empty houses, some of them rentals or foreclosures from real estate speculators who have been indicted for inflated housing appraisals.

"We’re stuck with these holes in our neighborhood," Bryant said.

And in myriad ways, the city government isn’t helping out much.