Kansas City is crumbling. A World Cup Band-Aid isn’t a solution | Opinion
You cannot plaster over the blatant issues of a city and expect the world to be fooled by the faux exterior.
A city should not try to improve for a one-time, short-term event in which outsiders will come and view it. A city should improve for the sake of the people who live there.
Building up new public spaces, investing money in entertainment corridors, pushing to extend a one-road streetcar that does not have wide-reaching benefits to the community, and throwing money at businesses that will likely fail after a year in order to make it appear as if we are a vibrant community is not how you improve a city.
These one-time fixes only scratch the surface of issues faced by a city that has been ravished and torn apart by its blatantly racist history. Redlining and highways have torn into once vibrant communities and business areas. The city once boasted nearly 300 miles of streetcar tracks, in line with those of Chicago and San Francisco, that moved people all throughout the city. Unfortunately, with the rise of the automobile, the city was cut apart and ravished for a highway system to aid suburbanites. Highways wrapped around downtown, cutting off and disenfranchising nearby areas, specifically harming African American and Hispanic communities.
The city is actively trying to right these wrongs with its Reconnecting the Westside and Reconnecting the East Side campaigns. I hope this will lead to actual change and not simply put a Band-Aid on what has been taken from these communities.
Further, the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority the city have struggled to come to terms, causing the fate of public transit in the region to teeter on the verge of erasure. This is public transit that regular people need to get places because of the lack of walkability and high cost of owning a car. With fewer bus lines and riders having to pay the fare again, many people will be stranded, unable to get to jobs or obtain necessities. We need truly reliable and free public transportation for all – not only free transportation for the week of the World Cup.
Compounded by this transit issue, there is also a housing issue that few are willing to take a deeper look at. When Mayor Quinton Lucas and the City Council established that a one-bedroom apartment’s market rate was $1,200 in 2022, renting a place to live in Kansas City became nearly impossible for many people.
We have an affordability crisis. We need better investment in reasonably priced, safe homes and to make it easier for people to get into this housing.
They say we have a housing shortage, and that we must build newer and bigger. But if you drive around in the east and northeast parts of the city, you will see the empty, abandoned housing stock that has fallen into disrepair. Along Benton Boulevard — once an elegant thoroughfare in the early 20th century that led to the historical mansions of the Kansas City elite in the northeast — one may notice ornately designed apartment complexes all boarded up, sitting empty and ravished by recent fires. Rehabbers are working to fix these homes, but local rules keep the process slow and costly. Building more and newer housing stock could help this crisis, though too many plans for apartment complexes along the current KC Streetcar line are for luxury units. This equates to unaffordable housing options for the people who need the streetcar and public transportation to get around the city.
We have a real problem, and I hope it is on full display when the world’s eyes are on Kansas City for the 2026 World Cup. We are a crumbling city that needs leaders who are truly interested in making the city better for the people who live here — and not only for show.
Anna Woiwood is an author and activist in the Kansas City area. She lives in Lee’s Summit.