Routinely, I am asked, "Why is DC *like that*?" And I know exactly what they mean, and you know exactly what they mean, because DC really is *like that.* And I am such a humanitarian, I will answer this question for you, if you subscribe to my newsletter.

What is The Birth of a Capital?

This post is decades in the making. Since high school, I have been interested in a particular part of my childhood that neighbors discussed uneasily, or apologetically, if at all. The big park up the ...

thebirthofacapital.info

Man every day I wonder if I shouldn’t just delete my account on here maybe. Opening Bluesky makes me want to actually walk in front of a truck. I don’t think people on here understand how crazy they’ve gotten

BREAKING: Platform Ventures, the development company that owns a south Kansas City warehouse that federal agents toured last month to consider for an immigrant detention center, announced today that it is not moving forward with the sale.

Kansas City developers halt sale of warehouse for ICE detention center as public pressure mounts

Federal officials first toured the building in January, sparking speculation over whether the owners had sold the building to the U.S. government. Media reports suggested the sale was part of a push to use warehouses across the country as immigration detention centers.

kcur.org

Gonna go ahead and pour cold water on calls for rail transit. It's an almost always idle structure 20 miles from the center of the region partially through under- and undeveloped land that was leapfrogged to build a mall by the freeway. Ain't happening.

KCUR (Kansas City's best news source)@kcur.org · 9mo ago

BREAKING: The Chiefs will relocate to Wyandotte County, Kansas, after lawmakers offered a major tax incentives package that could cover up to 70% of construction costs for a new stadium.

Hannah Arendt said 'The death of human empathy is one of the earliest & most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism' We saw the recent cruelty of MAGA denying empathy to Melissa Hortman Empathy for Kirk—not because he ever acted like a decent human—but because we are decent humans

The people of Kansas City should be furious about what the Republicans are trying to do to them. Breaking up KC for more political power to Trump is outrageous. And wrong. KC is a crown jewel of MO and the Rs are treating it like dirt.

Missouri republicans want to redraw the congressional map to eliminate KC's D+12 district Punchbowl calls it "perhaps the easiest place for the GOP to gain a seat" punchbowl.news/article/camp...

Where could the House GOP redistrict next?

The redistricting wars are ramping up. Here are the top places to watch.

punchbowl.news

I want inclusionary zoning for (only) bigfoot single family homes, the least affordable and sustainable building form. Like, want to build over 2,000 sqft? Then you gotta make a contribution to the affordable housing fund.

John Oliver said “Reagan talking points from a Whole Foods crowd” — I think that is in reference to homelessness but it works here too.

A brief history of Catholic geography in Kansas City, explained through four high schools. 1. Redemptorist High School opened in Midtown in 1926 in the midst of a five-decade boom that took KC from a backwater to (when combined with KCK) the 14th largest city in the country.

Surprising chart: library visits are still down 35% since the pandemic began, and book checkouts are down 30%. Does anyone have a theory that explains this?

There's still so much vacant land in greater midtown Kansas City

22,000 vehicles per day is generally considered the upper limit for a 3-lane road diet. Under 18k is a no-brainer. According to Replica, here are the non-expressway roadways with more than 18k cars per day (bidirectional traffic, or 9k for a directional segment). Our streets are so over-built.

new post on my blog: we're in the center of the country. So why does Kansas City feel so isolated? kcisms.wordpress.com/2025/05/17/i...

In the Center but All Alone

We’re in the center of the country. But everything is far away.  The Center of the Country Recently I told a friend I moved to Kansas City and he said “Oh that’s not bad, you’re smack dab in t…

kcisms.wordpress.com

Municipal population estimates are out for the year ending July 1, 2024 Kansas City 2024: 516,032 Kansas City 2023: 511,300 4,732 people moved to KC last year (0.93% growth) The city has added 7,936 people since April 2020

A Kansas City Star Fact Check states the obvious about subsidizing new stadiums for the Royals and Chiefs: it's a politically expedient giveaway to team owners, not a serious economic development strategy t.co/gqOIHzXD8K

Here's a fascinating angle of Kansas City's core at its population peak in the middle of the 1950s. There were roughly 50,000 people living in frame (not counting North Kansas City) in 1950. Today? ~20,000

crazy that an influx of dense infill housing can lower prices and make homeownership more attainable

Jonathan Berk 🏠@berkie1.bsky.social · last yr.

"In 2020, [Portland, OR] approved building [middle housing] on lots zoned for single family homes... A new report from the City says, it's working. 1,400 new units built in just a few years and each one is $300,000 less expensive than a typical single family home." @nbcnews.com

New post on my blog: long commutes are bad for your health, and disadvantaged groups are often forced into them. Is that true in the sprawly Kansas City? kcisms.wordpress.com/2025/05/01/o...

On KC Commute Times

Long commutes are associated with a number of adverse personal impacts: higher stress levels, increased risk of obesity, lower overall life satisfaction, reduced sleep duration, and weaker social t…

kcisms.wordpress.com

"Amazon has received permitting approval in the past two weeks...If all goes to plan, Amazon is hoping to build a drone delivery center at its same-day delivery facility, located south of Missouri 150, at the corner of Botts Road and 149th Street." www.kansascity.com/news/politic...

Amazon may bring drone delivery to Kansas City. Here’s the plan

An Amazon spokesperson confirmed to The Star that the retail giant founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos is considering bringing drone deliveries to Kansas City.

kansascity.com

New blog post: my thoughts on the Kansas City stadium debate kcisms.wordpress.com/2025/04/16/o...

On the Stadiums

The Border War Aaron Renn has a great old blog post about the Kansas City Metro’s unique political geography. As he notes, we have the highest share of any MSA of population living across a state l…

kcisms.wordpress.com

Tired: the endless debate on residential sprawl, whose demand is almost entirely a function of housing costs and public service quality in blue cities Wired: the worsening crisis of job sprawl, which is driven by little more than the whims of executives and will induce more residential sprawl

Yonah Freemark@yonahfreemark.com · last yr.

Not a single time in this article glorifying the need for sprawl to address the US's affordable housing crisis is there a mention of the vast transportation costs of sprawling living patterns. Nor is there mention of the fact that sprawl is directly linked to disinvestment in urban cores.

One cool thing about living in Kansas City is that every so often you stumble across a door in a hill that leads to one of our massive industrial caves

School bonds won last night for KCPS, Lees Summit, NKC, and the Park Hill School District. That's great to see--continued investment in our education system is key if the city wishes to remain attractive to employers and prospective residents

I have a short blog post up this morning arguing that we may end up underwhelmed by Kansas City's new neighborhoods in the West Bottoms and on the riverfront kcisms.wordpress.com/2025/04/09/a...

Are Kansas City Developers Repeating the Mistakes of the 1970s?

“When Kemper Arena opened, the West Bottoms was nearly vacant…Perhaps the philanthropist hoped his gift might inspire other investment there, but like Crown Center, the effort was flawed: it disper…

kcisms.wordpress.com

'What happened to starter homes in good neighborhoods?' Your city did well economically and land values rose. Instead of allowing many families to split the cost of land by building denser housing, you zoned it single family only and (1/2)

What actually needs to happen is that the city needs to break down barriers to national grocers like Walmart entering the city so they can run the local chains out of business. The model should be New Jersey, not the Soviet Union. It sucks that Mamdani has emerged as the top alternative to Cuomo.

Zohran Kwame Mamdani@zohrankmamdani.bsky.social · last yr.

NEW: Two-thirds of NYC voters support creating municipal grocery stores to bring down prices. "The concept is imminently feasible. In fact, publicly owned grocery stores are quite common and already exist at scale—in the US military."

New post on my blog: what we learned from this week's Census data release kcisms.wordpress.com/2025/03/16/2...

2024 Population Change: KC MSA & Counties

The 2024 Census population estimates for MSAs and counties were released this week. They found a one-year increase of 24,817 people in the Kansas City MSA, outpacing last year’s 19,305. Here …

kcisms.wordpress.com