I live in Kansas City, a thriving Midwestern metropolitan area with a population of about 1.5 million.
Actually, Kansas City, Mo., the namesake for the metro area, really only accounts for less than one-third of that million-and-a-half population. And, to be precise, I really live in one of the suburban cities in neighboring Kansas that adjoins Kansas City, and I actually work in another suburban city, Overland Park.
And, if you really want to get technical about it, it’s really the suburban cities -- like Overland Park and Olathe on the Kansas side, and Lee’s Summit and Platte County on the Missouri side -- that are doing most of the thriving. In fact, Overland Park’s population has grown to more than 150,000, making it the second largest city in Kansas.
Suburban Johnson County (Kansas), with its fifteen or so “bedroom” communities, has grown from being home to miles and miles of corn fields and an occasional Dairy Queen, to where its half-a-million population now tops that of our metro namesake, Kansas City, Mo.
Sound familiar? Well, Kansas City is just one of hundreds of metro areas in the U.S. where this is occurring. While the names of the cities and the counties may vary throughout the country, the gist of the story remains the same: we are becoming a more urbanized nation, but that urbanization is really taking place in the suburbs.
The price for all that suburban growth traditionally manifested itself in the form of miles and miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic, headed downtown in the mornings, and back to the suburbs in the afternoons. This gridlocked traffic, in turn, fouled our air and turned us into maniacs by the time we got to work, or when we returned home at night.
For years, urban planners and environmentalists predicted that there was no way we could sustain that trend, that the way in which we live and work had to fundamentally change.
They were right … and we are seeing that change take place right now. However, that change is not what environmentalists and many urban planners expected. In the marketplace of life, the suburbs won.
Sure enough, people are rejecting hour-plus commutes to work downtown in bumper-to-bumper traffic, but the solution has not been to sell their homes in the suburbs and move into apartments in the urban core in order to be closer to work. Instead, businesses have moved the jobs out to the suburbs in order to be closer to where their workers live.
The same overpowering urge that drove our forefathers to spread out, from the East Coast to the West Coast, and all parts in between, is alive and well today. It is a part of the American psyche. Whether that’s good or bad is a matter of opinion, but the fact remains that we Americans need our space. All we’ve done is replaced Conastoga wagons with SUVs. That’s part of the American Dream.
The reaction among the urban core proponents has often been to seize upon gimmicks in order to reverse these demographic and economic trends. Downtown stadiums and coliseums are examples. So are aquariums and other tourist venues. The theory is that these venues will give people a reason to go downtown and, while they’re there, they might have dinner in a restaurant, or go to a show, or otherwise spend some money.
Sometimes these “gimmicks” actually work. Any city with a river (or even a creek) running through the downtown wants to duplicate San Antonio’s Riverwalk. Baltimore’s aquarium has spawned dozens of would-be imitators, as has its beautiful Camden Yards stadium downtown.
While these projects, and others like them in Denver and Jacksonville and Charlotte and Dallas, have succeeded in reversing the downward spiral of the downtown area, none are likely to make much of a dent in the larger trend toward living and working in the suburbs. Only things that will make people want to live downtown will do that.
But just because a downtown is in decline doesn’t mean that the entire city is going down the drain. The idea that it is causes an enormous amount of undue stress and, occasionally, hostility among the various communities within a metro.
What we really need to change is the way we look at our cities.
We need to look beyond the artificial political boundaries that delineate our major cities from their suburban offspring, and look at the entire metro as being one big family. That’s how businesses look at it, and that’s certainly how people in general look at it.
Whether they actually settle in Leawood or Independence or Parkville, they still think of themselves as being in Kansas City.
That’s really what a metropolitan area is: a family of closely related cities and towns that rely upon each other for economic and social viability. Look at the name that OMB assigns the MSA as simply being the family name.
And as those of us with children well know, sometimes your children grow up to be bigger than you. It’s not the end of the world. We’re still family.
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