Downtown Retail

[FangKC]

Downtown Kansas City is close to 50 percent underserved in available retail storefronts. City Observatory did a study of retail storefronts within 3 miles of the the downtown business district in the top 50 major cities, and Kansas City ranked No. 43. The study indicated that in the average metro area there are an average of 900 storefront businesses within three miles of the central business district. In our case, that 3 mile distance would extend from 10th and Main to Westport Road and Main Street in Midtown for example--to the south, and Armour Road and Burlington in N. Kansas City--to the north. To the west, it would extend into downtown Kansas City, Kansas. To the east it would extend to Independence Avenue near Van Brunt.

Kansas City had 482 storefront businesses in this radius. The storefront measure is one of the indicators of a healthy city.

Peer cities like Milwaukee and Cincinnati have more than twice as many retail storefronts. Other peer cities like Pittsburgh, Columbus, Nashville, and San Antonio also do significantly better.





A comparison map showing New Orleans' retail storefronts.



http://cityobservatory.org/wp-content/u ... l_2016.pdf

http://cityobservatory.org/maps/storefronts/#28140

[FangKC]

This article might shed light on why Ilus Davis Park, Oppenheimer Park, Washington Square Park, and Barney Allis Plaza are not successful urban parks. They don't have enough retail spaces around them.

It was probably a big mistake when creating Ilus Davis Park to place the Department of Transportation and J.E. Dunn headquarters on the east side of the park space. Those should have been placed a block to the east, or the buildings should have at least be designed with retail spots in the street-level.

The success of the redesign of Washington Square Park will hinge on learning this lesson. The new buildings that might be part of that plan need to have retail spaces in them.

The same is true of any deck park over I-670.

http://cityobservatory.org/squaring-off ... ont-index/

http://www.washingtonian.com/2016/02/17 ... heres-why/

[pash]

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[miz.jordan17]

This article might shed light on why Ilus Davis Park, Oppenheimer Park, Washington Square Park, and Barney Allis Plaza are not successful urban parks. They don't have enough retail spaces around them.
....

The same is true of any deck park over I-670.

http://cityobservatory.org/squaring-off ... ont-index/

http://www.washingtonian.com/2016/02/17 ... heres-why/

You should take a look at Klyde Warren Park that caps a highway in Dallas. We just visited recently, and there were just a few permanent retail locations around it. However, the streets along the park were lined with food trucks, and it seemed like they really added something to the park.
http://www.klydewarrenpark.org/

[Eon Blue]

This article might shed light on why Ilus Davis Park, Oppenheimer Park, Washington Square Park, and Barney Allis Plaza are not successful urban parks. They don't have enough retail spaces around them.

It was probably a big mistake when creating Ilus Davis Park to place the Department of Transportation and J.E. Dunn headquarters on the east side of the park space. Those should have been placed a block to the east, or the buildings should have at least be designed with retail spots in the street-level.

The success of the redesign of Washington Square Park will hinge on learning this lesson. The new buildings that might be part of that plan need to have retail spaces in them.

The same is true of any deck park over I-670.

http://cityobservatory.org/squaring-off ... ont-index/

http://www.washingtonian.com/2016/02/17 ... heres-why/

Davis Park also has the UMB fortress on the west side to contend with. The completion of the Pickwick may do more to enliven that park than anything to date. The institutional uses surrounding it seem to contribute nary but the occasional smoker. The Argyle may also help in this regard, and if the building at the NWC of 10th & Oak ever gets done it will, too. It's nice that the gas station at the NEC of 10th & Locust is active again, but it needs to be redeveloped into a nice multi-story mixed-use building ASAP. The moribund east village developments need to get started soon, and done right as well.

There's nothing structurally wrong with the park - it's a fine space. It's just on an island for now.

[TheBigChuckbowski]

I think any list like this that puts an arbitrary ring around downtown should be taken with a huge grain of salt when it comes to Kansas City. The Plaza essentially serves as a 2nd downtown pulling retail, offices, and residents away from downtown. It's close enough that downtown and the Plaza work for and against each other but they're far enough apart that the Plaza is never included in a list like this. Certainly other cities have various other suburban downtowns or other types of areas that pull things away from downtown but not to the extent of KC IMO. At least when you're purely looking at it from a 3-mile ring perspective.

[JBmidtown]

I think it's premature to make any pessimistic conclusions about migration data at this early of a point in the turn around of downtown and the urban core. There's just not enough data to make a statement about current trends or the current or future healthiness of KC neighborhoods. I can just as safely conjecture that even when the redevelopment and population boom in the greater downtown regresses back to equilibrium there will still be a steady demand for new retail, multifamily residential and maybe even some job anchors in midtown, northeast and to a lesser extent the eastside. As prices rise in downtown and demand slowly tapers off, there will still be demand for living space and services in the peripheral neighborhoods to downtown. If migration remains constant, or preferably increases, significant density and retail occupancy will result.

There's already extremely cheap retail stock in under utilized urban nodes in midtown. I can think of 30+ spaces on Troost alone. It's just as likely that these spaces find tenants within the next decade as long as migration stays positive. I doubt these migration trends will reverse. Suburbs are just not desirable to my generation and we're the largest contingency to enter the workforce/market since baby boomers.

I feel Milwaukee is a healthy representative of what Kansas City could and should strive for with healthy, dense neighborhoods. The Riverwest neighborhood always makes me envious. There's grocers and other active storefronts on every corner, integrated well with the street and nestled amongst residential neighborhoods that are really no more dense than Hyde Park or Longfellow.

[DaveKCMO]

also, we've demolished a lot of usable retail stalls in favor of parking lots/garages and soulless concrete plazas.

[pash]

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[JBmidtown]

So if Milwaukee is also mostly built as single-family homes on lots of a size similar to what we have in KC, what accounts for its residential density being twice as high?

I think it has to do a lot with an earlier conversion of single family to multi family like KC saw with its single family dwellings in the 50s. However, where that was reversed by neighborhood associations in KC beginning in the 70s, in Milwaukee these houses remained multi family which helped maintain the density of their neighborhoods. There's also not a clear distinction between commercial and residential areas in the more dense Milwaukee neighborhoods. That is, the advent of suburbanization and car centric development doesn't seem to have effected these areas as dramatically as in Kansas City. It's obvious on a street level just how similar the grid design is yet wholly different the characteristics of these neighborhoods are to Kansas City. Imagine Roanoke or Volker or Hyde Park or Long Fellow but on almost every intersection every corner has a active and seemingly profitable storefront, intimately connected to the streetscape and the neighborhood. Virtually every other aspect of these neighborhoods is Kansas City at it's core, but there is healthy retail within the hearts of these neighborhoods. There's also not vast swathes of soul less parking lots. Not every part of Milwaukee is like this, but the best functioning neighborhoods like Rivewest are.

This is why I know in a way you're right. There is ALOT of work to be done in Kansas City's urban core to reach that kind of critical mass. There's just too much differentiation and separation from commercial and residential areas owing much to car culture decimating the connection between the two. It's fitting the strip mall was pioneered in KC. It shows. I think the best to hope for and plan around is continued infill in downtown, midtown and the northeast (even if some of it is single family) and hope that more storefronts redevelop the potential of urban retail nodes like 31st and Troost, Union Hill, Independence Ave and the other little spots where storefronts still exist. It is also essential to connect those nodes with meaningful transit. We're just not going to have a situation like Milwaukee unfortunately.

[JBmidtown]

Also, and I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I feel the suburban mindset of a lot of Kansas City's neighborhood associations are a detriment to reaching meaningful density. I'm not saying the drive to reconvert neighborhoods back to single family dwellings was a bad thing, but I don't think the benefits of more density really registers with them.

[Eon Blue]

also, we've demolished a lot of usable retail stalls in favor of parking lots/garages and soulless concrete plazas.

And we have lots of ground-level real estate that could be storefronts but is currently utilized as office or residential.

[FangKC]

You have got that right JBmidtown. Our residents don't understand the connection between healthy population density and retail within their neighborhoods.

Neighborhood population density has decreased not only because of demolition of housing, both multi-family and single family houses, but because of demographic changes that have fewer people living in each occupied residence. About 40 percent of KCMO housing units have only one person living in them. It isn't just apartments or small houses either, there are many larger single family houses where this is the case. That particular issue makes it even harder to increase population density than in the past.

On neighborhood Facebook pages, I see constant complaints about the lack of retail within the neighborhood, yet many of the same people are among those who oppose any new multi-residential housing on vacant lots. They don't understand that retail spaces won't fill up until population density increases.

There is a restaurant on Independence Avenue called Rambo's Chicken and Burgers. It hasn't been open that long. Old Northeast Facebook posters have said they like the food. This past week, someone posted that they had been there and the owners indicated that business had been slow, and that they were a few weeks from deciding whether they would have to close. Now this is a chicken and burger restaurant. It's not Indian food, or some other niche restaurant. It should enjoy good business, but it's struggling. People can't understand why. I can. The Old Northeast is not very dense anymore. There is still a lot of housing stock, but many of the houses are occupied by one person. I know on my block, almost half the houses have one person living in them, and it's an intact block. No vacant lots. Another thing I've noticed is that a lot of the houses are also occupied by older people, who probably don't eat out a lot. As I get older myself, I have noticed that I tend to buy less and less. I'm not a huge consumer of goods and services.

For retail to return, and survive, the Old Northeast, and lot of other neighborhoods in KCMO need to grow denser to compensate for the long-term population decline and demographic changes that have caused existing housing units to be occupied by fewer residents.

Our City leaders must do better to educate the public about this issue and how it affects them, and their quality of life.

[herrfrank]

I think any list like this that puts an arbitrary ring around downtown should be taken with a huge grain of salt when it comes to Kansas City. The Plaza essentially serves as a 2nd downtown pulling retail, offices, and residents away from downtown. It's close enough that downtown and the Plaza work for and against each other but they're far enough apart that the Plaza is never included in a list like this. Certainly other cities have various other suburban downtowns or other types of areas that pull things away from downtown but not to the extent of KC IMO. At least when you're purely looking at it from a 3-mile ring perspective.

Agreed. Arguably, The Plaza is the center of Kansas City. It has functioned as its de facto center since the 1960s. It is a jobs center (I'd wager that more people work within six blocks of 47th/ Broadway than within six blocks of 10th/ Main). It is also a residential and retail center. If you re-calculate this radial study from 47th and Broadway, you'd also see results similar to other peer cities.

I remember talking with a realtor back in the 1980s for a piece in a local magazine (the Baffler) who _did not know where_ downtown was. She thought the Plaza was the de jure downtown of Kansas City.

[earthling]

The Plaza/Westport area would probably add a few hundred more but still well below what it should be. Though there are 3 big industrial areas with 3 rail yards and commuter airport included in the diameter they have for KC - that's a lot of area not conducive to having retail. Even so, the CBD retail is minuscule compared to other cities. STL even worse.

[brewcrew1000]

Even if apartment buildings keep going up downtown at a good clip, and even if they start going up to fill in the holes on commercial corridors in other parts of the city, it's still going to take a long, long time to move the needle on overall urban population density, simply because so much of the core city is built up in low-density forms. In other words, it seems unlikely that population growth via in-migration into new and converted apartment buildings will be significant enough (within any realistic range) to change the big-picture status quo, which is an overwhelming dominance of inherently low-density neighborhoods in the core.

I feel Milwaukee is a healthy representative of what Kansas City could and should strive for with healthy, dense neighborhoods.

Milwaukee is an interesting example. Metro Milwaukee has a population-weighted population density that is more than twice as high as KC's. (In other words, if you randomly select a resident of metro Milwaukee, that person will on average live in a neighborhood that is more than twice as dense as a randomly selected counterpart in metro KC.) And Milwaukee's retail density reflects that. Yet Milwaukee's density is not the result of a stronger revival of downtown Milwaukee or a significantly bigger apartment-building boom there as compared to here, I don't think.

I have never been to Milwaukee, and I don't really know how the city is predominately built up. But looking at Google maps, it seems more similar to KC than to cities like Baltimore or Philadelphia or DC, which have many high-density residential neighborhoods of rowhouses and small apartment blocks. So if Milwaukee is also mostly built as single-family homes on lots of a size similar to what we have in KC, what accounts for its residential density being twice as high?

Milwaukee is really dense in the east side corridor all the way up to U of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, everything is pretty much apartments, high rises and even the large hyde park like homes are split up into multi family. Its also very hard to park in this East Side Corridor. Milwaukee is very similar to Chicago and is basically a mini chicago. I think having 3 major universities (One flanked on the West side of downtown (Marquette) and 2 to the East/NE (UWM and MSOE) and companies that want to build downtown are the reasons for Milwaukee's density and growing density. Milwaukee is a great example of what we want should strive but I don't think our citizens want it and I think Milwaukee is a bad example because Milwaukee is very much an East Coast type city.

[flyingember]

I know it's a bit crazy, but Houston is a downtown retail model we should look towards for how to induce massive change. If you ignore their oil boom you can see things we can copy.

They have a grid with one way streets, downtown loop they want to remove part of, a train line and started with WAY more surface parking than any city could ever need.

They also have multiple dense jobs areas connected together with a train.

[chingon]

I think any list like this that puts an arbitrary ring around downtown should be taken with a huge grain of salt when it comes to Kansas City. The Plaza essentially serves as a 2nd downtown pulling retail, offices, and residents away from downtown. It's close enough that downtown and the Plaza work for and against each other but they're far enough apart that the Plaza is never included in a list like this. Certainly other cities have various other suburban downtowns or other types of areas that pull things away from downtown but not to the extent of KC IMO. At least when you're purely looking at it from a 3-mile ring perspective.

Agreed. Arguably, The Plaza is the center of Kansas City. It has functioned as its de facto center since the 1960s. It is a jobs center (I'd wager that more people work within six blocks of 47th/ Broadway than within six blocks of 10th/ Main). It is also a residential and retail center. If you re-calculate this radial study from 47th and Broadway, you'd also see results similar to other peer cities.

One need only move the "center" to about Crown Center and our retail index becomes more in line with Nashville/Lousville.

Similarly our weighted population figures go up considerably when centered on the the Plaza-as-Downtown scenario.

[brewcrew1000]

Providence at 16 is pretty interesting but I think all of the major colleges located downtown plus you have the state gov't buildings plus city hall all located downtown. There is also a large shopping mall located in Providence, wonder if that is included in the storefronts.

[loftguy]

Providence at 16 is pretty interesting but I think all of the major colleges located downtown plus you have the state gov't buildings plus city hall all located downtown. There is also a large shopping mall located in Providence, wonder if that is included in the storefronts.

Providence is one of the most intact and complete cities I know.
Urban renewal did not find a home there.
Great place to visit, but their economy is rudderless.