A City without Slums: Urban Renewal; Public Housing and Downtown Revitalization in Kansas City, Missouri

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Jan, 2001 by Kevin Fox Gotham

The initiation of large-scale slum clearance and public housing building in the early 1950s represented the beginning of a dramatic socio-spatial transformation of the urban core that would continue over the next two and a half decades. In March 1950, a journalist for Holiday observed that "Kansas City is marked by sharp physical contrasts. There are tenements only a few blocks from skyscrapers, the landscaped lands of elaborate homes face vacant lots cluttered with billboards, and there are area shanties only a short distance outside the business district" (quoted in Brown and Dorsett 1978, p. 258). A few short years later urban renewal was reshaping the downtown core as residential neighborhoods were cleared to make way for new commercial and industrial land use (Cookingham 1958). Very early, urban renewal received unabashed support from the Kansas City Times and Kansas City Star with such celebratory headlines as "A Dream City Without Slums" (12/19/52), "Out of the Rubble a New Kansas City Rises"(6/1/58), "Kansas City's Battle on Blight is a Major Feat" (1/3/60), "To Redeem the Whole West Side" (7/6/53), "Praise Kansas City Renewal Projects"(5/2/59), "City Faces Great Era" (10/1/58), "Slums on the Retreat" (3/7/56), and "Slum War is On" (7/3/55) (Bohanon 1971, PP. 66-67, 88-94, 100-109). As one 1958 editorial proclaimed,

You see it everywhere around you, the building drama of the dynamic city. The earth vibrates with the great machines of progress. A wrecker's weight smashes a wall. A few weeks later a new structure rises ... A few men of vision believed that blight could be stopped. Today we can see the promise for the future. Civic enterprise is on the move. Before our eyes, a great city is being remade for the 20th century ("Out of the Rubble a New Kansas City Rises," 1958).

So impressive were Kansas City's slum clearance efforts that in 1958 Look magazine awarded the city the Community Home Achievement Award for reclamation and redevelopment of slum areas ("City Honored for Face Lift," 1958; "Award for a Program that is Rebuilding a City," 1958). In 1959, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) awarded the Kansas City AIA chapter the Citation of Honor Award, an honor given only fifteen times in the previous 102 years, for its comprehensive plan for downtown revitalization ("Architects Group Given High Honor," 1959). During the 1950s Kansas City's renewal efforts equally impressed federal and municipal leaders from around the country, including mayors, planners, and other elites from Lincoln, Tulsa, Milwaukee, Akron, New York, Omaha, Minneapolis, Louisville, Dallas, Indianapolis, Chicago, Denver, St. Louis, and Memphis ("Vitality in City Growth," 1957; "City Impresses Urban Leaders," 1959; "Praise Kansas City Renewal Projects," 1959; "Hail Vital City Pride," 1957; "Writers Lau d City Renewal Action," 1957; "Urban Plan as Model," 1958).

Despite the fanfare and publicity, large-scale slum clearance did not benefit everyone living in the city. From the middle 1950s through the late 1960s, urban renewal uprooted thousands of residents living in the downtown core, transforming their residential neighborhoods into industrial and commercial land-uses. Table 1 lists individual urban renewal projects launched in the 1950s through the late 1960s, showing the total acres of each individual project, and the number of blacks, whites, and businesses displaced in each urban renewal area.