IN THE BEGINNING...
Dan Lowe of RED Development has witnessed the evolution of Village West from the inside, having been involved in development there since the open ground was known simply as “the 400 acres.” RED worked with the Unified Government early to create a master plan for Village West, recruited tenants, and developed the Legends, the lifestyle/shopping center and entertainment district that opened in 2006.
Lowe says the real reason for success there—then and now—can be traced from a gutsy decision by the Unified Government that took both vision and courage: “They bought 400 acres of dirt. What other city would make an investment like that? Talk about rolling the dice.” He said he knew of no development company in the United States that would have gambled on that site, in that way, in those days.
Regardless of how one feels about government appropriation of private property for a greater public good (an issue that took on national proportions with the Supreme Court’s 2005 Kelo decision), there’s no question that Wyandotte County’s condemnation of land and property to create homes for the Speedway and Village West was an investment that has reaped previously unimaginable dividends, and continues to.
An important component, but one perhaps accorded too much credit for the success in western Wyandotte County, has been the STAR bonds program. Missouri has no direct equivalent, but uses tax-increment financing in somewhat the same fashion to prod development. While STAR bonds have their critics who argue that they allow a single region to enjoy use of tax dollars that otherwise would benefit all Kansans, the criticism is largely muted by the evidence that the bonds do, indeed, perform at least as well as intended.
Still, STAR bonds are but a facilitator of development, Lowe notes—they don’t drive it. Ultimately, the success of a project must come from its ability to deliver traffic and generate sales.
“The purpose of STAR bonds was to create tourism,” Lowe said. “People coming in to this site from Missouri and Nebraska, they’re not coming for the Wal-Mart—with all due respect to Wal-Mart, it’s a fine organization, but you pass 10 or 12 of them as you drive in from those states.”
Getting the final product right at Village West was much harder, he acknowledged, because nothing like it had been done before in this region. “We didn’t sit at a table and articulate a vision that everything in this development had to be unique” in terms of tenancy, Lowe said. “It was more a response to the circumstances, rather than a grand strategy.”
MAINTAINING MOMENTUM
The successful pieces of Village West, Miles says, have worked with one another to spawn a new developmental mindset in the county.
“It creates a culture,” he said. “That’s really what it is—a culture of getting deals done. When we got the Speedway, people thought, fine, but what’s next? Next came Nebraska Furniture Mart, Schlitterbahn, the Wizards deal, the casino.”
“And they’re still coming. The pie just keeps growing.”
The recent opening of an 800,000-square-foot power retail center across Parallel Parkway from the Legends will help broaden the economic base of that region, providing badly needed service retail for the thousands of new residences built nearby in the past decade or still in the planning stages. Recreational components of the Cerner project will help draw higher-end multifamily housing and spur additional single-family residential development, Miles said, yielding a market
for additional, smaller service retail operations in a pattern of sustained growth.
“There’s something to be said about momentum,” Miles said, “and that’s what we’ve got on our side: the momentum
of success.”
Where does that momentum take the region from here?
To the west of the Speedway, as many as 800 acres of undeveloped land offer possibilities that Wyandotte County hasn’t even begun to fully explore, much as the pasture land and 5-acre homesteads in that area a decade ago obscured the potential for what is now the Speedway district. That should be a signal to many communities in the area that the competition isn’t going to go away—and that if they want to vie for the kinds of draws that Wyandotte County is lining up, they need to start thinking differently, not simply bigger.
“What it will be, we don’t know,” Miles said. “But I don’t know if anybody expected the last 10 years to work out for us the way they did. What’s the next big thing? We’re studying it, but we’ve got to get these projects through the barn door and look at it from the 30,000-foot level again to see what the future holds.
“It will affect not only KCK, but Edwardsville, Bonner Springs—people don’t realize yet the effect this will have on Shawnee, on Leavenworth County.”
Whatever that effect, or how far away it can be felt, those closest to success there say you can count on this: Wyandotte County plans to be prepared for that developmental storm.