What’s going on here?

The Great Recession, perhaps fading at last into our economic history after 18 months, has laid waste to the nation’s financial markets, housing markets and, before it’s all over, perhaps commercial property markets as well.

To be sure, it left its mark on the effort to rebuild Downtown Kansas City, too.

And yet …we continue to see a solid measure of progress on what most certainly remains a work in progress. Underpinning that progress is the commitment this region’s builders, bankers and developers and more have made to building the kind of critical mass Downtown would need to remain viable.

They made it a nicer place to live. In large part, that meant creation of housing stock from nearly the ground up. Or, given the rehab nature of much of the work, from the warehouse floor up. Today, the far-and-away leading category of improvements in the core involves residential projects. At $965 million to date, the area has seen thousands and thousands of condos and apartments come on-line. That’s 2½ times the size of the next largest single project, the massive IRS Regional Service Center, which weighed in at $370 million.

And that critical mass has helped change everything. For one, it gave Downtown a population base that would be here on the weekends, after the workday crowd and many of the conventioneers have gone back home. It created a demand for restaurants, nightclubs and retail outlets, and gave the cultural institutions clustered there access to a pool of ready customers.

Well before the sledge hammers started swinging in those remodeling efforts, Ingram’s Magazine realized what was starting to happen here. And where that could take not just Downtown, but the Kansas City region as a whole. We saw how the power of an informed populace could help drive interest in, and success in, the Downtown revival. Thus was born the annual Destination Downtown series, in which we take an in-depth look at the community’s progress toward rebuilding and renewing Kansas City’s Downtown.

Have there been setbacks through this economic gauntlet? Absolutely. But this community is chock-full of the kinds of nimble business leaders who can wheel on a dime, improvise, adapt and overcome. Case in point: When the housing markets crashed, taking down demand for condominiums, developers of works in progress reacted by finishing out their projects as apartments, in some cases with smashing success.

And yes, the Sprint Center, now two years old, still lacks the anchor tenants that many had hoped would bring thousands of urban dwellers and suburbanites Downtown dozens of nights a year. That, combined with the effects of the recession, has made it tougher for many of the businesses in the adjacent Power & Light District than it otherwise might have been. But those owners and operators, as well, are a resourceful lot.

Surprisingly, more construction is going on right now in the Downtown area than any time in the previous two years. Block by block, project by project, Downtown continues its revival as the major cultural and economic force not only in the metropolitan area, but throughout the region.

Critics attack the timetable for success and the tactics for getting there. But the long-term strategy remains in place: Complete the Downtown renaissance, and do it right. We learned after World War II how quickly a major urban center could whither to near irrelevancy. After more than $5.2 billion in investment and too many man-hours to count, too much has transpired over the past decade for the city to give up now, with so many of its goals achieved and so many others within sight.

This section is dedicated to the proposition that a little perspective is a wonderful thing. So place the report herein up against the memory of what Downtown was a little more than a decade ago. And keep in mind: more work remains.

Kansas City, consider this your rallying cry.