1. Right out of the gate, Jerry Riffel rattled off what he saw as three priorities for Downtown: a new hotel, a streetcar system and market-rate housing. | 2. Bill Dietrich noted the extensive publicity that has focused on Kansas City, nationally and even internationally. | 3. David Frantze launched the discussion on the need for a new, 1,000-room convention hotel. | 4. If the city stops to rest on its redevelopmental laurels, said Steve Dunn, it risks falling behind.
Setting Priorities
Jerry Riffel, a partner at Lathrop & Gage whose specialties include large-scale development, teed the assembly up for a productive discussion by quickly laying out three priorities for Downtown: A new convention center hotel, a streetcar project still on the drawing boards, and more high-end, market-rate housing. Those elements, he said, would keep the momentum going.
Steve Dunn, chairman of J.E. Dunn Construction, echoed some of that by stressing a topic that would be woven in throughout the assembly. He called for a targeted program to encourage more multi-family housing. Again and again, participants said that such efforts to promote greater population density would be critical to capitalizing on Downtown’s successes to date. Among those is a more than doubling of the Downtown population over the past decade, to roughly 18,000 people—progress, but still only a little more than half the figure that planning models suggest would be necessary to create an economically viable central core.
Going around the table, many of the three dozen assembled zeroed in on key priorities for taking Downtown to the next level. Securing a Downtown home for UMKC’s Conservatory of Music and Dance, a theme that would warrant its own segment of the discussion later on, resonated with several, as did calls for bringing balance to the core by pressing development in the East Village, emphasizing the walkability factor, and actively pursuing the Greater Downtown Area Plan approved last year.
Dunn, summing up the wealth of suggested priorities, succinctly noted that whichever steps it takes, the city must build on its successes. “That’s the trick: You can’t stop. Once you stop,” he said, “other cities will pass you by.”
The path to that progress, though, is fraught with challenges noted by other participants. Among them are the burdens we create for ourselves with a typically Midwestern and overly self-deprecating sense of worth.
“We need to stop bad-mouthing ourselves,” said Herb Kohn, a senior partner with the Bryan Cave law firm.
Agreed, said Rick Hughes, president of the Kansas City Convention and Visitors Association: “Some of it is us,
here,” he said. “We need to call people out when we hear that kind of bad-mouthing.”
