The Creative Crossroads

Overlooked by many, Downtown Kansas City has undergone a creative renaissance.

 

More than 100,000 people commute to Downtown Kansas City every workday. Nearly 20,000 more people call Downtown home.

But to really build the critical mass for a thriving Downtown, experts say, you have to have a density of businesses that fall into what’s called the Creative Class:

• Design professionals, like architects and engineers.

• Visual arts venues, including galleries and studios.

• New media marketing and advertising professionals.

• Information technology companies.

• Video and animation studios.

• Cultural and performing arts organizations.

• Collaborative work spaces and business incubators.

So how does Kansas City stack up in those areas? Probably better than you might think. The Downtown Council of Kansas City recently posted an addition to its Web site that features a series of colored, digital push-pins marking the locations of companies and organizations that fit the profile. But if you go there, be prepared to hit the “zoom” button, because the density of those markers makes it almost impossible to see the streets named on the underlying map.

For Downtown to become successful, it must become that creative crossroads, drawing in younger, talented professionals. It seems to be working. More than 400 pins line that map of a Downtown that Forbes magazine has rated one of the 10 best in the U.S. Information technology firms, many of them with ties to mother ships at Sprint and Cerner Corp., have cropped up in numbers sufficient for The Wall Street Journal to reclassify Kansas City as a national hub in the IT space. And a magazine called Under30CEO has KC at No. 2 in the nation as a place for young entrepreneurs.

A good deal of that attention—but certainly not all—flows from the emergence of the Crossroads District over the past decade, turning the area south of Interstate 670 and east of I-35 into a cultural magnet. Every month, the First Friday crowd streams into the neighborhood by the thousands to check out the works of art, crafts and edible creations displayed for sale.

Not far away, on the western fringe of the greater Downtown area, the long-forsaken West Bottoms has gained new life as “the next Crossroads.” Creative companies, many of them new, founded by young professionals with lots of dreams and little capital, take advantage of the below-market rates for office space and art studios in converted buildings there. And that area has even seen developers move in with plans for the neighborhood’s first residential units.

Within the core of Downtown KC, inside the I-670/I-70 loop, companies continue to set up shop or expand, incrementally adding to depth to the creative bench. And those who are backing an effort to relocate UMKC’s Conservatory of Music and Dance to quarters nearer the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts say that if they succeed, the next phase in the rapid growth of Creative Kansas City will be significantly advanced.

 

 

 

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