Skinny Jeans Crowd to Skin Us Once Again

Perhaps no predilection better sums up the essence of today’s young “thought leaders” than their affection for so-called “skinny jeans.” Uncomfortable, expensive, and unattractive, these jeans shout conformity from the rooftops. Whenever I hear a wearer speak—especially if he/she/they “upspeak”—I reach for my wallet.

Now these folks are asking for roughly $200 million for a park to bridge I-670, the so-called South Loop. For all their professed affection for parks, however, I have never seen a man or woman in skinny jeans in Penn Valley Park, where I walk about every other day. 

What I do see are people even crazier than I am, some conspicuously so. One guy, for instance, wears short shorts and goes shirtless in the middle of the winter as he practices some wild, home-grown form of martial arts. Crazy people like parks.

When I walk through the park, I always bring my shillelagh, a walking stick made from stout knotty blackthorn with a head roughly the size and density of a shot put. I wouldn’t go without it. As much as I like Penn Valley Park, I don’t trust the place entirely.

The larger section of Penn Valley, east of Broadway, serves many functions, but the beautifully sculptured western section is prettier. For the stout of heart, it is the “refuge,” the “urban oasis” that civic leaders hope the planned South Loop Park will be. Unfortunately, it is also a disgrace.

Nearly as many people live in the park as hike or fish there. I am sure the homeless have many virtues, but neatness is not high among them. At its worst, the park is almost comically trashy. Lining the potentially sparkling stream are beer cans, fast-food wrappers, suitcases, shopping carts, and more discarded items of clothing than you could find in a well-stocked Goodwill store.

Not long ago, I asked a park board commissioner why he and his colleagues let the park devolve into this kind of post-apocalyptic messiness. He told me in all sincerity that they did not have the money to keep it clean. Apparently, though, the city does have the money, $200 million worth, to create a new park a little more than a mile away. Go figure.

As envisioned, the South Loop Project will cover about a four-block-long stretch of I-670 east of Bartle Hall with a park. Watching a video of the April 11 presentation by landscape architect Nathan Elliott, I got the distinct impression that this is a done deal. Port KC, the Downtown Council of Kansas City, and the City of Kansas City are all in. So are any number of corporate boosters, some of whom are ponying up dollars as well as good wishes.

Elliott, a principal with OJB’s San Diego office, conceded that Kansas City is new to him. So he and his colleagues began their cogitations with the question: “How can we make this a place that is authentically yours?” The answer seems to be to make it as much as possible like every other urban area manufactured for and by the skinny-jeans crowd. 

The South Loop website tells us as much. “Taking inspiration from urban parks such as Dallas’  Klyde Warren Park,” its authors brag, “the South Loop creates a more sustainable Downtown with a commitment to prioritize pedestrians, cyclists, and multimodal transportation.”

An empty buzzword at its best, it is hard to know, in this case, what the boosters mean by “sustainable.” If the word means making life more difficult for those dependent on automobiles, they may have a point. Although boosters tell us that the park will provide a “bridge” between Power & Light and the Crossroads District, there will be at least one fewer actual bridge over I-670, which means one fewer reason to go Downtown.

Cyclists and pedestrians will apparently rule the day in our reimagined city, which would be great were it not for winter, rainy days, and a population whose median age is 38 and whose median waist size is greater than its age—and getting greater by the day.

As it happens, too, the wearing of skinny jeans makes cycling so difficult that young urbanites have switched to scooters, usually powered by lithium-ion batteries. Happily for the skinny-jean crowd, people their age, even much younger, are pleased to work the mines in places like inner Mongolia and the Congo to keep Kansas City sustainable. 

If “sustainable” means financially sustainable, planners need only look to Kansas City’s earlier experiences with cookie-cutter urbanization. Not too long ago, civic boosters sold the Power & Light District to the public on the premise—pause here for laughter—that it would generate enough tax revenue to pay for the bonds issued to finance it.

That never happened. From Day One, even the true believers knew they had been suckered. Since it opened in 2007, the district has forever had to rely on refinancing and its general fund to make debt payments that total more than $10 million a year. Meanwhile, the city pulls from the park board allotments to keep the general fund afloat and Penn Valley Park awash in world-class debris. The park attracts illegal immigrants from many nations, the homeless of all races, and sex hustlers of all genders. bris.

As much as I appreciate their optimism, Elliot and his fellow boosters see the downside of nothing. He casually referred, for instance, to the city’s “great success with the light rail.” If great success means sustainability, light rail is a bust. It generates nothing. The fact that skinny-jeaners could ride for free embarrassed the KCATA into making all bus service free. This model would not even strike Karl Marx as “sustainable.”

The South Loopers, of course, are also keen on making their park “equitable.” If serious, they could find no better model than Penn Valley Park. The park attracts illegal immigrants from many nations, the homeless of all races, and sex hustlers of all genders. This helps explain why I have never seen a skinny-jeaned person anywhere near Penn Valley and why Elliott —surprise, surprise—failed to mention these potential park-killers even once in his presentation.