History of Racial and Economic Inequity

Historically, racism concentrated low-income African-Americans in the inner cores of central cities. This concentration of poverty created areas with tremendous social problems. The rules of the game were biased toward rewarding individuals and businesses to leave behind areas with problems and flee to outlying areas. The result was increased poverty in the core, segregations by race and economics, increased barriers, sprawl and urban degradation.

In the Kansas City metro region, our biggest weaknesses —concentrated minority poverty, limited innovation capacity, immense resource inefficiency, endangered natural wealth — are all intimately connected.

 

The Cost

Job Sprawl

· Over 80% of new jobs in the area were created outside our two central cities in the 1990’s.

· By the mid-1990’s more than 45% of Kansas City employees worked outside a 10-mile ring around the regional center. The national average is 35%.

L  Land Sprawl

· The Kansas City area urbanized land at twice the rate of population growth over the last two decades — significantly more inefficiently than other major metro areas.

Uneven Growth

· Overall, the region’s population grew 12% during the 1990’s, but the two central cities together grew less than 1%

· In the same period, the central cities’ share of the region’s jobs slumped from half to 43.1%.

· Only the “outer” third of the region’s population boomed, while the central business district lost 13% of its population, and growth in the “inner” and “middle” thirds declined by 6.5% and 3.7%, respectively.

Segregation

· As the Kansas City region decentralized, most of the area’s nonwhite residents became even more concentrated in the core as whites moved out.

Education and Social Gaps

· Urban schools have nearly five times the proportion of needy students as suburban schools, but only marginally higher resources to help them.

· The proportion of elementary students proficient in reading is two to four times higher in the suburbs than in the urban core.

The above text and data describing the costs are excerpted from Growth in the Heartland: Challenges and Opportunities for Missouri and Metro Outlook.

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