Hannah Arendt said 'The death of human empathy is one of the earliest & most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism' We saw the recent cruelty of MAGA denying empathy to Melissa Hortman Empathy for Kirk—not because he ever acted like a decent human—but because we are decent humans

The people of Kansas City should be furious about what the Republicans are trying to do to them. Breaking up KC for more political power to Trump is outrageous. And wrong. KC is a crown jewel of MO and the Rs are treating it like dirt.

Missouri republicans want to redraw the congressional map to eliminate KC's D+12 district Punchbowl calls it "perhaps the easiest place for the GOP to gain a seat" punchbowl.news/article/camp...

I want inclusionary zoning for (only) bigfoot single family homes, the least affordable and sustainable building form. Like, want to build over 2,000 sqft? Then you gotta make a contribution to the affordable housing fund.

John Oliver said “Reagan talking points from a Whole Foods crowd” — I think that is in reference to homelessness but it works here too.

A brief history of Catholic geography in Kansas City, explained through four high schools. 1. Redemptorist High School opened in Midtown in 1926 in the midst of a five-decade boom that took KC from a backwater to (when combined with KCK) the 14th largest city in the country.

Surprising chart: library visits are still down 35% since the pandemic began, and book checkouts are down 30%. Does anyone have a theory that explains this?

There's still so much vacant land in greater midtown Kansas City

22,000 vehicles per day is generally considered the upper limit for a 3-lane road diet. Under 18k is a no-brainer. According to Replica, here are the non-expressway roadways with more than 18k cars per day (bidirectional traffic, or 9k for a directional segment). Our streets are so over-built.

new post on my blog: we're in the center of the country. So why does Kansas City feel so isolated? kcisms.wordpress.com/2025/05/17/i...

Municipal population estimates are out for the year ending July 1, 2024 Kansas City 2024: 516,032 Kansas City 2023: 511,300 4,732 people moved to KC last year (0.93% growth) The city has added 7,936 people since April 2020

A Kansas City Star Fact Check states the obvious about subsidizing new stadiums for the Royals and Chiefs: it's a politically expedient giveaway to team owners, not a serious economic development strategy t.co/gqOIHzXD8K

Here's a fascinating angle of Kansas City's core at its population peak in the middle of the 1950s. There were roughly 50,000 people living in frame (not counting North Kansas City) in 1950. Today? ~20,000

crazy that an influx of dense infill housing can lower prices and make homeownership more attainable

New post on my blog: long commutes are bad for your health, and disadvantaged groups are often forced into them. Is that true in the sprawly Kansas City? kcisms.wordpress.com/2025/05/01/o...

"Amazon has received permitting approval in the past two weeks...If all goes to plan, Amazon is hoping to build a drone delivery center at its same-day delivery facility, located south of Missouri 150, at the corner of Botts Road and 149th Street." www.kansascity.com/news/politic...

New blog post: my thoughts on the Kansas City stadium debate kcisms.wordpress.com/2025/04/16/o...

Tired: the endless debate on residential sprawl, whose demand is almost entirely a function of housing costs and public service quality in blue cities Wired: the worsening crisis of job sprawl, which is driven by little more than the whims of executives and will induce more residential sprawl

One cool thing about living in Kansas City is that every so often you stumble across a door in a hill that leads to one of our massive industrial caves

School bonds won last night for KCPS, Lees Summit, NKC, and the Park Hill School District. That's great to see--continued investment in our education system is key if the city wishes to remain attractive to employers and prospective residents

I have a short blog post up this morning arguing that we may end up underwhelmed by Kansas City's new neighborhoods in the West Bottoms and on the riverfront kcisms.wordpress.com/2025/04/09/a...

'What happened to starter homes in good neighborhoods?' Your city did well economically and land values rose. Instead of allowing many families to split the cost of land by building denser housing, you zoned it single family only and (1/2)

What actually needs to happen is that the city needs to break down barriers to national grocers like Walmart entering the city so they can run the local chains out of business. The model should be New Jersey, not the Soviet Union. It sucks that Mamdani has emerged as the top alternative to Cuomo.

New post on my blog: what we learned from this week's Census data release kcisms.wordpress.com/2025/03/16/2...

New post on my blog: two predictions and one big question about the future of driverless cars kcisms.wordpress.com/2025/03/13/o...

To stop cycle fatalities you need: ✔️Protected cycle tracks on main roads that continue at junctions that keep vulnerable road users and large vehicles separate. You don't need: ❌Helmets ❌High Viz ❌Cycle training

2024 Census Estimates have the Kansas City MSA adding 24,817 people, the largest single-year change since before the pandemic.

Chart from the Missouri dept of econdev disaggregating components of population change in the state since the pandemic

The best airport->transit connection in the country

Infrastructure, Maryland

Map of economic distress by zip code from the Economic Innovation Group. Their measure sorts zip codes by quintile using a score that aggregates high school graduate rates, housing vacancy, adults joblessness, poverty, median income ratios, & employment/business changes.

Breaking in KCMO tonight

New blog post: a look at how much use the highways of Kansas City get. The color + size on this map is scaled by the average number of cars that drive on each segment per day. kcisms.wordpress.com/2025/03/06/w...

Asterisk Mag: Can We Build a 5GW Data Center? asteriskmag.com/issues/09/ca...

every data center in the US on one map

abundance movement folks on twitter are having a field day with this

'Idling emissions reduction' road widening projects. The first time I heard the argument I thought the person I was talking to was a complete crank but nope, many DOTs seriously push nonsense like this

Here's the ten largest federal buildings that the Trump Admin plans to put up for sale: 1. The Department of Agriculture South Building, DC. 2,000,000 square feet.

The Trump Admin just released a list of federal property it plans to put up for sale. Locally, it includes the GSA buildings at the old Bannister site, a small social security office in KCK, and the massive Bolling Federal Building downtown

KC Star: KC Life teases plans for its swathe of empty lots in Valentine (spoiler: they want to build a few dozen garden apartments. Story includes this photo of one of two colonnade building they hope to demolish www.kansascity.com/news/local/a...

Boston has one of the best freeway lids in the country. It's just not the famous one.

Is anyone in academia working on ai search engines for academic papers? If the world really is about to go all in on AI accelerated r&d, surely it's more urgent than ever to disseminate academic ideas into it?

The Atlanta tracker is predicting GDP growth of -2.8% in Q1. S&P, which I generally trust a lot, is at 1.6%. Goldman is also at 1.6%. Atlanta likely wrong. And regardless doesn't say what you think it does. So continue your deep breathing.

unbelievable chart

YIMBYism is wild because you start to ask questions like “why was single family zoning created?” and “are our regulations for building safety based on any actual safety data?” and soon realize that ~85% of the rules governing our cities are based on nothing but tradition and vibes.

US planning workflow: 1. Inherit regulations that were never meaningfully tested or studied. 2. Add a few more regulations that will never be meaningfully tested or studied. 3. Leave home at 5pm. 🎉

"tree equity" is the kind of thing that columnists like to make fun of when why it works is actually instantly apparent to anyone who's ever walked down a street in the summer apnews.com/article/tree...

“To fix the problems of American governance… A good place to start would be where government is currently under assault: public administration. It’s not enough just to defend the administrative state — it must be strengthened.”

Evidence of house flipping is a much better indicator of early stage gentrification than the things people typically cite (coffee shops, apartments, etc)