We need a City Housing pilot project here in KCMO. We’ve tried to solve a city problem with suburban answers. We are a city. Cities thrive by being cities. A new kind of City Housing leans into what density does well…walkability, quick access to goods and services, neighbors…and designs away what it does badly…the lack of privacy and private outdoor space, the traffic, the noise. Those are design problem. Design problems have solutions. A full-on design competition that actually gets built and sold. Not just pretty pictures. Work out the bugs. Rewrite the rules from the ground up to give us the housing we need at a cost we can afford. Fire Marshal at the table. Building code officials at the table. Urban planners at the table. Literally everyone. Coordinate it with real changes…zoning, building code, and upgrades to sewer, water, and roads. Make it a big deal. Make it big news. And make the goal unmistakable: To develop a new housing typology for city neighborhoods that is the envy of the region. Not just a Vision document. A project good enough to start a flywheel that spins off the next one, and the one after that. We have the land. We have the bones. We have the demand. I think we should build the prototype that shows exactly how KCMO will become the place everyone in the metro wants to live. Or not haha. We could keep trying to out suburb the suburbs I guess. Or keep throwing NO’s at every well meaning infill developer. I think there’s a better way.

People need to understand this. Every apartment building with a dead end corridor (high %!) is just as “unsafe” as a single stair building. A fire in the corridor traps residents from stair access. This is an acceptable risk per the code. Single stair is no worse.