A few years ago, I went to the store with two of my friends to get cookies. I had $3, but my friends were broke. Each cookie cost $1, so I bought two cookies- one for myself and the other for my best friend. I didn’t want to buy a third cookie for my other friend because I wanted to save my money. Essentially, I cared to invest in myself and my closer friend of the two, but not my other friend.

This demonstrates the paradox which Kansas City bestowed upon itself. Historically speaking, “a lack of investment leads to a lack of empathy. A lack of empathy leads to not getting a plethora of resources needed,” CEO and President of Community Builders of Kansas City, Emmet Pierson said. This results in economic disparity and with little to no empathy leads Kansas City towards a spiral of separation between economic and racial classes. This generalization of the paradox in America is called redlining. 

While racial and economic issues continue to linger in most major cities in the United States, it is a particularly grim problem in Kansas City. The alarming increase in abandoned buildings and housing in KCMO exacerbates the issue and readily makes it abundantly more clear.

In Kansas City, the devaluation of eastern Kansas City neighborhoods led to its lack of investment of infrastructure, education and every other primary necessities by the city. 

“Right at Blue Parkway and Cleveland, we have a shopping center, and it’s anchored by a grocery store. So we built it. The cost was roughly about $21 million… The first appraisal came in at $13.7 million,” Pierson said. 

The housing and land markets are clearly devalued when the cost of construction is significantly higher than its appraised value. This is the reason abandoned buildings and houses are prominent in east Kansas City, while seemingly scarce in the city’s western counterpart. To put it simply, it’s business 101. It is unfathomable to build something that costs more than its market value.

This plays a large factor in the city’s abandoned building/housing crisis over the past two decades. It is concerning that a prominent crisis like this has seemingly gone unsolved. In 2019, the City of Fountains had over 100,000 abandoned houses and thousands of vacated lots and buildings, according to the Abandoned to Vibrant (A2B) project- led by University of Missouri-Kansas City associate professor Jim DeLisle. That’s enough houses to be listed sixth in vacated homes by a city in America according to 24/7 Wall St. 

 While driving past ungroomed lawns in front of shambled buildings is unsettling, it barely touches the surface to the true issue at play.

University of Pennsylvania Cartographic Modeling Lab Papers studied the relationship between aggravated assault and abandoned buildings and found a statistically significant association between the two. But it’s not unique to just assault.

In fact, the cities in Missouri that lead in eviction rates also lead in gun homicides per the Gun Violence Archive and Princeton University’s Eviction Lab.

These areas turned into crime ridden neighborhoods impart because of the city’s devaluation and lack of investment, yet the two issues readily exacerbate each other. 

If low-income pollutes a particular neighborhood, then that community won’t receive loans from the bank just as a failing school won’t be accredited nor given an adequate amount of public funding. Similarly, if crime is high in a particular neighborhood, then insurance premiums skyrocket accordingly.

Yet, as crime in an area rises, its investment plummets. Where does that investment go? Education, housing, infrastructure, welfare and other government agencies Americans have deemed essential. 

But if all of these issues exacerbate each other, and impoverished and low-income Kansas Citians are hard workers- contrary to the notion that all poor Americans on welfare programs are lazy-  then how did this all start?

 The National Housing Act of 1934 sparked a national housing boom with low-cost, low-term mortgages. Once vacant plots of land turned into towns, parks, schools and any other aspect that are fundamental to a strong community. It became a realtor's gold mine and the birth of Suburbia, America. Yet, African-Americans were not allowed in. 

In Kansas City, for example, J.C. Nichols owned most of the land properties in the metropolitan area at this time. He is known largely for his contributions to the Kansas City Plaza- the first “walking shopping mall” in America- and for essentially mapping out the municipality as seen today. He turned the land he owned into the KC suburbs- Shawnee, Mission Hills, Lenexa, etc. He strategically placed the Country Club Plaza- corporation’s Disneyland- near these suburbs so that these neighborhoods could yield higher economic growth and investments in order for higher access to resources.

Yet, his deeds had restrictive racial covenants. He prohibited black Americans from owning, renting or occupying homes in these new towns. 

In fact, 96% of all Johnson County properties had similar restrictions- according to “Building the Troost Wall: Structural Racism in Kansas City”- a documentary by Michael Wesch and Nathaniel Bozarth addressing the issues of structural racism in KC. Thus, White America moved to the outskirts of cities, while Black America remained in the inner city. This separated communities based on skin color, which in a nutshell is racist. Yet, this is merely the beginning of the issue. The Federal Housing Administration developed a system to decide who could receive the low-cost loans granted by the Housing Act of 1934. 

These newer developed towns located just outside a major city were considered safe investments; whereas, inner city land was thought to be risky investments leading them, “to disrepair and decline,” Michael Wesch said on “Building the Troost Wall: Structural Racism in Kansas City.” 

Amid Black America’s demise, there became a power struggle and White America took control. After redlining was outlawed, the new wave of taking advantage of African Americans was called blockbusting. In theory, it incentivized more white people to move towards the suburbs, but in reality real estate agents devalued the housing market in particular neighborhoods- Black America or streets east of Troost Avenue- in order to cash a bigger commission check. African Americans became trapped particularly for two reasons. 

The first being that upon recently moving into predominantly white neighborhoods blockbusting immediately destroyed their wallets. How can you make money on an asset whose price dropped a considerable amount overnight? Not to fret because making money relies on good connections, but those relationships don’t occur when white flight strips white and black Americans from ever interacting. 

“As people were blockbusted and essentially convinced to leave and hightail it to Johnson County, all that money left and it went into the Shawnee Mission school district,” east Kansas City resident Nick Dorn said.

This segregation per se created a cycle of dependency and power struggle. The government gives money, or should I say welfare (better yet “handouts”), to those who ask for it. You don’t just receive food stamps or medicare, you have to apply to receive it. In other words, you have to know where to go and how to apply to get welfare, just like any government agency offering money- which boils down to who you know. Put more clearly, it’s about connections. 

Black America already lacked access to low-cost loans and mortgages which resulted in an unprecedented amount of crime, stifling debt and poverty and lack of education. The ‘50s were supposed to be a turning point for African Americans. They could finally live in white neighborhoods- areas where banks offered an innumerable amount of benefits. White flight made sure that wasn’t the case, however. At the very least, African Americans’ white neighbors or colleagues surely would help them in terms of networking, but alas white flight destroyed any possibility of this.

As connections boiled, small business opportunities in Black Kansas City dissipated more and more. Small businesses are the backbone to any prospering community too.

These connections can come in several different varieties. For example, 63% of the eligible applicants for the COVID-19 relief grants from Kansas City on the east side did not receive a Paycheck Protection Program loan.

As Emmet Pierson said, “A lack of empathy leads to not getting a plethora of resources needed.” Thus, west Kansas City’s constant lack of investment into its eastern counterparts led to more than half of eastern Kansas City’s PPP loan applicants being rejected. However, that’s not to say KC’s western hemisphere is to blame completely for these rejected applications rather a means of awareness to who the rich are accustomed to helping- which is themselves.

Due to a quality of investment, schools began to close, less jobs became available in these neighborhoods, and opportunities seemingly were bleak. While White America was able to take advantage of the cheap land when they wanted to, these residents aren’t able to afford to buy out vacated land. It is a primitive representation of the impacts and issues of redlining and blockbusting, yet it also further separates east Kansas City from west Kansas City. When one community has so little money that they can’t afford to buy cheap plots of land that another community has the luxury of doing, there’s a problem. It demonstrates that society has successfully equipped one facet of the country with resources, money, and the education to take care of these abandoned areas; whereas the other doesn’t have enough money to pay next month’s rent. Municipalities and governments present west Kansas City with a set of opportunities not offered to east Kansas City, and they are left to survive off of “handouts.”

Because of specific opportunities that aren’t available to the east side of Kansas City, it makes utilizing and buying these abandoned buildings and homes increasingly more difficult to purchase. Insurance costs go through the roof when houses or buildings are in more dangerous neighborhoods. Construction companies neglect to build there because the appraisals are far cheaper than the cost to build it.