Ingram's May 2024

2004 Zona Rosa retail center opens in the Northland. Bass Pro Shops announces it will open two stores in the Kansas City area. Sprint-Nextel merger completed.

2005 BATS Trading

2006 H&R Block opens its new world headquarters. The Legends opens, infusing a large retail shopping district into western Wyandotte County. Democrats regain full control of Congress by retaking the House, 12 years after the historic Republican Revolution.

2007 Sprint Center and the adjacent Power & Light District open. Two hospitals in Independence close with the opening of the Centerpoint

2008 Dow Jones Industrial Average posts its larg est one-day decline ever—777 points. KU wins the NCAA tournament with an overtime victory against Memphis. Leo Morton named chancellor of the University of Missouri– Kansas City.

(now BATS Global Markets) opens in Lenexa with a new model for executing equities trading on-line.

M ARCH 2006 $3.95

BOOM ? TOWN

Will KC’s Building Boom Sustain Rising Costs and Labor Shortages

Medical Center. Permits for new

residential home con struction begin to fall sharply.

their request,” Kemper said after the as sociation threatened to shop for a new host city if Kansas City didn’t ante up $365,000 a year, as well as other incen tives, to keep it here. “The convention is as much a fixture in Kansas City as the waters of the Missouri. What’s more im portant to Kansas City than the FFA con vention?” (Editor’s note 2024: The FFA, it seems wasn’t impressed with Kemper’s cash infusion; it relocated to Louisville in 1999, then Indianapolis in 2006.) Colleen Hernandez, director of Kan- sas City Neighborhood Alliance, is charged with making the city’s older, inner-city neighborhoods attractive, vi able places to live. It’s a game of beat the clock, and sometimes it seems as if the clock is winning. Between 1980 and 1988, more than 4,000 affordable hous ing units were demolished, and only 1,695 were constructed in Kansas City, leaving an estimated 51,000 people with out adequate housing. Federal support for housing dropped from $30.2 billion in 1981 to $3.2 billion in 1988. Still, local leaders believe that if any one can make a dent in the city’s deterio rating neighborhoods, Hernandez can. 1994 Kansas City’s urban renewal depends on a handful of developers, some private, some public. The question is: Can they coexist? For 30 years now, cities across America have wrestled with the same problem: White flight, dwindling tax bas es, and a severe decline in employment have stamped what sociologists call a “doughnut hole” out of the cities’ centers. From Boston to Birmingham, once-proud SEPTEMBER Voice N the Hood MARCH Fire and Ice

urban areas languish as businesses with money turn toward the suburbs. Kansas City is no exception. But while some cities, such as Atlanta, have made great strides in revitalizing their ur ban cores, Kansas City’s efforts have re sulted in only isolated pockets of redevel opment, such as Twelfth and Brooklyn. What’s the problem here? For Mayor Emanuel Cleaver, the an swer is simple: “The Atlantas, Chicagos, New York Cities have more rich black folk. What we see in a few isolated spots in the central city here are anomalies.” But the problem is more complex than that, and it’s inextricably linked to issues as divergent as race, crime and financing. At the heart is an emerging debate about private and public development. No longer just a luxury, videoconfer encing saves time and money for every one from rural hospital patients to busi ness people. A child in western Kansas sits on an examination table in her doc tor’s office, unaware that she’s about to be seen by a University of Kansas Medical Center pediatric cardiologist from miles away. Over a television screen, the KU spe cialist greets her, then begins an exami nation. With the help of the child’s regu lar doctor, who’s in the room with her, the specialist listens to the child’s heart beat and breathing and inspects X-rays, electrocardiograms, and sonograms over the monitor. This long-distance medical exam is but one of the ways organizations are increasingly using videoconferencing to save time and money and bring informa tion and services to remote or far-flung areas. Businesses use videoconferencing to hold business meetings, which saves the cost of national and international travel. Universities use it to bring instruc MAY Picture This

tion to students in remote areas. And some organizations use the technology to recruit employees, narrowing the field of candidates over the phone lines before flying in the finalists.

SEPTEMBER Boom Street

Fifteen years ago, the only business that considered locating on Johnson County’s 119th Street was a tractor com pany, attracted by the area’s farmhouses, tin-sided outbuildings, and abundant bean fields. Today, crops still landscape some sections of the suburban roadway, but bean counters of a decidedly different sort are calculating the area’s potential yield. The 7½-mile stretch of 119th Street, running west from State Line Road in Leawood to Pflumm Road in Olathe, ranks as one of the hottest commercial real estate sites of the metropolitan area. It sports some 5 million square feet of prime office and retail space waiting to be developed. 1995 Visitors to Kansas City might view an exhibit at Bartle Hall, attend a meet ing in Corporate Woods, spend the after noon at a suburban golf course, and in the evening enjoy dinner and live jazz on the Plaza, without ever knowing they’ve crossed a state line. But for metropolitan residents, the state line can be as divisive as the Mason-Dixon Line, providing op portunities for disagreement, stereotyp ing, and name-calling. Like the rest of the metropolitan area, institutions of higher education have had to contend with the state line, competing for students, grant money, and faculty. But in recent years, educators in Kansas JANUARY Meeting of Minds

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May 2024

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