The Next American Dream : Kansas City : A Documentary Film

The consultants who helped guide downtown’s current renaissance delivered a message Wednesday to a couple of hundred people interested in its future: Finish what has been started first.

“We want to reinforce that you’re not done downtown,” said Kathryn Madden, head of an urban planning team studying downtown from Sasaki Associates Inc. in Boston.

That means completing projects long on the drawing board, ranging from the south loop entertainment district to the performing arts center, from commuter rail to a new community center for the homeless.

But looking further into the future, the Sasaki consultants delivered a strategic plan with some new ideas to improve the district stretching from the Missouri River to 31st Street. The ideas included:

Madden and the Sasaki team presented its new plan to a mix of downtown executives, investors, workers and residents at the Liberty Memorial. The private-sector report is an update of Sasaki’s influential downtown master plan prepared earlier this decade.

While that 2001 document, dubbed the “Sasaki plan,” helped focus downtown interests around certain priorities, such as adding housing and cleaning up the loop, downtown leaders see the update as tying downtown together.

“Today, there’s less need for prescriptive solutions, and this report talks more about what can knit together the fabric of downtown,” said Mark Ernst, president of H&R Block and the new chairman of the Civic Council of local business executives, which commissioned Sasaki’s work.

Downtown’s strategy-setting process is seen as important because, before Sasaki arrived, the region’s heart hadn’t had a master plan in three decades, and it showed. The business and political community let downtown slump and decline.

Sasaki’s 2001 document highlighted what downtown needed to work on. It promoted housing as the primary way to boost downtown’s fortunes. It recommended that businesses band together and establish an agency to clean up the loop. And it called for adding a handful of destinations, such as an arena, inside the loop.

“I can’t think of another city that has done so much in such a short amount of time,” Sasaki’s Madden said.

Still, not all the suggestions in the 2001 plan moved forward. Those included adding more parks and public squares, re-establishing a two-way street system and developing new residential clusters east of City Hall and around Berkley Riverfront Park.

So this year the Civic Council brought Sasaki back to town to catch up on downtown’s progress and suggest how to build on its momentum.

Sasaki analyzed downtown’s housing market and, based on the increasing prices and trends toward condos, the planner determined that consumer demand existed for an additional 1,300 to 2,500 units during the next five years – significantly more than were built from 2000 to 2004.

The new plan spotlighted east-end locales, such as the blocks east of City Hall and on the riverfront, as still having the “greatest potential” for new neighborhoods.

Also, Sasaki stressed a greater need to landscape long stretches of priority roadways — such as Main Street, Grand Boulevard and Ninth, 12th and 18th streets — to help connect disparate parts of downtown. “Great streets are the hallmark of a city,” the new plan stated.

Along with that, Sasaki planners offered development standards to help make downtown more walkable and contribute to its “sense of place.”

These involved such policies as having buildings designed with ground-floor retail and wrapping parking lots or garages behind buildings, facades or trees.

In total, though, the new plan cautioned that “the success of any plan is ultimately determined by how it is implemented.”

Plan’s highlights

Here are some of the chief recommendations in the updated Kansas City Downtown Corridor Strategy, better known as the “Sasaki plan”:

Finish what is already on the drawing board, such as a performing arts center.

Complete projects under discussion, such as a community center for the homeless.

Turn some major thoroughfares into “grand, tree-lined avenues.”

Build more residences adjacent to downtown’s parks.

Look at 19th and Oak streets as the locale for a baseball stadium, if that project ever catches on.

Create a downtown development agency to coordinate and facilitate projects.

Adopt standards to guide future development, such as making sure new buildings have street-level retail.