A Hidden Collapse

Is Kansas City more like Detroit and St Louis than it seems?

Note: this post was first published on my wordpress blog in 2025. It is still the most interesting thing I have independently realized about Kansas City.

1. Annexations

The typical population trajectory for an older northeastern or midwestern US city is of continuous growth from its founding until 1950, then several decades of decline from white flight and suburbanization, followed by growth after 1990 or so. The most fortunate (New York) have recovered all their lost population; the least (Detroit, Baltimore) are still spiraling downward. 

Kansas City’s population trajectory doesn’t follow that pattern. Yes, our growth nearly stalled after 1950, but it didn’t begin to decline until three decades later. Until 2020 our population peak was 1970, 20 years after similar late-19th-century industrial boomtowns like Chicago, Saint Louis, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, etc. Ours looks more similar to that of Denver, a much younger city, or even Columbus, a city of an entirely different kind.

There’s a simple reason for Kansas City’s missing decline decades: annexations. Before the Second World War, Kansas City covered just 59.8 square miles. Between 1947 and 2010 it swallowed up its suburbs rapidly, eventually adding nearly 259 square miles. That level of annexation is unusual for ‘old’ US cities; Detroit, for example, lost its practical ability to annex in 1926. Saint Louis hasn’t expanded its boundaries since it separated from the county in 1876. 

The huge growth of our city limits makes it hard to compare like for like. Did Kansas City really avoid the worst of the urban crisis after 1945? Or did we just grow enough to mask it? There are clearly neighborhoods in the city that have declined, but by how much? Does our urban core’s experience look more like that of Detroit, with extreme flight and disinvestment, or are we more like Denver, a 20th century success story? 

 It’s surprisingly difficult to find solid answers. This isn’t covered in any planning department work (that I’ve been able to read), or on city websites, the local media doesn’t seem to have covered it before, and even when Strong Towns did a big report on the Kansas City suburban experiment a few years back they didn’t track the figure down. So I did, pulling census data from NHGIS and adopting it to the old boundaries. I’ll walk through the specific steps at the bottom of this post.  

2. Population Collapse

The population of the pre-1945 boundaries of Kansas City peaked in 1950 at 430,535 people. In 2022, it was (approximately) 187,902. That means pre-annexation Kansas City has lost  242,633 residents, 56% of its previous population. 

A 56% population decline is an incredible figure.  

This chart shows the population trajectories of all major US cities that lost a significant share of their population after 1950. Each of the cities on this list have generated national headlines as they’ve declined, and those at the top have practically become synonymous with urban failure and population loss. None annexed substantial land or population after 1945. 

If not for the growth of areas annexed after 1945, Kansas City would be among the very largest population losers of any major city in the US. In percentage terms, we lost the fourth most population; in absolute terms, 7th. Had Kansas City not annexed so much land it would be near the top of every urban decline listicle, CityLab op-ed, and glossy magazine think piece written in the past fifty years. City planning students would pile up masters theses on rethinking the city’s land use; think tanks would talk about ‘right-sizing’ services. Conservatives would use its name as a pejorative; political careers would be made on ‘turning the city around’. It’s hard to overstate how different Kansas City’s reputation would be without the postwar annexations. 

3. 187,902 Fewer People 

These maps show the extent of population decline within the old city boundaries. In 1950 several tracts reached a density of near 40,000 people per square mile, mostly on the east side of downtown. The core residential section stretched from Downtown to the Plaza area, State Line Road to roughly Swope Parkway and for the most part was built to transit-supportive densities. Higher density areas traced the path of the extensive streetcar network; these neighborhoods were generally built out with a mix of small apartment buildings, single family homes on small lots, and one-to-two story shops on commercial streets. The colonnaded apartment buildings lining the extensive network of boulevards gave the city a distinctive feel. 

By 2022, this core region had lost hundreds of thousands of residents. Downtown itself and the near east neighborhoods—Paseo West, Parkview—lost the most people in absolute terms, while neighborhoods further southeast generally lost the highest share of residents. Highway construction and urban renewal was the most common cause of severe local population loss; according to historian Kevin Fox Gotham, at least 12,000 residents were displaced by freeway building from 1950-1980 alone (it’s hard to say how many left the city entirely, of course). 

Newer sections southwest of Brush Creek were much less affected; the dynamics of white flight and racialized decline were held back there to a much greater extent than elsewhere in the city. Population decline here was almost entirely driven by falling household sizes. 

4800 people lived in this East Village area neighborhood in 1950; its current population appears to be zero 

If you’ve never thought about demographic change you might not realize how much neighborhood population loss is driven by changing household compositions. The median household size in the US dropped from an average of 3.5 to 2.6 people per household during this period. Household sizes dropping by ⅓ explains why many places don’t look like they’ve lost population—there are nearly as many homes, they just have fewer people living in them. To keep its 1950 population, the old city would have needed to substantially add to its housing stock.  

This next graphic shows the impact to the built environment of population decline in one six-block area. The Census Tract home to these blocks lost 91% of its population between 1950 and 2022, dropping from 5,397 to just 515 residents. In just this small area the city bought and demolished two blocks for US-71 right of way, a church replaced a face block of single family homes, and a number of vacant lots replaced homes throughout.  

I posted this next photo on twitter recently, of Kansas City's core looking north right as the collapse began. There were roughly 50,000 people living in frame here (south of the river) in 1950. Fewer than 20,000 call this part of the city home today.

4. Learning From A Hidden Crisis 

Population loss is bad for remaining residents

Falling population creates a whole range of problems for people who don't leave. 

Property values drop, worsening racial inequality and leaving people whose homes are their largest investments without the appreciation they hoped would fund retirement or be handed down to children. Abandoned homes catch fire, either on their own or through arson by vandals. Unmaintained homes and property attract crime and vermin. Not knowing what else to do with vacant, distressed homes, cities incur large costs demolishing them. Budgets stretch as assessments fall and infrastructure per capita rises. Small businesses move away, or close. Social networks fragment. Wealthier residents, who have more options for where they live, leave first, taking their social resources and buying power with them and leading to rising poverty rates. All of these issues take a psychological toll on residents, serving as an additional push to move away. 

Annexation served to mask the old city’s decline but didn’t prevent it

This is a subtle point but I think the most important one here. 

We don’t know if the annexations increased or decreased population decline in the old city boundaries. My guess is neither, but here’s my best case for each:

Increased decline: people living in the declining area of the city saw that they could move to nicer housing without the increased psychological and bureaucratic hurdles of leaving their hometown, and did so more than they would have otherwise. 

Decreased decline: the growing population outside the distressed core kept the city better resourced than it would have otherwise been by propping up the tax base. This prevented the kind of public service collapse that cities like Detroit saw during their depopulation eras, where trash wasn’t picked up, roads weren’t paved, and police and fire sometimes took hours to respond to emergencies. In Detroit’s case, decline eventually brought it to bankruptcy. Kansas City’s fiscal picture was stronger and therefore it remained more livable, even in neighborhoods that were losing population quickly.  

Of the two cases, the latter is the more credible. It is very obviously true that a decline in neighborhood quality—driven in part by lower quality public services—has been one of the drivers of urban out-migration in US cities over the past seventy years. It is plausible to me that on the margin decline may have been worse absent the annexations. 

Still, there’s good reason to think the effect of the annexations on decline in the old city is not very large. Academic work has generally found six major causes for urban population loss after 1950, none of which match those cases well. They are: favorable mortgage lending standards for suburban housing, increased access to suburban land because of funding for expressways, ‘white flight’ away from neighborhoods that African Americans were gaining access to in the context of rising incomes and civil rights legislation, a sharp rise in violent crime in urban centers, the creation of higher quality and closed access school districts in the suburbs, and economic restructuring with deindustrialization and the growth of the service economy (old job centers declined, and new job centers rose in different geographies). Public service quality is downstream of those major structural shifts, and likely played a minor role in population movement. The exception to this is school quality. 

Images: 17 years of decline on 27th Street in the Washington-Wheatley area

Schools are enormously important

One thing that didn’t change with annexations is the boundaries of the Kansas City school district, which has expanded very little beyond the old city limits. A combination of new and merged districts serve the annexed lands to the north and south of the old city. As the neighborhoods it serves declined and became increasingly disadvantaged, the KC school district suffered declining test scores, enrollment, and facility quality. And because they are extremely capital intensive, schools are highly susceptible to decline spirals (fewer students = less funding = buildings fall apart = fewer students = less funding = ). 

It’s not plausible that an expanded school district could have alone stopped population decline in the old city. But on the margin, expanding its boundaries likely would have helped (though there is also the flipside to consider - doing so could have slowed growth in the annexed lands).   

Comparative governance implications

I’ve long been sympathetic to the idea that struggling legacy cities could improve their fortunes by merging with their suburbs, normalizing resources across what have become very socioeconomically unequal geographies. This finding has made me reassess that view.

It’s naive to imagine that you can fix the deep structural issues driving decline in neighborhoods like these solely by bringing more outside investment into them. This has failed in other big cities — see the ongoing debate about demolishing Detroit’s Renaissance Center. Planners and economic development bureaucrats in my opinion overrate the potential of place based policy; in many cases it’s a better idea to invest in residents directly than to dump money into ‘revitalization’ projects.     

The lack of school district expansion does limit the value of the comparison, though. City-county mergers in Louisville, Jacksonville, and Indianapolis remain better cases. 

Narratives matter

This one is hard to pin down as an empirical matter but I do think that popular narratives about cities are important for their economic prospects. Ecdev consultants increasingly talk about ‘storytelling’ as a strategy to get people excited about a place, but really it’s the stories that already exist and are broadly known that influence how people feel the most. Positive narratives (such as ‘we are a growing, vibrant city’) can inspire pride and excitement, encouraging people who live in the city to stay and contribute and people in and from beyond the region to want to visit or invest in it. Conversely, decline narratives can be extremely difficult to change. When I told people I was moving to Detroit five years ago, despite a decade-long campaign by the city and developers to tell people it was coming back, my friends looked at me like I had three heads. Legacy city biases are deeply rooted. Even if it wasn’t the intention of the Kansas City annexors to create an illusion of resilience, it was effective. 

As an aside, the same thing is true of Kansas City Kansas and its Unified Government. Downtown KCK is among the most distressed centers I’ve ever visited, but when I talk about KCK with people here they think about the growth out in the county and so don’t have a negative impression of it as a city.

5. Solutions

I may write a future post about what the city can do for its declined neighborhoods. I’m new to the region and don’t know enough about the politics locally to have an informed opinion. In general, my recommendations for governing declining cities are:

1. Invest in people more than place

2. Make it as easy as possible to renovate houses

3. Be as efficient and communicative as possible about solving residents’ needs. Ask them what they need frequently

4. Make sure your tax foreclosure process isn’t shooting you in the foot

5. Devote every dollar you can find, and make every approval process as easy as you can, for infill construction (tax breaks, fees waived, cash grants for certain infrastructure or land clearance expenses, flexible zoning, fast approvals, etc)

6.  Don’t fall for single big projects that claim to be quick fixes

7. At the same time, don’t let your biggest problem spots define your agenda. Invest in strong neighborhoods and green shoots

6. Fin

As always, reach me at @2024dion on twitter with comments