I would tend to agree, it is not a debacle but it is a hardship on the city. Those infrastructure improvements you list are not a normal expense of the city's General Fund.

Awhile back there was a concern that the city could lose the E-tax as a revenue source and if lost how the city would lose X amount of money per year for ten years. Well, the financial impact on the city's budget, by subsidizing the P&L, is roughly that same amount of money per year except that it isn't limited to ten years but for either the next 15 or 25 years.

The question is whether the revenue shortfall will continue for the next 15-25 years. And to answer this question, you have to ask whether the western portion of this development (retail block) will remain largely vacant for the next 15-25 years. If the answer to the latter question is no, then the answer to the former question is probably no as well. Or, at least, the revenue shortfall will be greatly reduced.

The other obvious question is how much tax revenues have increased in other areas of the city due to P&L. Nobody seems to be able to quantify this. And I guess there will never be any way to determine whether downtown redevelopment from Union Station to River Market is or has been influenced by P&L.

Equipped with zero statistical data, I personally believe that economic development surrounding P&L has been largely, positively impacted by P&L. I worked downtown pre-P&L and lived/worked downtown post P&L and the CBD is just different. More alive. More energy. More activity. Feels like an actual city again. There may be no way to quantify this positive impact. But, just as a new job or new clothes or new haircut can change a person's outlook on life, this new P&L has changed many Kansas Citians' view of downtown. People are now living, working, and playing downtown who wouldn't have ever dreamed of doing so 10 years ago. For these reasons, I support the investment and stand by it despite the initial revenue shortfalls.

Great post wildcat...for all the angst over the finances there is no doubt that P & L has transformed downtown. I was downtown last night at about 6 and it was absolutely packed...traffic, pedestrians, mayhem for various things going on. I used to run downtown 8 or 9 years ago about the same time of night. I remember not seeing a car or person for blocks. It was completely dead. This city had to do something daring and ambitious to bring downtown back. And while there may be short term financial pain, it was far better than the alternative downtown of absolutely nothing.

well if those downtown volunteers would stop recommending LOCAL ESTABLISHMENTS to tourists, we wouldn't be in the mess now would we!!

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/05/14/36 ... rylink=cpy

I went to see Chris Botti last Friday night at the Midland with an longtime friend, who is 68, and lives up in Kearney.

We sat outside and ate beforehand, and did some people-watching as concert-goers walked to the Sprint Center to see Miranda Lambert.

My friend said "I can't believe how much Downtown Kansas City has changed. It used to be such a cess-pool--that we just stopped coming here. It's really great now. I look forward to coming to more things down here."

But where did you park?

Garage by Cosentinos.

^ Great Article. I think it really is true, that entertainment districts kind of spring up on their own. Its funny though because the Water Street in Milwaukee he uses is kind of like a P&L disrict, i don't really like Water Street because its full of suburban tourists getting drunk and acting stupid. So maybe a lot of these entertainment areas have more to do with the kind of people that go to these areas rather then something being pre-planned garbage.

I like these paragraphs in the article.
Milwaukee has taken a similarly hands-off approach to Water Street, an area on the city’s waterfront where a fairly raucous bar scene emerges nightly. Daniel Campo, assistant professor of architecture and planning at Morgan State University, co-authored a study of the Water Street scene and identified several factors that make it work: Small, older buildings (cheap enough to open a dive bar in), flexible facades (no historic designations), open late (naturally) and located on a slightly dicey fringe of town where chaos can unfold.

Campo characterizes such spaces as areas of “benign neglect,” neighborhoods where entertainment zones can naturally emerge. “These are places where no one lives, the cops don’t go there, people don’t care about that area.” He compares it to New York in the ’70s and ’80s, when the police had bigger fish to fry than kids drinking beer on the street. “You have to be comfortable with the way these places work. There’s going to be loud people, messes on the sidewalk — it’s not for everyone.” They’re an example of what philosopher Michel Foucault called heterotopias: “Neither utopian or dystopian, but a paradoxical combination of both.”

That sounds just like the Crossroads. Why do you think the Crossroads has not taken that next step? Is it possible with the P&L just to the north? Or are we talking different crowds?

Why would we want to be like New York in the 70s and 80s? As I recall from historical accounts, much of NYC was a pretty dangerous and disgusting place. And what is wrong with having an Epcot-style entertainment district. Just as someone described the band Creed to me... "Even methamphedamine needs a soundtrack." Every big city in the world has an Epcot-style entertainment district, including New York in the 70s and 80s, and especially today. The P&L has become a scapegoat for lazy journalists who are just taking other people's word for the reality here. The reality is that nothing was ever going to happen to that part of downtown without a major sweeping effort and push towards change, involving a lot of money and city involvement. I'd like for someone to claim that we would have as many people walking around our CBD today without the P&L. For those who worked here before the P&L, foot traffic at lunch was probably about 5% of what it is now, if not less.

Who exactly was lining up to build new buildings on the vacant parking lots that somehow fit into this definition of fringe and organic? There is no fringe and organic with new development. Everything is a disappointment unless it is one-of-a-kind, and one-of-a-kind is generally the most expensive prospect and/or the biggest risk. I am not a fan of Cordish, and I don't like many of the restaurants they decided to bring in, but I am still happy to have the P&L. I'd also like to have a monorail to the airport and a comprehensive commuter rail plan because other cities have it, but that does not mean that this idea is achievable or that I don't support the existing streetcar plan.

We have Westport, 75th and Wornall, Brookside, Martini Corner, 39th Street, the Crossroads, and the River Market... all organic and gritty and mostly historic (for KC). These places are all over the map, and the Crossroads is way too big of an area currently to have a traditional row/concentration of entertainment options. This is perfect for First Fridays when people are supposed to randomly wander, but most people out on the town don't randomly wander. All of the places listed have developed over many many years, and they are all great to have, but the P&L is still probably more recognized by everyone, KC native and not, next to the Plaza.

To me, the purpose of P&L is to create something attractive that encourages the organic to grow around it. I bet in 20-30 years when we see where we are as a city because of it, there will be no doubt it was a worthwhile investment.

The characterization of Boston's Kenmore Square was incorrect by omission. Yes, back in the 80's and early 90's that was the epicenter of the music scene that spawned a lot of great bands, including the Pixies. And it was seedy with a capital S. By the early 2000s the scene had died and it was mostly half empty brownstones with copy shops and liquor stores on the ground floor. You ended up there at night because you were either a BU student and lived nearby or had gotten off the T and were walking over to the bars on Lansdowne St.

Around 2001, BU started buying up property and ultimately razed about a block worth of buildings - including the onetime home of the legendary Rathskeller, a hole in the wall bar that hosted the Cars, REM, the Police, and the Replacements - to build a 150 room, luxury hotel, with a nightclub on the first floor. The area was also helped by the fact that the Red Sox finally started sinking money into Fenway Park around the same time. The entire area changed within 2 or 3 years.

That's all a long way of saying that old Kenmore Square was a place that most people didn't ever spend much time in and only became beloved in retrospect - long after what made it famous was gone. And what replaced it was basically a tourist destination for people visiting the kiddo at BU or in town for a series at Fenway. The "authentic" urban place the author talks about was fairly short-lived and ultimately died before the area was gentrified. There was no connection between the two. They just happened on the same piece of real estate.

Even "organic" entertainment districts that have sprung up (like Westport) in the past have their problems. Westport has had to contend with neighborhood complaints because of drunken patrons' behavior (Club X/0, America's Pub), and things like random acts of violence (shootings, etc.).

We also have to recognize the influence and power of branding over the past 20 years. Even homegrown enterprises that start with one store, or outlet, have evolved because of the influence of branding (AMC Theaters, Boulevard Brewery, Roasterie coffee, Applebee's, Gates BBQ). Many entrepenuers open restaurants and bars and then seek to franchise the "concepts."

Americans have increasingly become brand-oriented over the years. They like buying familiarity off the shelf in their products and services, so it stands to reason that real estate developers would also buy into the trend of creating sellable concepts, and then repeating them over and over in other places.

Organic neighborhoods like the East Village of New York City is also succumbing to the influence of franchised retail: K-Mart, Barnes and Noble, Tower Records, Starbucks and The Gap, AMC Loews, Chipotle, Subway, Walgreens, and Regal Theaters.

It's hard to expect an organic neighborhood to emerge spontaneously in a part of downtown that was filled with surface parking lots, and lacked the historic building infastructure for retail to renovate and occupy.

Building new structures is expensive, and small local entrepeneurs have a hard time with capital, or affording the rents (Peach Tree).

That's the key element. New construction, with density, is enormously expensive. For one, it requires parking garages which themselves are unaffordable. I can't see how the P&L tract was ever going to be developed organically because of the lack of structures and what we would have had would probably had been less dense than the P&L District (as surface parking would have needed to be retained). And years down the road as well. The P&L District is not perfect, the deal wasn't perfect, but it served and is serving its purpose. Who really in KC wants to go back to a dead downtown, no CBE, no Sprint Center (relying on Kemper for a primary venue?), no H & R Block building? At least we got one modern downtown venue out of the deal; most cities have multiple sport venues downtown these days. People can complain all they want about the financing but few other than the very loud but small and insignificant curmudgeon population would actually want to go back.

Thing is, yours is a false dichotomy between a dead, desolate downtown and a lively, bustling one paid for by handing all the financial upside to the developer while burdening the city with all of the risk. It's a good thing Cordish is a private company because it would be laughably painful to look at the details of its healthy financial statements while city taxpayers hand over $13 million a year to make those profits possible.

Thing is, it's a pretty reasonable dichotomy and cities commonly pay far more than that to get a single project going. And all the financial upside? The city stands to gain a great deal by having the P&L district there. Find a private corporation that would ever take that risk in a decaying downtown with practically no amenities; no stadiums, no arenas, no reason people would ever go there. Or we could have waited another 50 years for organic growth to possibly make some inroads.

It is not common for cities to commit to covering revenue shortfalls in TIF-like funding arrangements. I know of no other examples of redevelopment projects anywhere in the United States in which the municipal government made that commitment. Do you?

And if you really think the city can pull off a net financial gain from the P&L situation, you (a) have obviously never seen a present-value calculation in your life and (b) are probably severely arithmetically challenged.

Independence Mo with the Bass Pro Shop development. And it is hurting the city.