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The land that is known as Kansas was once part of the Louisiana Territory, which the U.S. purchased from France, who purchased it from Spain. But it was never really Spain's or France's land to begin with. The plains were the territory of the Kickapoo, Kaw/Kansa, Pawnee, Comanche, Oto, Osage, Wichita, Kiowa, Iowa, Escanxaques, and other indigenous tribes for hundreds, if not thousands of years before Europeans discovered the continent and started claiming it for themselves.
Today, descendants of these native tribes live throught the United States, within westernized communities like Topeka -- founded by white people but named after indigenous terms-- but also on small, restrictive -- but sovereign -- reservations. Indigenous women are the most at-risk demographic on the entire content, with the widest disparities in health, economics, mortality, and almost all other measures. The results of colonization are still felt viscerally today by indigenous people, hundreds of years after the firs European settlers landed. For people with native heritage, "freedom" is a loaded word.
Freedom is a heavy word for Black Kansans, too. Even now in 2020, black families face significant economic and health disparities, not only as a result of slavery, but also as a result of the subsequent century of continued oppression toward people of color in the form of Jim Crow laws and 'black codes,' as well as discrimination in housing, employment, education, and health.
The fight for Kansas to enter the Union as a free state, or a slavery state, was violent and bloody. Slaveowners had financial interests in spreading their insidious practice westward. But abolitionists fought back, and made Kansas free. The fight over slavery had been happening throughout the colonies and carried into the country's westward expansion. The skirmishes in Kansas eventually boiled over into the conflict we call the Civil War.
Though it ended more than 150 years ago, the Civil War is as relevant as ever. The founding of Kansas as a free-state was the one of the major reasons the Civil War started, and yet, Confederate flags can be seen displayed today in Topeka and other parts of the state, on flagpoles, on houses, on the bumpers of cars and the back windows of pickup trucks.
The story that proud Kansans tell today is that we fought hard to join the Union as a free state. But the truth is not quite so clear. Even at its founding, not every Kansan was against slavery. Of the state's 105 counties, 26 were named for pro-slavery men. The 1855 Territorial Legislature was voted in as a pro-slavery territory. But things had changed by 1859, when the free-state 'Wyandotte Constitution' was passed by referendum, 10,421 to 5,530. Two years later, on January 29, 1861, the state constitution was approved by the U.S. Congress -- but only after Southern legislators had physically walked out of the chamber.
Slavery was such a critical institution in the economy and the way of life in the south that it was a struggle during colonial times for northern colonies to get southern colonies to agree on methods of counting the population and collecting taxes. The colonies which profited most from holding people as property tended to have the most autocratic governments, with the power and control concentrated among just a few wealthy, well-connected members of society. If they didn't count enslaved people as part of their population, they wouldn't have to pay as much in taxes to the central government, so they flat out refused to do so.
The slavery fight came up again and again as the nation's early leaders emerged, but northern objectionists - hardly impassioned enough to be called abolitionists - could not bring up the issue without causing a rift. We might not have progressed at all in 400 years.
Even after the Declaration of Independence - supposedly, a time of unity for the fledgling country - the newly-united states all struggled to get on the same page. And as more states joined the Union, factions emerged and the bloody battles for power began. Kansas became a free state only because southern legislators had walked out of congressional session in Washington D.C., and the abolitionist legislators had enough votes to pass the state's constitution. It was a risky move, pulled literally behind the back of some of the country's elected officials. Was war not inevitable in a nation so divided?
War is a last resort of practical nations, but a natural tendency of human groupthink. Fear is the most powerful human motivator. We fight out of fear, out of a tendency to violently protect our comforts.
South Carolina voted to secede from the nation shortly after Lincoln's presidential victory. The state built up armories around the military post in Charleston, Fort Sumter, and eventually opened fire upon the fort. Where a developed nation with intelligence networks and well-rounded leaders might have sent a delegation with gifts and a proxy to negotiate - these tools had hardly been developed in the nation's tumultuous first two generations, and the conflict devolved to a military one.
War doesn't decide who's right; only who's left. The south was devastated by the Civil War and had no choice but to acquiesce to the new standards imposed by the north. But the failure left a bitterness in the hearts of all southerners who had felt their cause justified.
Toward the end of the war, General Sherman made Special Field Order 15, commandeering 400,000 acres of southern land and devoting that to freed black people. Just a few months later, the order was reversed.
The war didn't change hearts and minds of southerners. Southern states have spent the intervening 150 years proving this to the country, and to black people and other minorities. Only now, in 2020, has Mississippi voted to remove the confederate battle flag from its state flag.
But that flag was rarely flown in the war. The symbolism of the Confederate Flag has less to do with the actual Civil War, and more to do with the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.
"They say that history is written by the victors, but the Civil War has been the rare exception. Perhaps the need for the country to stay together made it necessary for the North to sit silently and accept the South's conception of the conflict. In any case, for most of the past 150 years, the South’s version of the war and Reconstruction has held sway in our schools, our literature and, since the dawn of feature films, our movies."
— The San Francisco Chronicle[8] https://www.sfchronicle.com/movies/article/Romanticizing-Confederate-cause-has-no-place-6403446.php
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy
The battle flag was popularized decades after the end of the civil war. Mississippi, the state that just removed it - didn't actually adopt a state flag with that symbol until 1894. Georgia adopted the same symbol in 1956, almost 100 years after the end of the civil war. Georgia removed that symbol from its flag in 2001, but its current state flag is based on the original flag of the Confederate States of America. Lesser-known symbolism is not exactly an improvement in this case.
https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/these-5-states-still-use-confederate-symbols-their-flags-msna624326
We are still fighting this same fight in 2020 - the fight of liberation and to end the widespread economic exploitation of races of people. The Civil War ended but the north didn't win.
American Revolution, 1775- Declaration of Independence, 1776 Peace signed in Paris, -1783 Federalist Papers written & Constitution ratified, 1788 Washington elected, 1789 Jefferson elected, 1800
Louisiana Purchase, 1803 https://www.monticello.org/thomas-jefferson/louisiana-lewis-clark/the-louisiana-purchase/
Lewis and Clark expedition, July 1804 -- saw a Kansa village https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/lewis-and-clark-in-kansas/12129
Early 1800s - Missions built to 'educate' native children https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/missions-in-kansas/14236
The Beginning and the End: Lewis and Clark among the Upper Missouri River People by Clarissa Confer https://www.jstor.org/stable/1409483
"Corps of Discovery" - Lewis and Clark expedition Lewis and Clark's military expedition, the "Corps of Discovery" led westward through the plains to the coast through the country's newly-acquired Louisiana Territory. Barely two decades old, the country more than doubled its size. President Thomas Jefferson, who made the gamble on the Louisiana Purchase,
...but led to devastation among the native tribes they met. Trade with white people brought disease and devastation to the plains tribes, whether they were nomadic or agricultural, they all suffered.
Mandan tribe in present-day North Dakota area, Upper Missouri peoples Shoshone woman - Sacagawea
https://www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/sacagawea
https://www.pbs.org/lewisandclark/native/mis.html
Missionization
The story of the Mandans wasn't new. White people had been devastating native tribes on the continent for centuries. Some sources even suggest that transmission of viruses like smallpox or other maladies was accidental - since little was understood at that time about viral transmission.
Europeans and Americans having prolonged interaction with native tribes may have been enough to cause their downfall. In the 1400s, Spanish travelers came through Kansas and found the Etzanoa settlement, which may have been as large as 20,000 people at that time - a community many generations in the making. But 100 years later, when French explorers came through the same area - the settlement was gone. The cause of their demise is currently unknown, but disease, drought, flood, or famine were all possible culprits.
https://www.history.com/news/colonists-native-americans-smallpox-blankets
Etzanoa.. 1450-1700 https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-kansas-lost-city-20180819-htmlstory.html
Manifest Destiny, pioneers and cowboys, self-sufficiency
Dodge City 1850s
Cattle drovers
John Brown and the Civil War 1850s
Kansas as a free state
American Taxation, American Slavery 1500s
Settlement Topeka founded in 1850s Cyrus K. Holliday and railroads
Native land.... land acknowledgement PrairyErth
Turn of the century - 1880-1910
Samuel Crumbine
Etta Semple in Ottawa KS, Free-thinkers movement
Emanuel and Marcet Haldeman-Julius and The Little Blue Books in Girard, KS
Socialists in Kansas
The railroad boom of the late 1800s led to a rush on natural resources - and coal was plentiful in Crawford County, Kansas. Much of the mining activity centered in Girard, with a half-dozen mining concerns operating at one time, employing hundreds of miners, and leading to complementary development in other towns, like Pittsburg, and Joplin, Missouri.
Because Girard was home to so many laborers, it was a perfect setting for pro-labor philosophy to take hold. Julius Augustus Wayland moved to Girard and founded the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason in 1897. The newspaper grew to national prominence, featuring writing from Jack London, "Mother" Jones, Upton Sinclair, and Eugene Debs. By 1910, the newspaper had reached a national circulation of more than 500,000 readers every week.
("In 1904, Appeal to Reason commissioned Upton Sinclair to write a novel about immigrant workers in the Chicago meatpacking houses. Sinclair's novel, titled The Jungle, appeared in 1905 as a serial in Appeal to Reason.") https://spartacus-educational.com/USAwaylandJ.htm https://inthesetimes.com/article/appeal-to-reason-in-these-times-socialist-newspaper-left
Life wasn't easy as a socialist publisher. The Appeal opposed World War I and the national conscription policy - and as a result, the federal government rescinded its second-class mailing rights. Wayland eventually committed suicide in 1912.
Emanual Julius hoped that inexpensive literature could be made available to the masses. His journalism career brought him to Girard, Kansas, to work for Appeal to Reason. In Girard, Emanuel met Marcet Haldeman, social activist and contemporary of suffragette Jane Addams. Emanuel and Marcet had many shared philosophies, and married in 1916, becoming the Haldeman-Julius family. In 1919, the couple purchased the presses, and most importantly, the national mailing list for the Appeal, and in 1919, started publishing what would become the Little Blue Books - notecard-sized pamphlets of history, literature, art, and culture.
By the 1970s, the Haldeman-Julius press had distributed more than 300 million copies of its Little Blue Books.
https://inthesetimes.com/article/appeal-to-reason-in-these-times-socialist-newspaper-left
http://www.ksgenweb.org/archives/crawford/history/1905/101.html
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/appeal-to-reason/index.htm
https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/marcet-and-emanuel-haldeman-julius/12077
Temperance
Railroads vs. towns Ghost towns when railroads left
Clara Barton
Post-war
Reconstruction in Kansas?
Nicodemus and the Exodusters
1890 - 1930: Exodusters from Tennessee, Lytle Family in Topeka, black establishments in Topeka and Kansas, National Negro Business League
History books say that the South established the Confederacy and fought the Civil War for "States' Rights." The rights they were referring to were to keep people as property. As soon as the war was over, and the southern states had rejoined the country, they quickly set to work enforcing their 'states' rights' again, writing new laws restricting the movement of the newly-freed black people in their midsts. As early as 1865, the year the war ended, "black codes" were being written and enacted.
https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/black-codes
These laws limited the choices that free black people could legally make, and if a black person broke a law (that they likely had never been informed about), or even appeared to come near the line, the consequences were grave. "Between 1880 and 1950, an African-American was lynched more than once a week for some perceived breach of the racial hierarchy." (smithsonianmag)
But the north star pointed the way to opportunity.
While Field Order 15 was reversed after Lincoln's assassination, his Homestead Act of 1862 stayed on the books for years -- because it also benefitted white people. The Act, passed in 1862 during the war, was a strategic move designed to give the Union a competitive edge in agriculture over the south. It gave any citizen the opportunity to claim 160 acres of land to own and establish their own farm. This meant that poor white families could finally start their own farms, when before, they could not have competed with southern plantation bosses, who had massive farms and an enslaved workforce. The Union also passed the National Banking Act, established the federal Department of Agriculture, and passed the Pacific Railroad Act, all during the war. These moves all had the aim of making the north strategically advantageous through more attractive opportunities in agriculture, better economic opportunities, and potentially even by draining population from the south.
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-ushistory/chapter/government-during-the-war/
The adoption of the 14th amendment in 1868 meant that free black people were legal citizens of the United States, and could thus start to take advantage of the Homestead Act. New railroad lines meant that travel through the northern states was feasible. Finally, after 200 years of slavery in North America, black Americans had a way out. The first mass migration was the Exodusters movement of 1879, in which as many as 40,000 free black people left the south for opportunities in the north. Over the next several decades, millions of free black people would do the same, a movement that later became known as The Great Migration.
It was a tainted freedom, however.
As a natural continuation of the brutal and bloody work of Lewis and Clark, later President Andrew Jackson, and the cavalry of the U.S. Army, the genocide against native American tribes continued beyond the Civil War. The Homestead Act granted citizens (of the country that had existed for a few generations only) a righteousness to claim land in places west of the Mississippi River only recently established as "states." Formerly, and probably for thousands of years, this had been the territory of the Kickapoo, Kaw/Kansa, Pawnee, Comanche, Oto, Osage, Wichita, Kiowa, Iowa, Escanxaques, and other indigenous tribes. While black families were just starting to experience the taste of freedom, the first Americans, who had known nothing but freedom for as long as their histories had existed, now were forced to experience restriction. Many of the claims made under the Homestead Act by both black and white families were in Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Colorado. While poor white families and newly free black families were moving in and expanding, Native Americans were moving out and contracting.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/long-lasting-legacy-great-migration-180960118/
Farming the prairie was rarely a profitable prospect. The exodusters who had the best success were the ones who moved to cities and towns, where they established new businesses, joined church communities, and found work for family members. https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/the-gilded-age/american-west/a/the-homestead-act-and-the-exodusters
Kansas was particularly appealing to newly freed black people, as the state became known for its abolition efforts by John Brown and others.
The exodusters were not a monolith; some of the black Americans moving west had almost no money and possessions, while some groups had resources for farming and establishing other types of businesses. Settlements like Nicodemus sought to attract people with resources and funds to develop the town, and discouraged the influx of poor migrants.
http://npshistory.com/publications/nico/promised-land-solomon.pdf
In places like Topeka, people without many physical assets soon found themselves with the valuable resource of a new network — a burgeoning black community. By 1907, Topeka had 71 churches, 29 of which were home to black congregations.
The Lytle Family
The Lytle Family One Exoduster, John Lytle, born into slavery but freed by the 13th amendment, was a barber and later a salesman in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Though he and his family were free, they had limited opportunities for land, worship, and education in Tennessee. Reconstruction had failed to deliver the equality it promised, and in fact, local and national racist policymaking, as well as outright mob violence — escalated in the 1870s, especially in Tennessee.
In 1882, John and Mary Ann Lytle heard the call of the Exodusters, and uprooted their family of five from Tennessee and moved to Kansas. In Topeka, John established a barbershop at 207 S. Kansas Avenue. He went on to serve on the city’s police force, and was politically active in the state’s Populist Party.
The Lytles’ children were successful, too.
Crediting her experience working for newspapers and for the Legislature in Topeka, the Lytles’ daughter, Lutie Lytle, was the first black woman in the U.S. to become a law professor.
Their son Charles also went into barbering and law enforcement like his father, but became better known as the owner of Lytle’s Drug Store at 112 SE 4th Street. (https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-102-issue-5/i-shall-talk-to-my-own-people-the-intersectional-life-and-times-of-lutie-a-lytle)
By 1956, the Lytle family had grown to almost 20 members in Topeka, even with Lutie and her family settling elsewhere. Lytle’s Barber Shop was even listed in the Green Book entry for Topeka (https://www.cjonline.com/news/20190306/history-guy-green-books-suggest-topeka-was-more-welcoming-to-african-americans-than-other-kansas-cities) at that time. Though John had passed away in 1933, by all measures he had established a successful and comfortable home for his family in Topeka.
In 1958, Lytle’s Drug Store, as well as Velvet Freeze restaurant, La Michoacana Tortilleria, Star Lounge, the Apex Theater, and dozens of other businesses and residences were closed and vacated in order to clear the land for urban renewal.
The demolition crews came and went, leaving bare earth in their path.
Ten years later, in 1966, not a single Lytle remained in Topeka.
The departure of the Lytle family is a tiny example of the unfathomable loss caused by urban renewal.
Compromise of 1877 "Removed protections for African-Americans in the South..." ....????
Mexican migration in late 1800s
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781444351071.wbeghm365
Legislative War of 1912
Populist uprising
"The Negro and Populism: A Kansas Case Study" William H. Chafe The Journal of Southern History https://www.jstor.org/stable/2205135?seq=1
Many free black people in Kansas established newspapers. Many of these news sources became galvanizing political forces, and helped build black support for the Populism movement in Kansas, which seemed to promise the chance to become established community members, deserving of the protection of the law and welcome to the opportunity of commerce. White populists, however, railed against the wealthy and well-bred upper classes.
"...by 1880 one out of every six persons in greater Topeka and one out of every five persons in greater Kansas City was a Negro." ~15,000 in 1880, 31,000 in 1890 total Topeka population ~2,500 black people in Topeka in 1880.
Black "equality," voting rights, and political activity in Topeka and Kansas at the turn of the century
Topeka in its [black & immigrant] heyday National Negro Business League and Booker T. Washington
Intersectionality
Races, immigration, sexuality, income
Reconstruction amendments
13th amendment - abolished slavery (except for prison) (more on that later) 14th amendment - citizenship and equal protection 15th amendment - men of all races (and potentially owners of property) could vote
The Great Migration was the second, larger wave of black migration from southern states to northern and western states.
Harlem Renaissance, etc
Langston Hughes in Topeka, Lawrence, and then Harlem Aaron Douglas others
https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/langston-hughes/15506
Redlining
This was the time of redlining, when federal officials from the Home Owners' Loan Corporation graded some Topeka neighborhoods as "Hazardous" or "Declining," and discouraged banks from providing loans for any home purchases in those areas. Many of the neighborhoods degraded by the HOLC ratings were home to black families, Latino families, other immigrants, and poor white families. What happened next shouldn't surprise anyone. Investment in those neighborhoods has stalled for 80 years. Today, these neighborhoods still suffer from depressed home values and aging infrastructure.
All of North Topeka, most of central Topeka, and almost all of East Topeka were in the Hazardous or Declining categories in 1940. Only a few neighborhoods in Topeka were graded either "Still Desirable" or "Best." The auditors of the HOLC shaped the future of Topeka and helped propel the population outward from downtown.
https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=5/39.1/-94.58
A terrible followup to the redlining declarations was the city's comprehensive plan, started in 1940 but completed after World War II. In 1945, Bartholomew and Associates published their Comprehensive Plan for the City of Topeka and Shawnee County, Kansas. While the 200-page plan was probably lauded as progressive in its day, today it reads as overtly racist.
For example, the Bartholomew plan propose a "Minimum Housing Standards Ordinance," which ends with several suggested avenues of correction and enforcement of properties not meeting the proposed standards. In reality, these were avenues to push the poor, immigrants, and BIPOC into the criminal-legal system.
Today's analog to this proposal, the City Code Compliance department, is perhaps the most hated office of the City of Topeka, and there have been occasions in Topeka where code compliance officers have been shot at. Sacajawea and the Mandans might have been wise to consider Lewis and Clark to be code compliance officers. They arrived unannounced and unwelcome on foreign land, claiming to own it, then proceeded to judge the common standard of living to be insufficient (read: incongruent with western tastes), and threatened the lives and livelihoods of the people therein.
Everyone deserves to live in a safe and healthy home. But if someone does not currently live in a safe home, do they need a letter of enforcement from the government telling them of their faults? Or do they need help?
Also in the Bartholomew plan, the consultants suggest several solutions for improving housing availability in Topeka. One proposal is to bar the poor from owning property and requiring them to rent. Is that not a regurgitation of slavery? To suggest that some people are not good enough to own anything, and that they should be prevented from doing so?
Comprehensive Plan https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015020942101
The neighborhoods declared "hazardous" and "declining" are still struggling today because of decisions made in the 1930s. In the City of Topeka's Neighborhood Health Map from 2017, all of North Topeka is either "Intensive Care" or "At Risk"; all of downtown is "At Risk"; and central-east Topeka is also "At Risk." These maps are compiled from current data points of poverty, Part I Crimes per 100 persons, single family homeownership, and boarded houses.
If Topeka, or any North American city, had followed a traditional development pattern throughout the 20th century, we may have seen a slow change in these neighborhoods - even a transition for some of these families out of poverty and into wealth and opportunity. But the baby boom after World War II completely changed the country's white leaders' goals for urban development.
Flu epidemic
World War I
Black family wealth and its barriers between WWI and WWII
After the civil war and emancipation, black Americans started the slow climb toward family wealth. By moving to safer states and cities, they could start new ventures - farms, families, churches, and businesses. The critical element for independence would be land. This would allow freed people to use their own labor to build their own wealth.
But it wasn't easy.
Northerners may have seen the Civil War as the chance to finally make the South reckon with its problem of people as property. Lincoln issued the Emanicipation Proclamation as a strategic move, hoping to deplete the south of its primary labor force. That document exempts the four states that had not seceded but still allowed for people to be owned as slaves - Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware - so it wasn't truly a national emancipation. Not until the end of the war and the ratification of the 13th Amendment was slavery truly over as a private enterprise.
In another strategic move at the end of the war, northern general William Sherman issued Field Order 15, commandeering 400,000 acres of coastal land from the southern states, from Charleston, South Carolina to St. John's River in Florida, to be given to free black Americans. This move, later known as "40 acres and a mule," had been organized by a group of 20 black ministers from the Savannah, Georgia area, and was seen by the war effort as another way to splinter southern power. Word of the program spread nationally, and by June of 1865, as many as 40,000 Black Americans had moved to the area and claimed their 40-acre plots.
It was a perfect opportunity: the war was over, slavery was over, and the Union had righted the wrongs of generations of southern slavery. Free people were starting their new lives on their own land, and could work their way into prosperity.
But it was a short-lived dream. President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor (and a sympathizer with the South), overturned the order in the fall of 1865, and reverted the land back to its original owners.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/the-truth-behind-40-acres-and-a-mule/ https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/shermans-field-order-no-15
Blockbusting in Baltimore and elsewhere
Land is one of the most important fixed assets Americans use to build security and accumulate wealth, but black families have been locked out of many opportunities to own. When those opportunities have arisen, white Americans have not reacted from their freedom-loving hearts. They have been scared witless. This fear led to policies like redlining and racial covenants on deeds, preventing black or immigrant families from buying this or that house. But it had unintended consequences. As Antero Pietila recounts in "Not in my Neighborhood," this fear was a capital opportunity for enterprising real estate salespeople. If a shrewd businessman could buy a house in a declining white neighborhood and sell it to a black family, the remaining white families would start to sell, too. The salespeople could buy those other houses for cheap, and sell them at above-market rates to black families. Because black families were prohibited from securing loans for homes, they were often paying cash. Buying a house in a neighborhood like that might have been a big opportunity for a black family to be closer to resources within the city, or to be able to claim a certain social status by citing their street or neighborhood. White families fled, black families moved in, real estate sharks got rich, and cities couldn't keep up with the change. This practice later became known as blockbusting.
1945
WWII
1954
Brown v. Board
1950s-1960s
Baby Boom Suburbs Lake Sherwood White Lakes Mall
Nation of Islam and Malcolm X from 500 - 50,000 members
1970s-1980s
Department stores from downtown, to malls, to bankruptcy ex: Toys R Us Pier 1 Imports
Interstate Highways.
Urban Renewal in Topeka
In the 1950s and 1960s, more than 3,000 Topekans were forced to leave their homes and businesses in The Bottoms district in downtown to make way for new real estate development and the construction of Interstate 70, all as part of the Keyway Urban Renewal Project. (https://crcnet.org/crc-history/)
The country was at the peak of the Baby Boom, when all roads seemed to lead to prosperity. Topeka’s population was growing rapidly, construction was constant, and no one could predict an end to the wave of economic success brought by the post-war population explosion.
The Housing Act of 1954 opened up a huge federal grant program for cities to rebuild their downtowns. Two years later, President Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. Millions of dollars in economic development money were made available to every city with a plan. So, Topeka made a plan.
Topeka’s Urban Renewal Agency conceived and oversaw the “Keyway” project, which would eradicate so-called slums in the downtown area and clear lots for new retail and light-industrial development. Instead, the program decimated a neighborhood called The Bottoms — more than 20 blocks of residences and businesses, and decades of Topeka’s history. (Urban Renewal file, Topeka Room, Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library; press clippings)
East 4th Street in the Bottoms was the heart of a thriving Black Business District, with more than 50 different businesses: doctors, lawyers, dentists, bars, restaurants, cafes, community cornerstones like Lytle’s Drug Store, as well as shops, nightclubs, and the beloved Apex Theater.
The Bottoms district also hosted a robust and connected Latino community, with strong ties to Topeka’s Oakland neighborhood and Our Lady of Guadelupe Parish.
This area’s history is inextricably linked with Topeka’s history. Many of Topeka’s Latin-American immigrants came to Topeka to work for the railroad; and African-Americans came to Topeka looking for a new start.
Cyrus Holliday founded Topeka, brought the railroad, and with it, economic development and jobs. But it was the influx of free Black Americans and immigrants who truly put Topeka on the map. After the end of the Civil War, thousands of free Black families moved from the eastern U.S. to Kansas to start new lives, later known as Exodusters.
In the 1880s, about 20% of the Topeka population was comprised of Black Americans, or about 2,500 of its 15,000 total population. (Today that proportion is less than 10%)
By 1906 in Topeka, 28 of the city’s 71 churches were Black congregations. Black families in Topeka settled in Tennessee Town (many Exodusters were from Tennessee), in Mudtown just south of the downtown area, in Redmonsville in North Topeka, and also in The Bottoms. In 1907, Topeka hosted the 8th annual meeting of the National Negro Business League, Booker T. Washington’s organization built to support black business and entrepreneurship across the country. (National Negro Business League, 1906 City Directory, Topeka, KS (Topeka Room, TSCPL))
Black families built their own networks in Topeka, including newspapers and other publications and periodicals, social groups, non-profits, and political parties.
If you were lucky enough to own property in the Keyway area, the program would buy your property as compensation for your loss. Some residents found new homes in the Oakland and Highland Park neighborhoods. But if you were renting — many black families and immigrant families were prohibited from securing loans or buying property due to redlining — the Urban Renewal Agency offered no compensation or relocation assistance.
Today in 2020, The Bottoms district is more vacant and less diverse than it ever was, though there are still a few streets full of 100-year old homes. A two-story, two-bedroom house in the area sold in 2016 for $5,000. (Shawnee County Appraiser, Property Record for 221 SW Harrison St.)
Urban Renewal ultimately banished poor people from downtown, built highways for the affluent to avoid the area entirely, and deeply depressed the housing prices in the central business district.
In the 1960s, classic buildings from the late 1800s were bulldozed in the Bottoms to build new development. One such project along southeast 4th Street was a Montgomery-Ward department store and massive surface parking lot. In spite of the stated intentions of urban renewal — to keep downtown relevant to suburban residents — the department store left the downtown area after two decades, to move into the mall on the edge of the city. After an extended period of vacancy, the old Montgomery Ward building was eventually repurposed into the Law Enforcement Center. Yes, the police station sits in the middle of the former Black Business District. And the city can no longer collect property tax from that parcel.
The written intentions of urban renewal may have been noble. But its effects caused long lasting economic and social devastation. The program failed categorically to enrich cities, but had a spectacular record of reinforcing stereotypes, forcing black people and immigrants out of opportunity, and breaking up families and social networks.
Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" started in 1964 because the problem of "slums" in cities hadn't been real to many white decision-makers in the prior decades. Immigrant families and black families knew the treachery of slumlords, disinvested neighborhoods, and discrimination on all fronts - but until the housing studies of the 1940s and 1950s were conducted (in order to make government plans for urban renewal projects), these problems were rarely documented or catalogued. Finally, in the era of the Civil Rights Act, when black people were put on "equal" footing with white people, the problem of poverty (which affects all races, but some disproportionately) could be called a scourge, and addressed.
Later in the decade, The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other leaders in the Souther Christian Leadership Conference recognized the class solidarity that poor black people had with poor white people, and others, and organized the Poor People's Campaign and the Poor People's March on Washington. Now that poverty had been revealed to be a national problem, and not just a personal failure, the movement gained momentum. Activists could hold leaders accountable - and in some cases, at least, affect positive change for communities, with both disenfranchised people and the upper classes of people "feeling good" about these changes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_People%27s_Campaign#cite_note-6 " McKnight, Last Crusade (1998), pp. 13–14: "King's emergent radicalism was fostered by his mounting despair over the callous and reactionary political climate in Washington. The White House's earlier boastful assurances of 'guns and butter' was proving a cruel hoax. Johnson's 1966 civil rights bill containing the strong open housing title died in the Senate, largely because the White House, distracted by the Vietnam War, never bothered to lobby the leaders of the political opposition in the upper house. Before the year ended the Congress slashed the budget of the Office of Economic Opportunity, reducing the War on Poverty funds by half a billion dollars ...""
In the years after urban renewal remixed city centers, banished black Americans from downtowns, and bulldozed factories to build shiny new retail - mega-corporations in the U.S. started to realize the profit potential in moving their manufacturing overseas, in countries where labor was less organized, and significantly cheaper. Before World War II, corporations took pride in American manufacturing. The 1950s were the peak of union membership in the country. In 1955, one in five Kansans belonged to a Union; nationally, the average was even higher. But as Unions grew in membership and strength, business owners sought other means to profits.
Soon, CEOs and shareholders began to retreat from the power of unions. If American labor came at a high price, these companies would find workers elsewhere. In the 1970s, Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric, argued that corporations owe their first allegiance to stockholders -- not employees. And so, the barons of industry fell back on the American tradition of labor exploitation. Once it was slavery; now it's offshoring. Recently, when the average American manufacturing worker was making $14 an hour, the average manufacturing worker in China was making about 57 cents per hour.
But that's talking about free people. The 13th amendment to the U.S. constitution prohibits slavery except as punishment for a crime. Slavery is still legal in the United States, and it is codified in the prison system. During wildfires along the west coast in 2020, inmates from California prisons were "allowed" to risk their lives fighting fires and clearing brush for the distinct privilege of earning about $1 an hour.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/09/02/the-former-prisoners-fighting-california-s-wildfires
https://www.macrotrends.net/1319/dow-jones-100-year-historical-chart
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2005/08/art3full.pdf
https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/01/ford-doubles-minimum-wage/
Value per acre failures in Topeka and elsewhere
Downtown is our best prospect for economic growth
We have worsened our city’s economic outlook by spreading out our population into suburbs easily-accessed by city highways. This ever-expanding outline has created massive maintenance liabilities for our city budget without expanding our tax base. Topeka’s population has been the same for 50 years, but our square mileage has steadily increased in that same time. That’s more miles of streets, sewers, and water lines for the city to maintain, on functionally the same property tax revenue from decades ago. At the same time, we wrecked a high-performing district in downtown and gave up taxable, private land to non-taxable uses like infrastructure and government buildings.
Urban Renewal became “Urban Removal,” sending thousands of residents out of the downtown district, and building a highway express route to the suburbs. Commercial properties have proliferated on the fringes of Topeka. We grew our city on the edges, rather from the middle, and we are financially suffering as a result.
If you’re curious to learn more about massive maintenance liabilities, the example of Lafayette, Louisiana may sound familiar. (https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason-your-city-has-no-money) Lafayette is a city of 125,000 (about the same as Topeka) that would have to raise taxes by $3,300 per household today just to maintain the roads and drainage systems they have already built. We’re in the same situation. Topeka has a $60 million liability on water lines alone. (https://www.cjonline.com/news/20200307/city-seeks-to-replace-aging-pipes-without-soaking-taxpayers)
Growth Ponzi scheme
Census Year | Topeka Population 1860 759 1870 5,790 1880 15,452 1890 31,007 1900 33,608 1910 43,684 1920 50,022 1930 64,120 1940 67,833 1950 78,701 1960 119,484 1970 125,011 1980 115,266 1990 119,883 2000 122,377 2010 127,473 2019 (est.) 125,310
Instead of urban renewal, a better bet in the 1950s would have been to help residents of The Bottoms improve their properties, block by block. After all, poor neighborhoods make the best investments. (https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/10/poor-neighborhoods-make-the-best-investment) The biggest gain in value for Topeka would have been to build and improve incrementally within The Bottoms district. Downtown creates some of the best property tax revenue in the city, with many parcels bringing in the highest value per acre compared to any other part of Topeka. (https://biketopeka.com/2020/05/20/value-per-acre-what-did-we-learn/) Sadly, investing in The Bottoms neighborhood is not an option any more, but maybe we can still make good on the destruction that urban renewal caused.
As we look at KDOT’s plan to rebuild and expand the Polk-Quincy Viaduct section of Interstate 70, it’s time to pause and consider what happened when this highway was built. The highway project and the Keyway Urban Renewal Project pulled the plug on downtown Topeka and drained it of significant, valuable population and commerce. Now, we are desperate to add residents and businesses to the area, but it’s a slow project. Maybe there’s a better way.
Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it
The real problem is right in front of us, and it’s not the noisy, polluting highway. That’s just a nuisance. The real problems are the silent struggles of our neighbors and residents who live within reach of the most valuable real estate district in all of Shawnee County, but don’t have enough food to eat, don’t have stable employment, and don’t have access to the power needed to make change in the future of their city — all because we cut apart communities of color in the 1950s.
These wounds will never be fully healed; we will never have the community like we might have had. But the pain and damage can be acknowledged, and we can work to give today’s generations a better start. We need to do that with real, physical acknowledgement — with money and land for economic development.
Because The Bottoms was the most affordable place to live in Topeka, many families had nowhere to go when urban renewal started. The Topeka Housing Authority was founded, and the Pine Ridge housing project was built. In its first year, it had 300 applications for just 100 apartments. We took a housing challenge from one part of the city and moved it to another area.
In 2016, black families nationally had on average 1/10th the wealth of white families. That is not to say that white families are necessarily wealthy — just that black families have significantly more barriers to education, employment, healthcare, and homeownership. Black families have been left behind, because they were legally prohibited from securing loans to buy homes in the 1940s and 1950s. At the same time, white families were investing in property and land, most of which appreciated significantly in the last five decades. Furthermore, in Topeka, the unemployment rate for black men in 2018 was 12.9% and only 5% for white men. (https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining-the-black-white-wealth-gap/) and (https://www.khi.org/assets/uploads/news/14815/ib1807_socio_final.pdf)
Despite a promising start as a free state, and a sort of ‘utopia’ for black families fleeing continued harassment after the Civil War, Kansas has not delivered on the promise of equality that our Constitution guarantees. From the late 1800s to the 1950s — a span of about 70 years — black families built community, built businesses, and built their families in Topeka. But the Keyway Urban Renewal Project, in about four years, shattered that dream for thousands of people. The racist policymaking of redlining, urban renewal, and urban highways exacerbated inequalities in Topeka, and ensured that our downtown would be less diverse in the future than it was at the turn of the 20th century.
Right now, we have the chance to do something different than KDOT’s proposed plan for rebuilding the Polk-Quincy Viaduct. We don’t have to add lanes (and add traffic) and bulldoze more buildings to keep our city on track for progress. We can tear down the highway and route traffic on boulevards instead. Streets like 10th Street, 8th Street, 6th Street, and Topeka Boulevard are all designed to carry plenty of traffic. If you’re just passing through, Google Maps reports that I-470 is only a minute different from using I-70. We can fill in the hole left by the below-grade highway downtown, and resurrect land where it used to be. We can offer that land, and capital, to former residents of the area, and any current resident of Topeka Housing Authority who writes a business plan.
One city’s path to rebuilding downtown
Topeka is far from the first city to consider closing part of an interstate. Take a look at the Inner Loop East project in Rochester, NY. (https://rbj.net/2019/09/18/inner-loop-projects-beginning-to-take-shape/)
Rochester closed a section of below-grade highway, filled in the hole, and developed new construction on top of that land.
Instead of rebuilding the highway, they closed it and filled it in with dirt, and the Mayor led the charge to encourage new development. The city saved millions of dollars in maintenance. And now, more than $200 million has been spent in private investment for housing and retail. In the near future, Rochester will be earning new property tax on land that has been un-taxable for decades.
The rebuild of the Polk-Quincy Viaduct is expected to cost more than $300 million to complete, mostly federal and state funding, with $20 million coming from Topeka (all debt). But if we close the highway, how much will we save? How much will we gain? It makes sense that Topeka should invest in land, especially its most valuable downtown land. After all, they’re not making any more of it.
Kansas was once a land of opportunity for people of color. Today, our teachers still proudly educate students about the state's role in the Brown v. Board of Education decision. While that court case helped to make life more equal for black people in the U.S., urban renewal, which happened just after the Brown decision, made life worse.
First, we built the suburbs. Then, we built highways leading to those suburbs. Then, we built malls in the suburbs, and drained downtown of retail. Then, we built roads from suburb to suburb, and put strip-malls in between them. Then we had to build schools and fire stations and parks in the suburbs. Pretty soon, we were spending just as much of the city's taxpayer money on sprawl as we were on the original town.
Suburban development is an inefficient method for a city to disperse its tax dollars. With wider roads, bigger land parcels, and neighborhoods far away from existing infrastructure - it costs more and more for a city to maintain these areas.
Old neighborhoods near downtown tend to be more compact and more efficient for a city to fund. The infrastructure is smaller. The streets are narrower and require less paving. The sidewalks already exist, so there aren't costly design phases to build new sidewalks.
Right now, Topeka is like many other cities in the U.S. - a doughnut. Much of the city's wealth, especially residential wealth, is concentrated in neighborhoods that ring around the fringe of the city. In the middle of the city - downtown and its immediate surrounding neighborhoods - is the hole. Disinvestment, displacement, and vacancy are the rule. Retail and office buildings constructed of brick and stone sit vacant while new developments are being built every season on the edge of town. Why should buildings, intended to last 150 years, sit vacant, while new buildings, built to last no more than 20, see full occupancy? In Topeka alone, we love to rebuild our fast-food restaurants. Typically we build a new one right next to the old one. You can see this pattern with Pizza Huts, Taco Bells, McDonald's restaurants, and more. The city's forebears put real investments into bank buildings, office buildings, and towers downtown - investing hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions - in sturdy buildings meant to last for generations. But we don't build this way any more. We build cheap and fast because our economy has become based on short-term growth -- not longevity.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/8/3/cobb-county-addicted-to-growth
"..the Suburban Experiment is not a problem we can solve, but a predicament with outcomes we can only manage." https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/4/16/where-did-the-money-go
Kansas City example from Strong Towns:
"Kansas City in 1946 had approximately 12 feet of street for each of its 434,000 residents. Then the city began a massive annexation binge, gobbling up suburban and rural land even as the population of the core city plummeted amid postwar decline and white flight. Core neighborhoods saw whole swaths of land demolished for new highways to serve suburban commuters.
By 2018, Kansas City had added an additional 58,000 net new residents while more than quintupling its physical area. For each of those new residents, on average, Kansas City built a jaw-dropping 148 feet of new streets: over 12 times the per-capita street obligation of its prewar pattern. In total, the city added 1,625 miles of streets and roads in the post-war era, a 169% expansion of its street network to accompany only a 13% increase in population.
These statistics illustrate how the Suburban Experiment was a pivot point in the history of North American cities, a moment at which we started doing something fundamentally different and unprecedented. It's an experiment we've never been able to afford—though only nowadays, as much of our 20th-century infrastructure begins to need repair or replacement, are the bills coming due in an obvious way. And Kansas City exemplifies that as well as anywhere." https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/7/26/the-road-to-insolvency-is-long
Local thoughts on Kansas City
Getting to Kansas City from Topeka takes about an hour by car. Crossing the greater Kansas City metro area from say, Olathe, KS to Liberty, MO, also takes about an hour by car. Kansas City is huge. With the exception of downtown and some prewar neighborhoods, it's a massive nest of suburbs and a snarl of highways, with very little practical infrastructure.
Personal story about Kansas City - include anecdotes about mother's upbringing? And a note about shopping malls
As a kid, making a trip to Kansas City usually meant going to Oak Park Mall in Overland Park.
Checking the map for the Oak Park Mall area today, the mall is surrounded by modern chain-based retail and restaurants. Three of the 30+ businesses surrounding the mall are local; the rest are national chains. The intersection of 95th & Quivira is on par with Kansas City-style development: it's huge. Built like a divided highway that would be better suited for crossing rural farmland, these streets have eight lanes crossing eight lanes. Sidewalks are present, but only used when absolutely necessary. I've been visiting Oak Park Mall for 20 years and have never had occasion to use the sidewalks in the area.
Suppose I wanted to leave the mall and go eat at Bo Ling's across the street. From JC Penney to the front door of Bo Ling's is about 600 feet in a straight line, or a few minutes' walk. But crossing 8 lanes of 45 mph traffic is a bad idea for a pedestrian. Using the built-in pedestrian infrastructure and crossing the street at the stoplight almost triples the walking journey. So, driving across the street is the best option. But this is not convenience. Our car-based built environment has spread things out, and made life more expensive and more difficult. Humans have a natural capacity for extremely efficient bipedal locomotion - walking - but in this case, the easiest and safest option for crossing a distance of 600 feet is getting inside a 3,000-pound metal machine, starting its engine capable of propelling that machine to speeds of 80 mph, crossing traffic where hundreds of other people inside metal machines are competing for space, and driving for two minutes to get to the restaurant. This option is neither simple nor elegant.
Power of local vs. chains
https://ilsr.org/key-studies-why-local-matters/
Climate Change
Is climate change the new poor people's campaign? Probably not. The poor people's campaign encompasses more than that. But it's certainly one big issue. But like every natural disaster and man-made challenge, it tends to affect the poor disproportionately. Take the novel coronavirus COVID-19, a climate-change related pandemic. In the U.S., the virus has disproportionately affected people of color and people experiencing poverty. ( https://now.tufts.edu/articles/why-people-color-are-suffering-more-covid-19 )
In Kansas, we don't often discuss climate change. But we do talk about droughts, floods, and storms, which all affect the state's biggest industry, agriculture.
Ice Cream anecdote
On the way to pick up some Dole Whip from the Pineapple Dream food truck parked at 29th & Urish in Topeka, a deer darted between my car and another car on Urish Road. It was a near miss. Developments in this area are more than 20 years old, but they are still on the fringe of the city, where the transition to rural is clear. Wildlife were here first, and we have encroached upon their territory, without much care to practical and safe management between the types of developments. The residential areas to the east of Urish between 21st and 29th don't have many street lights. Urish Road doesn't have sidewalks. To the west of Urish Road is former agricultural land, now a golf course, and some additional parcels being developed into parkland. To wildlife, it's not clear what's safe or what isn't. Clearly, it's not very obvious to human residents, either. Just look at the squirrel, skunk, raccoon, and opossum roadkill count on any street in the county.
Urban-Rural
About 99% of Kansas is farmland. We are a very rural state. We have a population of almost 3 million people, and we are not densely populated - we average about 35 people per square mile. We're in the top ten of rural states in the country. Despite our rural roots, more than two-thirds of Kansans live in cities and urban areas. Half of the state's urban population lives in Johnson County alone.
Kansas was once even more rural than it is today, but as rural opportunities fade away, interest in urban living increases.
And yet, urban living in Kansas doesn't mean living in high-rise apartments and shopping at corner stores. The tallest apartment building in Topeka has ten stories. Kansans, even urban Kansans, are used to having plenty of space to roam.
renters and owners https://www.nmhc.org/research-insight/quick-facts-figures/quick-facts-resident-demographics/renters-and-owners/ county populations http://kslegislature.org/li/b2019_20/committees/ctte_h_rural_revitalization_1/documents/testimony/20190117_01.pdf
Car ownership Almost every senior, adult, teen, and toddler could have a car in Kansas -- in this state, there are 9 cars for every ten residents.
But at one time, trains and transit ruled rural transport on the plains. Between 1870 and 1900, more than 20 different rail transit companies had been established in the Topeka area. Sending trains from Topeka to Kansas City, and Rossville to Eskridge, these private rail companies spanned an exponentially greater network than today's anemic transit services. Today, transit service covers only the city limits, with fewer lines and less frequency than service at the turn of the 20th century.
"Omnibus to Motor Bus" Bulletin of Shawnee County Historical Society, December 1969 - No. 46 car ownership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_vehicles_per_capita
To put car ownership in perspective - Kansas is somewhere in the middle. The way we've built our country, car ownership is almost a requirement for getting an education, getting a job, getting to health care, and visiting family and friends.
It's a complex issue. Our population - and our economy - blew up like a bomb after WWII. We were rich and had a massive population bubble. We built new neighborhoods, new roads, new cities, even - to house all the new people. And new schools, and new fire stations, and new shopping malls. But we didn't build sustainably. We didn't build incrementally. We started to build entire neighborhoods to a finished state - the whole 3-bedroom, 2-bath, 2-car house - was complete, and installed on a cul-de-sac. We wouldn't need sidewalks, because we would always have cars, now that we were wealthy. Plus, the neighborhood was built way outside of town, so each family could have plenty of space for a yard of their own, but that means it's a pretty far drive to get back into town.
Decades later we realize that the suburbs are the hardest place to make it. Unless you arrive in the suburbs with means, you may never get ahead. The cost of living is high in the suburbs, because the plots are bigger. The cost of transportation is high, because the suburbs are disconnected from the resources in the city. The grocery stores are more expensive, because it costs more to get goods delivered further away.
Car-based families, car-less seniors
And now, in 2020, wages have been depressed for nearly sixty years -- families are struggling to pay for rent, utilities, food, and transportation. Basic travel costs can now account for 20-40% of a family's budget.
The most exciting day in a teenager's life is getting the keys to their first car. No matter how old or rusty the car, it's a great day - it's an emancipation from geographical boundaries imposed by parents.
Parents are equally excited to hand over the keys. With school a few miles from home and soccer practice 10 miles in a different direction, it's a part-time job just to shuttle kids to their daily activities. As soon as kids can drive themselves, parents start to relax and make their empty-nest plans.
Americans value solo living above all else. White families in the U.S. rarely live with multiple generations in the home -- usually just parents and children. Rarely grandparents -- they're off in the nursing home, another few miles' drive away, most likely in a suburb without transit access.
While many of a person's needs can be met at a retirement home, transportation is still a challenge. Because our cities have been designed around car travel by independent drivers, we have eroded the support for good sidewalks, connected communities, and easy-to-use transit. As a result, our seniors are left behind. When elderly people can no longer drive, they mostly stay home. (need several citations here)
For seniors, transportation is often the biggest cost after housing - outpacing even health care. https://www.forbes.com/sites/josephcoughlin/2019/01/30/the-big-surprising-cost-in-retirement-no-one-plans-for-but-should/?sh=93d2b0d20f32
Bringing it back to Urban-Rural
Shawnee County's 2038 Comprehensive Plan suggests that the county's aging population will see the greatest growth in the unincorporated areas of the county, outside the city limits. Conversely, the City of Topeka's Land Use and Growth Management Plan 2040 hopes to capture some of this population growth within the city (which has not seen significant growth since 1970) by encouraging development within areas that already have established city infrastructure like water, sewer, and streets.
While the tone of each plan is markedly different, both have some positive overlap. The County plan proposes to "Ensure fiscally responsible administration of infrastructure investments" and to "Encourage industrial development to the most suitable locations."
While County residents have different interests from City residents, as they should, the two governing bodies have one big goal in common: bring in more money than they spend. http://www.snco.us/planning/document/snco_comp_plan_final_DRAFT_(FINAL%2010.15.18).pdf
- Habitat for Humanity builds several houses each year in Topeka, and gives people a path to home ownership - rebuilding the "missing teeth" in neighborhoods, and building community connections among families and neighbors.
- Cornerstone of Topeka builds and manages affordable housing throughout the city, working to combat homelessness and provide housing with dignity.
- The City of Topeka passed a Land Use & Growth Management Plan which cites population leakage, low density sprawl, unbalanced investment, and unplanned growth as the major problems with development and planning in the Topeka area. The plan proposes changes to make development in Topeka more fiscally sustainable and cost-effective with "all 5 city services." This is a great guiding document for the future of the city. https://www.topeka.org/planning/land-use-growth-management-plan-2040/
Compare stats to 1940s housing study