Nationwide, we’ve built cities we can’t afford. Kansas City is among them, able to budget just 10 percent of recommended street maintenance in 2019 and hitting a similar financial wall on sewers and water lines.

Dennis Strait, managing principal of the Kansas City studio of Gould Evans, an architecture and planning firm, lays out the problems and solutions in the first of two Making a Great City installments in March.

Kansas City is nearly four times as large as it was in 1950 and, without corresponding growth in population, each resident is responsible for maintaining four times as much infrastructure. The answer, Strait says, is more strategic development and a restructured tax system that motivates the private sector to build in ways that increase the city’s fiscal health and financial resilience.

Co-presented by Gould Evans, the Hall Family Foundation, the Urban Land Institute of Kansas City, First Missouri Bank, the Mid-America Regional Council, and Newmark Grubb Zimmer.