Kansas City is currently imagining what the future of U.S. Highway 71 — particularly the five-mile stretch that confoundingly changes from a traditional highway to a parkway-highway hybrid through southeast neighborhoods — will look like.
Now nine months into a community engagement period, the city has published three potential alternatives for the highway whose construction led to the destruction of 2,000 homes and upended the lives of 25,000 people in majority Black neighborhoods.
Under consideration is turning Highway 71 into a traditional freeway (like Interstate 35 on the Westside), transforming it into a parkway (like Ward Parkway) or returning it to its original street grid (what the area looked like before the highway was built).
City staff presented those three alternative choices at the last community summit meeting for the Reconnecting the Eastside project. The window for residents to provide feedback on each solution closed at the end of October.
Selina Zapata Bur, a planning manager in the city’s public works department, said the city is now refining those options for Highway 71 based on community feedback and additional analysis.
“We're currently synthesizing and going through all the input that we got,” she said. “We got a lot, which is great. We want this to be a community-driven process.”
Kansas City resident Darlene Peterson Guess, who lives near Highway 71, agrees. She said she hopes the city considers the people who live around it.
“I think the neighborhood should be the priority, not just the people who want a fast access from out south to downtown,” Guess said.
The city’s vision to reconnect the neighborhoods split up by Highway 71 focuses specifically on the stretch of highway from Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard south to 85th Street, and Paseo Boulevard east to Swope Parkway.
Guess lives in the Town Fork Creek area, one of the neighborhoods near Highway 71 that would be impacted by any changes to it. Guess remembers how construction of the highway severed close ties with friends when she was younger. Now, she’s skeptical that changes will be in the best interests of the residents most impacted by the highway.
“Don't make us a promise,” she said.
Guess said she worries about the city prioritizing the needs of people who want to speed down Highway 71, past neighborhoods like Town Fork Creek.
“The people who live there, within this stretch of 85th to Martin Luther King, who are, what I call, the ‘forgotten people’ already,” Guess said. “And we're going to be even more forgotten when you put in these highways above us or take out our stoplights so people can just fly right through.”
Pros and cons of each
Regardless of which option the city chooses, each poses major changes for Highway 71, also called Bruce R. Watkins Drive.
The city received a federal grant under the Joe Biden administration to identify how to make the highway safer. The corridor from Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to 85th Street is prone to car crashes and is particularly dangerous for pedestrians who have to cross the six-lane highway.
In the freeway option, the city would remove the stoplights that turn a portion of Highway 71 into a “parkway” section, which also comes with bridges, landscaping and a lower speed limit.
If Bruce R. Watkins Drive was turned into a freeway, Guess said she would like to have it built below grade level, similar to the downtown loop. Dallas city leaders, in a similar project revisiting the harms caused by highways, decided to replace an overpass with an underground highway.
“Then you would have the opportunity to develop the green space in between the highway north and southbound, and people would feel safer to drive over and maybe have access to that green space,” Guess said.
Under the parkway option, the city would add more stoplights, turning the highway stretch into Ward Parkway. (Ironically enough, Kansas City resident Dorothy Frazier, who witnessed the highway’s construction from her front door in the late 1980s, was told it would look like Ward Parkway.)
“In this case, the focus really is on traffic calming and slowing the traffic down,” Zapata Bur said, adding that a parkway could support a higher volume of cars than a traditional street.
The third option would have the city tearing out the highway completely, and returning the area to the streetscape that existed before Highway 71 was built. Tom Meyer, the neighborhood plan and design coordinator at the Center for Neighborhoods with the University of Missouri-Kansas City, had some reservations about that option.
Meyer said tearing out the highway could open opportunities for developing the land and adding more housing — if the city has a plan for that.
“What is the potential for actually redeveloping that space,” Meyer said, “if they're just creating a bunch of vacant lots in a corridor that's been seeing disinvestment for so long without a really intense strategy to reinvest in that area?”
Meyer said neighborhoods around the highway already struggle with vacant lots.
“So if you're adding to that problem by creating dozens and dozens and dozens of new properties, if there's no incentive to develop on those properties, it could just become a ghost land of sorts,” he said.
‘Reconnect us to what?’
As the city continues this first phase in the Highway 71 project, there are several roadblocks that stand between identifying how to transform the highway and actually doing it.
One such obstacle is lifting the 1985 consent decree that resulted in the current design of Highway 71, with stoplights and greenspace. The consent decree was the result of a yearslong lawsuit arguing the project would harm predominantly Black neighborhoods and violate residents’ civil rights.
“We can make smaller changes, but anything bigger, like changing things to a parkway or changing it to a freeway, changing the design of it would mean that we would have to lift the consent decree,” Zapata Bur at City Hall said. “And in order to do that, we need that community engagement.”
Zapata Bur said the project’s current phase will end next spring. The next phase will involve the city working with the Missouri Department of Transportation to lift the consent decree.
Jacob Wagner, associate professor of urban planning and design at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and co-founder of the Center for Neighborhoods, said the city needs to engage more with the neighborhoods that will be affected by any changes to the highway.
“The problem is: Repair it for whom and for whose interest?” Wagner said.
Another looming question is cost, as the $5 million grant is only to study how to make Highway 71 safer. Wagner said it’s unclear if the Trump administration would support a major infrastructure project focused on equity and safety for marginalized communities. The current administration has already pulled funding from other roadway safety projects.
“There's multiple ways to solve for the challenges that could present a way better future,” Wagner added. “Infrastructure decisions are huge, right? These are 50- or 100-year decisions.”
Guess, the resident living near the highway, said just focusing on fixing the highway isn’t enough. She said the city should also consider how it will invest in historically disinvested areas around it, like the Prospect Avenue corridor, which a city council member once said was “the economic backbone of the African American community.”
“They're saying they want to reconnect us to the east side, but to the east side of what?” Guess said. “There is nothing on Prospect for us to reconnect to … because Prospect is a deserted island.”
