Today Steve Penn writes a wonderfully (willfully?) naive column about two suburban transplants doing their best to spruce up the Hyde Park area . . . Obviously, these folks deserve to be commended but they also deserve the truth: A renewal movement in Hyde Park starts ever 7 and 1/2 years and even appears to make progress. Then, like clockwork, a young (white) professional is senselessly killed by one of the people of color in the area. Everyone panics. People move out. Property values plummet and the whole cycle starts over again. It's nice to see people with high hopes but everyone deserves to know the facts about previous gentrification development improvement efforts and the ultimate result . . . Building a better mousetrap in the urban core is kinda tricky and this column doesn't do a good job of explaining the back story of the neighborhood that everyone who has lived in Kansas City for more than a decade understands.
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Hyde Park is too close to Troost, and as long as our inept police department won't enforce the law or respond to 911 calls for that matter, it will never get any better.
ReplyDeleteSomebody forgot to tell the tranny hooker that I passed by at 43rd and Harrison at 1:30am last Saturday morning that the neighborhood is nice now.
ReplyDeleteThat is awful close to Trooft.
ReplyDeleteHyde Park is hopeless.
ReplyDeleteLarge chunks of the Waldo area are close to Troost and so is the Plaza but they tend to thrive. Why?
ReplyDeleteHyde Park is fine. The rest of you pussies think that any neighborhood that has more than three black people on the street at once classifies as Watts.
ReplyDeleteI wanted to buy some real estate a few years ago in Hyde Park. There was a lovely 3 story house that I was set to purchase and had escrow in the works. My agent advised that I wait.
ReplyDeleteSomeone else bought the house from underneath me. Because of your post, I looked up the value of the home recently. It has been on the market all summer and is listed at more than 50 thousand dollars than what I was going to pay.
I don't know if he'll get an offer and he has been waiting for awhile but it proves your theory about property values wrong Tony.
I personally know the Uryasz family and they are definitely an asset to the community. Hopefully more people will follow their lead and DO SOMETHING instead of waiting for the government to do it for them.
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