Obama proclaims the end of sprawl; Johnson County agrees

It’s the Kansas City metro’s biggest problem — the one no one talks about.

But on Monday, the president said it was over.

Earlier this week, Kevin Klinkenberg, one of Kansas City’s cool and forward-thinking architects, sent around a link to the CSPAN video of President Barack Obama ‘s town hall meeting in Ft. Myers, Florida (unemployment rate 10 percent). At the end of the hour-long speech, Obama took some questions from the audience. The second-to-last question was from a city councilwoman who asked about the role of public transportation in fixing the economy.

The president gave a long answer — the kind of detailed, rambling-but-with-a-point answer that’s such a welcome change. It wound around to highways, high-speed rail and thinking differently about the way we plan our cities.

“The days where we’re just building sprawl forever, those days are over,” he said. “I think that Republicans, Democrats, everybody recognizes that that’s not a smart way to design communities.”

Hearing the president declare the end of sprawl was exciting for people who are paying attention to the issue.

“Kansas City is as spread out as any city in the world,” Klinkenberg notes. “We’ve poured all of our collective and individual wealth into horizontal infrastructure, and it is literally bankrupting us.” When we’re so spread out, with so little mass transit, we’re dependent on cars for all economic activity. “So if you lose your job, or if gas prices go up, you are hit especially hard since we essentially have no real functioning system for getting around other than driving. That’s a tremendous waste of human capital.”

Unfortunately, Klinkenberg says, “we are still stuck with this mammoth amount of infrastructure that we cannot afford, and still not enough popular suppport to do something different.”

I wondered what people out in sprawl country would say about all of this, so I called up the guy who’s in charge of the planning department in unincorporated Johnson County.