Compasses of Justice: Notes on Mesopolitical Geography

Edgar made it down to the rally; I sadly had to work.

For our more broadly-dispersed readers, I must apologize: today is going to be another hyper-local piece, much like our previous one on gentrification.

Recently, there have been efforts in Kansas City to pass a Tenant’s Bill of Rights – it’s a project of the KC Tenants group, and based largely on research done by the Kansas City Eviction Project. Generally speaking, those of us here support these efforts – Missouri state law is heavily biased in favor of property owners, and largely against renters, as we and a number of people we know have learned through research.

If you’re in the Kansas City area, I highly recommend looking at the aforementioned websites – they’re very enlightening. Today, however, I want to turn my attention to another local issue that concerns me.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the geography of my hometown lately, and how people move through it — when I write, I think a lot about place, and Kansas City, in many ways, has always informed how I think of the issue of place. How we live in the places we live is important (and as a renter, KC Tenants largely speaks for people with the same interests as me,) but I want to think today about how we move through our environments, how they shape how we think and are shaped, in turn, by how we live. The most obvious thing to connect with here is the street.

This piece was prompted by the recent vote in my city to change the name of Martin Luther King Boulevard back to The Paseo Boulevard – a move that I think makes sense, but might be misinterpreted by people outside of the metropolitan area. The Paseo is a very old street, and has been the “main street” of the black community for many years – the move to change its name to MLK Boulevard was imposed from outside of the community with the consciousness that Kansas City is the largest city in the country without a Martin Luther King Boulevard.

You see, Kansas City is very much built along the lines of northern cities (I’ve heard some people refer to us as a Southern city, but no. A member of my mother’s family, Nathaniel Lyon, may have been an absolute shit general, but he fought like hell to keep Missouri in the Union, and that’s why it ends in an “ee” sound instead of an “ah” sound, despite the NYT trying to waffle on it.) By this, I mean it’s a very racially divided city. Our internal border is a North-South street called Troost Avenue: west of that line is generally white, east of that line is generally black (though gentrification is pushing that line further east, and there have long been some enclaves. I attended the predominantly white Rockhurst University that stretches from Troost to Paseo.)

JC Nichols: boring racist.

Personally, I’m of the opinion that any street we label Martin Luther King Boulevard should be an East-West street. This is for two reasons: first, it would bridge the two halves of the town, and second East-West Streets tend to be (but are not always) numbered, meaning that no charges of erasing history could be leveled (other good options include renaming JC Nichols Parkway, named for the local king of red lining. I support renaming this street, but it’s also fairly short and not terribly noteworthy.)

I’m getting off into the weeds here. Let me recenter. I want to talk about a problem of Political Mesogeography.

“Meso-” is one of my favorite prefixes – it falls in the borderland between micro- and macro-, and indicates things in the middle level. I feel like there’s a certain ignorance of the middle level of culture, a blindness to forces between the personal and the national (thanks to the writing of George Trow for putting me on to this.)

There are some hidden connections in the geography of this town: Tenskwatawa, the religious leader of Tecumseh’s confederacy, is buried in the Shawnee Mission area. This doesn’t really connect to my topic, but he’s a fascinating figure. (Portrait by Charles Bird King.)

For me, the Political Mesogeography I’m conscious of is the fact that, in Kansas City, the cardinal directions are themselves a social justice issue. “East” is a shibboleth for “Black”, and the local NPR affiliate, KCUR, will often use “people/listeners east of Troost” as a way of referring to the black community. Meanwhile, “Johnson County” – the Southwestern suburbs over State Line in Kansas – is generally used to refer to people who occupy the upper-middle class segment of the wage scale (it’s also where approximately all the money siphoned up by the payday loans industry ends up.) There are connotations attached to “North of the River” (predominantly white, new money,) there’s “Wyandotte” (which refers not to the Native American tribe but to the county in which KCK is located, which has a long history of being home to immigrant and migrant communities, first Irish, then Croatian, and now Latinx.)

But the East-West issue has always seemed to be one of the most important ones. For a long time I was a delivery driver – first I was a legal courier and then I delivered pizzas – so I’ve been all over, and I learned all the streets of this city a deeper, more granular level than most people, and I began to notice something.

First, I’m going to show you two maps: first, we have a map of property values in Kansas City (with some nuance purple, blue, green: wealthy; yellow, orange, red: poor). Second, we have a public transit map of this city. I want you to click back and forth between them. To the left: amenities, rentable bikes, reliable bus service. To the right: a bare-bones infrastructure that doesn’t function with quite the same regularity. The dividing line, predictably, is Troost.

As a side note, the murals along Troost are a thing of beauty — we have some on the west side, but east side street art tends towards wild collage in a more realist style. (From In Kansas City.)

What we have here is a city that has been divided, largely, into north-south bands, with one or two major east-west corridors, which exist largely in a begrudging fashion. On the extreme right and extreme left, you have the suburbs – these are penetrated by some east-west service, but barely. Largely, these sections are the domain of automobile owners (I hope that changes, because of climate-related reasons I have discussed previously.) In the middle, you have the west-of-troost band, which is affluent and well-served, and you have the east-of-troost band, which is neither of those things.

Back during the 2018 City Council election, I received a number of phone calls trying to drum up support for one candidate or another, and I remember one interaction where I was talking to a representative of a candidate trying to brand herself as a populist, pro-public transportation candidate. I brought up the issue of East-West public transportation, and the young woman on the other end of the line was flummoxed.

What I thought was a fairly obvious issue was met with two things: first, the representative repeated the talking point about the candidate in question riding the street car to be closer to the people; second, she didn’t understand the question I was positing (“Does Candidate X have any plans to increase east-west public transportation?”) and had to go ask someone higher up.

As a side note: Kansas City has been trying to get light rail or a street car or something going for ages now. We finally approved it, and the end result is a two mile stretch of track from Union Station to the river market (a North-South route) and is sort of like the transit equivalent of a kazoo solo.

Our street car is a boring roller coaster for rich people.

If the city planners had any guts, it would have been a river front project, running from the Historic Northeast, through Columbus Park, the River Market, and West Bottoms, and would’ve connected up to a Wyandotte County bus hub at the west end, bridging three major north-south bus lines (the Main street, Troost, and Paseo lines) and allowing quicker and easier access to both sides of town.

Again, I find myself in the weeds, and this is a very local topic – if it were warmer, I’d have to worry about chiggers. Let me, instead, try to generalize this in a way that can be used by everyone.

There are certain things that tend to fall into the intellectual and perceptive background because, as far as we’re concerned, they’ve always been there. There are lines of inquiry we don’t follow because they’re hard, roads we don’t go down because they’re not well-lit or easy to traverse. It’s possible that this is unintentional, an unfortunate side effect. Or it may be another aspect of the Society of Control. It may be that the powers that be want you to go down a different route, and made this one harder than that one for a reason.

It is at our own risk that we allow anything to slip into the background, to become furniture that we navigate but ignore. I would encourage you, today, to take a moment to look at a map of your hometown, or the place you live, and ask yourself “now why is it that way?”

Because you may discover something important about the background of your life, and you may discover something that you need to make noise about and try to fix.

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