Cost of Living
curiousKC | Help Inform Our Coverage of the Climate and Utility Bill Crisis
Flatland will report on the climate and utility cost issue for the next Flatland Show episode. What questions do you want our team to investigate?
A Clash of the Way In
Rachel Miskec watches the news each night and worries she’ll see an apartment fire in Kansas City, Kansas. “If something bad happens, I know someone is going to ask us when did you go into [the apartment] last,” said Miskec, the coordinator of the rental license program for the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and…
Exploring Frank Lloyd Wright’s Naturalistic Legacy
By Christopher G. Olszewski Our area certainly has some distinctive architecture, including the art deco Power & Light Building in downtown Kansas City and the massive new Church of the Resurrection sanctuary in Leawood, Kansas. Before those bricks were laid, one of the world’s most famous architects left his mark on Kansas City. During a…
Changed Locks: Getting Evicted in Wyandotte
It takes two minutes for the woman in the wheelchair to roll in front of Judge R. Wayne Lawson. It only takes another two minutes for her to be legally evicted. “You have to leave, just not today,” Lawson tells her. The plaintiff’s lawyer asks her to wait for him in the hallway. He still…
How’d We Get This Data? See the Human Side of Records Analysis
44 days. That’s how long it took our research intern to obtain all the eviction information for Wyandotte County. Across that month and a half, Flatland’s Ryan Hennessy spent about six hours a day combing eviction records the only place they were available: on one of three public computers on the first floor of the…
Affordable Housing: The Apartment Fight
When the Kansas City Housing Authority won a coveted $30 million federal grant in 2015 to tear down Chouteau Courts, a low-income housing project east of downtown, and replace it with mixed-income housing, housing advocates were thrilled. But when the Northland was proposed as a location for one of the new properties, area residents took…
Affordable Housing: Pricing Out Workers
If working two full-time jobs isn’t enough to make rent in the city, Kimberly Lawson wants to know what is enough. This video, part of a larger project from Kansas City PBS and Flatland looking at gentrification, affordable housing, and evictions in the Kansas City metro, delves into whether the downtown boom is driving out…
Anything Concrete? We Check In A Year After Our Infrastructure Project
Last spring, we dug into the state of metro roads, highways, sewers and public transportation in a project called Public Works? The Cost of Our Aging Infrastructure. Now, we’re issuing a report card, of sorts, to see if anything has changed in a year’s time. We track the progress on our weekly public affairs shows, Week in…
Gentrification: The Westside
In the historic Westside neighborhood, “gentrification” has become a hotly contested word. From long-term residents to real estate developers, a neighborhood meeting shows there’s the pull between old and new, and a question of the right way to evolve a neighborhood. This video is part of a larger project from Kansas City PBS and Flatland…
Can You Improve an Area Without Gentrifying It?
By Anne Kniggendorf As a traffic engineer, Jay Aber worries that some of the improvements he designs have the exact opposite effect of what he had hoped. “We try to improve the street for the people who live there,” Aber said. “Then, the people who live there end up getting pushed out in favor of…