Sunday editions of The Kansas City Star can feel like a bit of a rip-off, what with the front-page ad and C.W. Gusewelle writing about the splendors of yellow forsythia in the metro section. Then something like Diane Stafford's series about growing old in Kansas City comes along, and taking the paper on weekends seems worthwhile again.
Stories about aging baby boomers are nothing new. Stafford's series, which began yesterday, derives its power from its frank discussion of suburban sprawl, which is hell on the elderly and anyone else who doesn't own a car. Today's installment described a woman in Johnson County who can see a CVS from her window but doesn't dare make the trip on foot out of fear of being crushed by an SUV.
Kansas City is beginning to reckon with its orgy of overpass and cul-de-sac building. Stafford talked with experts who used stark language to describe the mess in which Kansas City finds itself. One prof talked about razing rows of Prairie Village split-level houses.
In today's atricle, Stafford describes the challenges of transporting the elderly from place to far-flung place. The situation is not difficult. It's impossible, and we have the politicians, road builders and developers who confused "growth" with "prosperity" to thank for it.
It's not just the elderly who become stranded in a World Traversed Only By Car. It sucks for kids, too. Here's writer James Howard Kunstler, who has called sprawl "the greatest misallocation of resources the world has ever known":
Children are certainly the biggest losers -- though suburbs have been touted endlessly as wonderful places for them to grow up. The elderly, at least, have seen something of the world, and know that there is more to it than a housing subdivision. Children are stuck in that one-dimensional world. When they venture beyond it in search of richer experience, they do so at some hazard. More usually, they must be driven about, which impairs their developing sense of personal sovereignty, and turns the parent -- usually Mom -- into a chauffeur.Those words appeared in a book Kunstler published in 1993. To look at Kansas City, his prose was never translated out of the original Sanskrit.
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