![]() Various developers floated proposals for the site, the most lucrative of which was a sporting complex for the MSL Kansas City Wizards, combined with office and retail. The meager revenue proved insufficient to cover expenses for such a large structure, and by spring of 2007, the Bannister Mall closed completely. But these local businesses only chose to locate at the mallīecause of significantly lower leasing rates, and by that point the mall was already over 50% vacant. ![]() For a few of those years, the mall managed to hang on with mom-and-pop in-line tenants. By 2000, the first of the major anchors closed over the next six years, the other three department stores followed suit. This influx of Section 8 tenants, in turn, caused an uptick of crime in the mall by the mid-1990s, scaring away shoppers. Needless to say, it follows similar patterns seen in metros across the country: a decline in the desirability of the apartment complexes in the area forced many of them to cater to a lower-income population. As dead malls go, it’s a well-known one: websites like Labelscar and Dead Malls chronicle the one-million-square-foot mall’s downfall (first opened in 1980) in great detail. The Bannister Mall area, about 12 miles south of downtown KCMO but still within the city limits, was a flourishing retail and residential corridor as recently as 1990, but it took a significant turn for the worse later that decade. While I’m sure there are plenty of other, more persuasive examples, Kansas City offers the best visual evidence I have ever seen that serious blight can afflict the suburbs in equal measure. But does it ever look as bad? After all, we don’t typically associate a three-bedroom house – with a big front yard and an attached garage – with decay or neglect. It requires little semantic stretching to call it suburban blight I can think of no more appropriate label, since it is characterized by the same disinvested conditions that urban America experienced half a century ago. But does blight always have to affect urban settings or the inner city? In the last 25 years, a new type of blight has emerged in America, affecting post-war, automobile oriented, outer-city districts. In contemporary life, it’s hard to imagine and definition of blight without at least some reference to urbanism such is the case with Merriam-Webster and at least.Īnybody getting this far in the essay is probably well familiar with urban blight, not just as a label for a certain condition but its physical manifestations. So urban blight appropriates characteristics of plant disease but in a sociological form, in which the tissue of a city suffers dilapidation, underutilization, or outright abandonment. ![]() In contemporary parlance, however, I suspect a far greater number of people use the term in combination with “urban”–a metaphoric reassignment of the characteristics that organic plant matter can suffer, only this time applied to non-organic human construction. It was originally a botanical term referring to a disease characterized by discoloration, wilting, and eventual death of plant tissues. Over the past century, the word “blight” has undergone a curious expansion in its denotations.
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