If you are in search of a monument to consumption, look no further than the Kansas City Royals.
If you want to see a culture fall apart, give them the ability to move their baseball stadium to the Crossroads district.
Hiding behind the successful Kansas City Chiefs, the Royals are trying to rip away a part of the city’s cultural identity by taking over the 18-acre plot spanning from Grand Boulevard east to Locust Street.
The Royals were once in talks with community organizations to find middle ground for the businesses that would be displaced. To many this seemed like a turning point in the process because a company has never done something just for good press with no intention of following through, right?
Surprisingly to few, those discussions fell through.
Additionally, the Royals failed to sign documents ahead of the vote for Question 1 on April 2 that would have guaranteed that KC Public Schools, the KC Library and the Jackson County Mental Health Fund wouldn’t lose any funding because of the proposal.
With this information, the Royals have since realized they need more good press, especially with younger audiences.
They took this strategy straight to UMKC on Thursday, where the university announced a Royals day on campus during spring break.
It doesn’t take much to realize that this likely came as a move from the Royals themselves, as it wouldn’t make sense to have a spirit day on campus on a day where most people wouldn’t be there.
UMKC is a commuter school, meaning that most of the students here don’t live on campus. This spirit day, logistically, just wouldn’t make sense under normal circumstances.
However, these aren’t normal circumstances. In a recent survey of self-identified Downtown residents and workers, only 30% of the residents and 25% of the workers indicated they would be in favor of the development. The Royals’ backs are against the wall.
“The traffic alone would make me never want to visit [Downtown] KC,” one anonymous respondent in the survey stated in justification of their “no” vote. “And [the development] would force me to move away.”
On the other side of the argument, support for the proposal is outlined with, for lack of a better term, superficiality.
Whether it’s conscious or not, people in cities want to live somewhere with the aura of New York. They want to be able to walk places, which is a completely reasonable want.
The issue is that it becomes unreasonable when convenience and aesthetics are put ahead of what is right for a certain community.
With time being of the essence, the only thing that can save Kansas City and its identity is to vote “no” on Question 1 on Tuesday, April 2.
