Urban Blight Tour 08...........East Side

There is no way I could cover every corner of what most of us call, Kansas City's East side. East of Paseo, or Troost, or even as far as Prospect, pick your jump off point. The most bleak area in the city, is centered by Prospect Ave, and runs from 39th north to the 20's. If you live in a better area than this, and you most likely do, then spending twenty or thirty minutes driving around here will depress you, and make you feel like the love child of Donald Trump and Oprah. After spending some time driving through this war zone, I feel rich beyond measure, and trust me, if it cost a quarter to shit, I'd have to throw up.

The first thing you notice when you drive through these neighborhoods, every single person you pass, they look at you and the look says you don't belong here. Like the black guy said to Edward Norton in American History X, "Just remember, in here, you the nigga. Not me." That is true in practically every prison in the Nation, and equally true east of Troost. If you are white and prowling these streets you are either a cop, a victim, an addict, a trick, or a mildly retarded blogger. I don't mean to sound crass or insensitive, but the unicorns of Brookside, don't venture east of Holmes road. So I cant write about the East side in a sensitive and politically correct tone. It wouldnt ring true. It's a hard place, and it begs for the hard truth. Not every single home is run down, there are people who take pride , who bust their humps every day, and who live there by choice, or circumstance, doing the best they can. That said, you don't have to look far to find blight, poverty and whole lot of shit you are better off not finding. In fact you would be hard pressed to drive down any side street and not find at least a couple of boarded houses every block or two.
If you pay much attention to the News, you know that the majority of killings happen to the east, you also might see some local Politician on the news, selling the latest war on crime, or guns, or weeds, or the latest revitalization effort. Judging from these pictures, I'd say the weeds and blight are winning the battle. With a murder rate that is on target to be one of the highest in the city's history, and a city hall mired in a quagmire of bullshit and incompetence, things are going to get worse in the city's poorest area.
I stepped outside about halfway through writing this post. There was a police helicopter circling around outside, I can never resist going outside when I hear one. Around here I hear a lot of them. They fly low, all you can see is the lights, hear the trees whipping up. It's not particularly smart to stand outside in the dark when a police helicopter is searching for suspects. You could get shot by the cops, or who ever they are looking for. So when I'm standing out in my darkened driveway, watching it all unfold, I'm never totally relaxed, my eyes are always scanning my surroundings. Driving around the east side of Kansas City today, in broad daylight, is a lot like that feeling, multiplied by 50. In most every single post on urban blight I have cracked several jokes at the expense of what ever area I was writing about. But I've got to tell you, I got nothin. This shit just isn't funny, not on this level.

Everyone has their own personal opinion about why the east side of Kansas city is in the shape it's in. I think there are plenty of guilty parties, but that's not what this post is about. This just gives you a quick glance of a place. the east side is like Humpty Dumpty; And all the kings horses, and all the kings men...........well , you know the rest.