| The purpose of this dissertation is to identify key actors, important decisions, and social processes that have created contemporary patterns of poverty and racial residential segregation in the Kansas City metropolitan area. In recent years the Kansas City metropolitan area has been identified by scholars as one of the nation's hypersegregated metropolitan areas due to the high degree of segregation in housing patterns on a range of indices. Using a racial political economy perspective and the urban case study method, I examine how the production, distribution, and consumption of housing has been instrumental in creating and reinforcing racial residential segregation and uneven development. I situate the historical origins, development, and social and spatial consequences of racial residential segregation in large-scale processes of urban change and development including the shift from a compact city (pre-1880) to a fragmented city (1880-World War II), and the transition to a multicentered metropolis (World War II to the present). Specifically, I examine the long-term segregative effects of federal home mortgage programs, public housing programs, urban redevelopment and renewal programs, and large-scale highway building in the Kansas City metropolitan area. I draw upon archival data, census data, public documents and housing reports, and interviews with local residents and civil rights activists to explore the extent to which these state housing policies and subsidies, and the actions of local political and economic actors, have contributed the development of segregated housing patterns, suburbanization of residences, and the concentration of minority poverty. |
