UrbanLand: Demographic Shifts Keeping Kansas City Suburbs and Urban Core Viable

According to Adam Ducker, a panelist at the event and a managing director with Bethesda, Maryland–based RCLCO, 78 percent of Kansas City’s population lived in the suburbs in 2015, which is comparable with the national average. Only 9.4 percent lived in the city’s urban areas, which was about 7 percentage points below the national average. Nearly 75 percent of Kansas City’s minority population lived in the suburbs in 2015, as did a large majority of millennials, two trends that were also on par with national trends. Yet while Kansas City’s urban population fell for decades, from 2010 to 2015 it grew an average of 2.1 percent annually, about 70 basis points shy of growth in the surrounding suburbs.