The Kansas City Star has written an article about Prairie Village today, and it’s not about our thriving small businesses and locally-owned award-winning restaurants, our stunning new sculpture at Meadowbrook Park, or our LEED Platinum Public Works facility which diverted over 85% of its construction waste from the landfill…

To outsiders it may look like our entire city is divided on this one topic. But as with all things, looks can be deceiving.

By the numbers, it appears that about 6% of PV residents (based on the PV registered voter estimate*) are ardently against looking at solutions for our housing issues, and about 6% of PV residents (again based on the PV registered voter estimate) are in vocal favor of looking at solutions to diversify PV’s housing inventory. And both of those percentages might be overly generous.

*One could argue that we should include non-registered residents too (because they could be homeowners or renters in our neighborhoods), but that would make the percentage even smaller for these two resident groups so this is good.

That leaves about 88% of Prairie Village that are… disengaged from local issues… or that trust the process Council and the Planning Commission are going through… or that just don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other. And isn’t that about typical for all issues?

Most of us learn very early in our lives that you can’t please ALL of the people ALL of the time, and that’s never been more true for me than in public service. There will always be a vocal percentage that are super unhappy about what you’re doing and another vocal percentage that are super ecstatic about what you’re doing, and then there will be everyone else in between. It’s also not easy to predict who is going to love or hate what issues, even in our current hyper-partisan climate in the U.S. right now. Most of our local issues truly are non-partisan, and that comes across in the variety of resident communications we receive.

My silver-lining-hope is that this added engagement from folks that we’ve never heard from before, on both sides of this housing issue, will increase the participation in our upcoming community survey on a proposed community center in Prairie Village. 🤞

It’s worth noting that the same people who are against housing diversity are NOT all against a community center. I know of three neighbors with “stop” signs that have asked me when we’re getting back to the community center conversation. (Soon, neighbors, soon). I’m sure there are also PV 4 All supporters who are against a community center. City Council wants to hear from all of you on all of these issues, Prairie Village! 🤗

Keep the emails coming: councilmembers@pvkansas.com!

KC Star Article BY ANDREA KLICK:

Read all about it by clicking HERE or the image above.