Chase Billingham, associate professor of sociology at Wichita State University, is a popular voice on local development and politics. His new book, “All-American City: Bluster, Boom and Bust in Wichita,” explores the cultural and economic history of Wichita and its struggle to become a destination city.
KMUW’s Dan Dillon talked with Billingham about the book.
The interview was edited for length and clarity.
DILLON: Tell us a little about this book.
BILLINGHAM: The book is a social history of Wichita, really, from the past half-century or so, covering trends in urban economic development, success and failure, and growth and stagnation in the Wichita metropolitan region, and setting it in the context of broader urban and metropolitan development trends that have been taking place across the United States
DILLON: You and your wife moved to Wichita in 2013 from Boston, and you decide to write a book about Wichita. How did that happen?
BILLINGHAM: Well, I didn't decide to write the book about Wichita right on the first day. But we came from a very different place, the city of Boston, and moved to this new location in a different part of the country, very different type of city. We moved into an apartment in the Old Town area of Wichita because we wanted to be as close to urban nightlife and exciting things as possible in the city.
As an urban sociologist, trying to discover and learn about a new place, what I love to do is walk around, bike around, look at buildings, and try to figure out what a place is all about. And that's what I did when I first moved to Wichita. Walking around the downtown and Old Town areas, the place that interested me the most was the old Naftzger Park at the corner of Douglas and St. Francis. It was this beautiful little green space in the middle of the city, surrounded by brick walls and wrought iron, and it looked very old. And I was perplexed by this park because it was in the middle of this downtown section of the city, and it was this green space with flowing streams and rock formations and trees, but I didn't ever really see any people around, except for sometimes a few people sleeping in the park.
And so it tried to figure out: Where did this park come from? Why is it so underutilized, and how does it fit into the history of Wichita? That got me started on learning more about the history of this city and trying to situate that history within the theoretical ideas that I had been working through in my sociological work.
DILLON: What do you want people to take away from reading this book?
BILLINGHAM: I think the book has multiple audiences. It’s an academic book, but it's targeted for a general audience as well, (people) who are interested in cities, in urban development, and specifically for people in this region who are interested in trying to make Wichita grow and make Wichita better.
I've had a lot of conversations with policymakers, with elected officials, with journalists, with business leaders here over the years. So I'm hoping, on a local level, that the book will contribute to ongoing debates about where we take this city in the future.
Wichita has struggled over the past half-century in terms of its growth trajectory in relation to other metropolitan areas. The challenges that Wichita faces are not unique to this region. But as all of these smaller and mid-sized cities compete for limited investment, limited numbers of jobs, limited numbers of new companies to attract this region, the competition that cities engage in leads to a zero-sum game of winners and losers.
DILLON: Back to Wichita’s downtown area and Naftzger Park. Talk about the problems that the park faced and where it is now.
BILLINGHAM: The reason Naftzger Park existed in the first place was because it was an urban renewal project spearheaded in the 1970s as part of an effort to demolish and replace what was known as ‘Skid Row’ in downtown Wichita. And so the urban renewal agency in the 1960s and 70s acquired vast amounts of territory in that region, leveled most of the buildings on that block to make way for this park that was designed to attract new middle class residents to the region in order to try to invigorate growth in downtown Wichita.
So the stigmatization of poor people in the downtown area didn't start with that park. But when the park was built, it was a beautiful, shady space in a very hot city in the summer, and so people naturally made use of it. And I would say that they were often blamed for the failures of the downtown region in Wichita to grow when, as I discuss in the book, there were many other structural economic factors that really impeded growth in this region, apart from unhoused people using Naftzger Park.
And yet, what we saw in the previous decade was an effort to once again do exactly what happened in the 1970s, which was to bulldoze that space and try to build a new park right in that location in order to attract new middle-class residents and investments in the downtown region – with mixed success, I think. Because we haven't solved the problem of homelessness in Wichita. Instead, it's mostly been moved to other parts of of the city, and it remains a significant social problem in this region, as it does in most American cities.
DILLON: What do you see Wichita doing well right now and in the past few years?
BILLINGHAM: [Long, awkward pause.] I struggle to come up with answers to that question. What I see is continued stagnation and investment in quality-of-life amenities, and a widespread, pervasive anti-tax ideology in this region that impedes investment in things like public schools, public transportation, parks, libraries, other types of amenities that everyday people make use of in their daily lives. Those are the things that really make a place an attractive place to live, not necessarily building a new stadium, a new arena, a casino, a 300-foot-tall replica of the Keeper of the Plains statue. Those are not necessarily the things that are going to drive sustainable growth and quality of life in a region.
The problems that I've identified in the book over the past half-century really continue to this day, and I think that local leaders have really struggled to come up with reliable financing mechanisms to maintain core civic infrastructure that's going to maintain the quality of life for regular people.
