Observations from Wichita

[enigmo]

I'm going beyond my usual lurking. Actually, I'm in Omaha visiting friends and family. It's good to see progress on Omaha projects in the five months since I moved to Wichita after 16 years in Omaha.

Thought you guys might be interested in a development under way in Wichita, the next phase of which will be announced this week:

http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/13093450.htm

The riverfront in Wichita is different than in Omaha. The Arkansas River (pronounced AR-KAN-SAS, not AR-KAN-SAW, I learned quickly) is a lazy, meandering river that probably won't flood because of controls upstream. So development can go a lot closer than on the Missouri.

Wichita is no Omaha, so I'm not trying to start a spitting match. Omaha's economy is more diverse and Omaha's clearly bigger. But when the aviation companies are doing well, so is Wichita. Both Cessna and Raytheon this past week said they're back to pre-9/11 production levels. Boeing didn't strike for very long. Wichita is actually gaining some call centers (yeah, not $35-an-hour aviation jobs, but they're jobs). About 1,500 jobs have been announced just recently. So things are good.

Wichita's downtown is nearly square in the city, not to the far east like Omaha's. Here there's a clear "I'm from the east side/I'm from the west side" mentality. And they shop and seek entertainment where they live, so downtown is maligned (it seems) just as Omaha's is. They don't want to go there unless there's a good reason.

Old Town has a nice mix of restaurants, perhaps more than the Old Market, but not the kind of stores the Old Market has. Downtown condos are way behind Omaha's, but they're starting to be developed.

We're going through debates over where to put a 15,000-seat arena, much as Omaha did in the 1990s. It's down to two sites. There's nothing like the UP yards here, so a pretty big batch of buildings is going to be wiped out. There won't be a convention center attached. John Q. Hammons is already angling to attach a hotel to it.

Oh, and at least one big casino wants to build here. Fat chance.

The Wichita school district is nearing getting rid of "forced" busing as Omaha did the last 1990s.

I've tried to sell to my new employer (the Wichita Eagle) that Omaha could be used as an example of where Wichita's going in many regards. We'll see how that comes out.

Oh, and you think there are nattering nabobs of negativism in Omaha! You ain't seen nothing like the NNNs in Wichita.

Anyway, good to be back, at least forum-wise.

[omahastylee459]

WaterWalk Place, a seven-story building with nearly 250,000 square feet, will have stores on the first floor and parking on the next three floors, then apartments on the top three floors. It will be done in the summer of 2007.

Atleast they are building smart, we need some more developments like that, a completely self-contained building, not one that is surrounded by surface parking.