FROM THE EDITOR
C O N T R I B U TO R S
12
KANSAS CITY APRIL 2022
Hanna Luetchfield ILLUSTRATOR
The illustration on our news story about the “dark store” theory was drawn by Hanna Luechtefeld, a local graphic designer and illustrator. They graduated from the University of Central Missouri in 2019 with degrees in graphic design and illustration and have a passion for zines and DIY comics.
James Harris WRITER
Our profile of the people behind Panic Fest was written by James Harris, a Black, Mexican, and white writer who writes speculative fiction with a literary twist. He currently resides in Kansas City, where he contemplates the dreadful, the macabre and the end of all things sacred.
Chase Castor
PHOTOGRAPHER
This month’s news story about the likely demise of the city’s signature DIY skate park was both written and photographed by Chase Castor, a local photographer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Vice, the Washington Post and many others. Castor has previously covered the skate park for Kansas City magazine.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOANNA GORHAM
A
bout six months ago, I did something a little bit eccentric: I removed my oven. I live in Brookside, and I have a small kitchen with limited counter space. I didn’t remove the oven because I don’t cook but because I cook enough to be annoyed by the space it occupied. I use a big Breville toaster oven for most things other people use their regular oven to cook, and if I am cooking a giant hunk of meat, I’m far more likely to cook it sous vide, smoke it on my Big Green Egg or pressure cook it in the Instant Pot. So I rented a dolly and wheeled my oven out to the garage, then replaced it with a cart that has an induction cooktop and shelves for my toaster oven and microwave. Finally, all seven feet of my countertop were free. And it has worked out really well (if you have a toaster oven, how often do you use your real oven?), even if it does make me feel a little bit like a kook. I’ve talked to so many people who have made big and unexpected lifestyle changes since the pandemic. I haven’t talked to anyone else who’s gone No Oven—if you have, please contact me so we can start some sort of support group—but my change is obviously a lot less extreme than many of those that others have made. I’ve been thinking a lot about that over the last month as we compiled this issue’s cover story, a feature on booming neighborhoods. We worked with Redfin to crunch data, including increased sales price, time on the market and sales price over the listing price. We removed everything below the median to settle on eleven zip codes where things have blown up the biggest. After we got the zips, we talked to more than a dozen real estate agents about each area to get a feel for who’s moving there and why. One thing that came up repeatedly in those conversations is that many people who moved to neighborhoods like West Shawnee or Martin City weren’t necessarily expecting to buy in those areas this time two years ago. But with prices everywhere in the metro exploding and inventory at historic lows, many families started broadening their searches. I strongly suspect that such demographic shifts are going to have all sorts of large and unanticipated consequences in the decades to come. In a way, this feature may come closer than most we publish to being the proverbial “first draft of history.” If you’ve been thinking it’s time for a little more space or a different lifestyle, hopefully this package will be helpful to Martin Cizmar EDITOR IN CHIEF you. If your kitchen is the main problem, MARTIN@KANSASCITYMAG.COM though, I do have another idea…
