BY ZACH MORTICE
The West Bottoms Flats site is bisected by a narrow street, scaled as an intimate alley with landscaping. Image courtesy BNIM.
In Kansas City, the private sector is helping pick up the tab for green infrastructure in a new residential development.
 
Since 2010, Kansas City, Missouri, has been subject to a federal consent decree, to begin properly capturing sewage and stormwater before it flows into rivers and streams. It?s a consequence of the city?s overwhelmed combined sewer system, which covers 58 square miles. From 2002 to 2010, the system produced 1,300 illegal overflows, putting approximately 6.4 billion gallons of untreated sewage into waterways annually.
Notably, this is the first time a municipal water federal consent decree has allowed the use of green infrastructure, according to Andy Shively, a special assistant to the City Manager Troy Schulte, who works on issues relating to the consent decree. And the developer-driven West Bottoms Flats mixed-use residential complex designed by Kansas City-based BNIM is shaping up to be an influential test case for ways the private sector can grapple with public sector failure toward water quality goals. Landscape architects at BNIM have designed the flats? green infrastructure capacity to absorb excess stormwater as a series of placemaking amenities ?in order to prevent it from being [value-engineered] from the project,? says Cheryl Lough, the director of BNIM?s landscape architecture studio.
Typical r...