Veteran Kansas City architect Kite Singleton, a longtime champion of the urban core, has started his own practice to pursue this mission.

"I think people are beginning to see that the urban center is the place where they'd like to live and work," said Singleton, who has been an executive with HNTB Corp. in Kansas City since 1996. "What is missing - the critical element - is the financial community. The mortgage lenders need to see that the central part of the city is a safe place to invest their money.

Singleton, 60, said he hung out his own shingle because he wants to work full time on this pursuit and devote the rest of his career to it.

"I'm a team guy," Singleton said during an interview in his West Plaza home office. "I'm not a real estate broker. So I see myself teaming with real estate brokers and mortgage lenders, because nothing happens until the mortgage lenders believe - believe that they're going to get paid back.

Singleton, a Kansas City native, has taken an increasingly active role in civic causes since returning from an overseas apprenticeship in 1965. He chaired the Kansas City Planning Commission from 1973 through 1978 and has since contributed to the FOCUS plan that represents the first update of the city's master plan in half a century.

One of his passions has been light rail. "Those kinds of pieces of the urban puzzle are critical to the total success," Singleton said. "You don't get a dense urban center without a public transit system that is dense."

While acknowledging he initially was angry with Kansas City Mayor Emanuel Cleaver last year for blasting a light rail proposal as "touristy frou-frou," Singleton said this criticism accurately reflected skepticism by the public and federal officials, who control the project's budget.

"We had not achieved a level of enthusiastic support for the light rail system," Singleton said. But he continues pushing for a viable alternative. This week, Singleton told the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce about a rubber-tired, diesel-powered public transit system in Brazil. Its capital costs are 10 percent of what had been proposed here.

The reduced expense could allow the Kansas City line to extend further, from downtown to the Northland and eastern Jackson County, Singleton said. "If you get that system in place and you get a commuter rail system in place from Johnson County to Union station and you put in a series of feeder buses to feed that main line system, you have yourself a transit system - a metropolitan transit system," he said.