Divided Lines

You can drive five minutes in Kansas City and feel like you've entered a different world. The houses change. The streets change. The trees change. The money becomes visible—or disappears. Why? In Divided Lines, Kansas City author Paul Coffey follows the lines left behind by redlining, restrictive covenants, disinvestment, highway construction, and decades of decisions that helped shape where wealth accumulated and where families were given less room to recover when life went wrong. But this is not a history book written from a distance. It is a book about what happens when a roof starts leaking and one family can afford to fix it while another has to wait. It is about vacant houses, neighborhood violence, healthcare, addiction, domestic abuse, children growing up inside adult crises, and the difference between having something to fall back on and having nowhere left to fall. Along the way, Coffey turns toward his own family, including the death of his sister Tammy from metastatic breast cancer and a baby in his extended family growing up without his mother after she was killed in a drive-by shooting. Divided Lines does not argue that history excuses cruelty, crime, or personal choices. It asks a more difficult question: What happened before the headline? Accessible, personal, and deeply rooted in Kansas City, Divided Lines examines how old decisions can survive long after the maps are put away—and what responsibility belongs to the people who inherit the city that remains. The lines are still here. We are still deciding where they go next.