Welcome to SubTropolis: The Massive Business Complex Buried Under Kansas City
More than 1,000
people spend their workdays in SubTropolis, an industrial park housed in
an excavated mine the size of 140 football fields
The underground industrial park known as SubTroplis opened for
business in 1964 in an excavated mine below Kansas City, Mo., attracting
tenants with the lure of lower energy costs and cheap rents. The walls,
carved out of 270-million-year-old limestone deposits, help keep
humidity low and temperatures at a constant 68 degrees, eliminating the
need for air conditioning or heating. Tenants have reported saving as
much as 70 percent on their energy bills, says Ora Reynolds, president
of SubTropolis landlord Hunt Midwest. Rents run about $2.25 per square
foot, about half the going rate on the surface. "It's also a question of
sustainability," says Joe Paris, vice president at Paris Brothers, a
specialty foods packager that employs about 200 workers underground. In
addition to Paris Brothers, 51 tenants have rented nearly 6 million
square feet of space. Others include LightEdge Solutions, a cloud
computing company that uses the mild climate to help cool servers, and
an underground archive that contains the original film reels to Gone with the Wind and Wizard of Oz.
The U.S. Postal Service keeps hundreds of millions of postage stamps
in an underground distribution hub at SubTropolis. There's still
plenty of space here, with about 8 million square feet of land to
develop—almost 10 times the floor area of Kansas City's tallest
building. To reach capacity, Hunt Midwest may have to consider
additional uses. Underground real estate has been used to grow mushrooms
in Pennsylvania and vegetables in London. "We've talked about that,"
says Reynolds. "We've talked about fish, too. For now, we're trying to
stick to what we're good at."Journey to the center of the earth—or at least, to EarthWorks, an
educational program that schools students on the Midwest's natural
habitats in a 32,000 square-foot space in SubTropolis.
Road runners have been competing in 5-kilometer and 10k races inside SubTropolis's seven miles of roadways for 33 years.
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