Kansas City’s Hispanic community is getting bigger — and more prosperous, new data shows
Kansas City’s Hispanic population has been growing steadily in recent years — and increasingly flourishing in the metro, new data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows.
The agency recently released a wealth of American Community Survey data for 2023, which looks at factors including housing, employment, immigration status and wages broken down by characteristics like race, gender and age.
Hispanic residents of all races now make up 11% of Kansas City’s population — the highest proportion recorded in the last 10 years. As the metro’s Hispanic population has grown, metrics of economic hardship like the poverty rate and rent burden on families havedecreased, data shows.
Factors like low incomes, large gender pay gaps and a high cost of living still pose challenges for Kansas City’s Hispanic community. But Carlos Gomez, the president of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Greater Kansas City, says local resources and the community’s entrepreneurial spirit are helping residents thrive.
“I see both sides,” Gomez said. “I see the many success stories of someone coming to this country and working their way up … but I see just as many challenges from the level that I work at.”
Here’s a closer look at some of the factors that point to growing economic prosperity in this community.
Quantifying Kansas City’s Hispanic community
Kansas City’s Hispanic community has been growing along with the city’s increasing population for years. In the mid-2010s, Hispanic residents made up just under 9% of the metro area’s total residents, increasing at just a fraction of a percentage point per year.
That’s changed in the past five years, with numbers climbing to 11% in 2023. Gomez says the increase is largely due to immigration. While the community is still younger on average than the general public, the influx of new adults also means that the average age of Kansas City’s Hispanic population is rising. Children and teens under age 18 made up 36.6% of the community five years ago, but only 34.1% in 2023.
Employment rates for Hispanic residents aged 16 and above are on the rise, with overall participation in the labor force increasing by 3.5 percentage points in just one year between 2022 and 2023. Among women, this jump was even more significant — 67.4% of women participated in the labor force in 2023, up from 62% just the previous year.
Gomez added that factors like language and cultural barriers explain why these employment rates aren’t even higher.
“One of the challenges is understanding those new growth industries and understanding how do we, as a community, break into those?” he said. “A perfect example is energy — Hispanics are not represented in energy or green jobs like we should be.”
Economic hardship declining among Kansas City’s Hispanic residents
Several metrics of economic hardship declined in 2023 to their lowest rate in more than 10 years among Kansas City’s Hispanic population.
The community’s overall poverty rate was over 25% a decade ago — but in 2023, it dropped to a record low of 14%. Childhood poverty has also seen significant declines. In 2014, more than a third of Hispanic minors in the metro fell below the poverty line. A decade later, the rate is less than half that — just 15.7%.
Other economic hardship metrics have been on the decline, too. Around 20.3% of Hispanic Kansas Citians lived with no health insurance in 2023 — down from 33.2% in 2013. While there’s still room for improvement, that means the uninsured rate has been slashed from around one-third to just over one-fifth in a decade.
Around 44.6% of Kansas City’s Hispanic residents are renters — and around 41.7% of those renters are rent-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on housing. But the rate of renters who meet this criteria has been slowly declining in recent years.
Ten years ago, more than half of Kansas City’s Hispanic renters were rent-burdened — 52.4% of them met the criteria in 2014. The 2023 rate of 41.7% is still high — but it shows a more than 10% improvement in Hispanic residents’ ability to sustainably afford their rented homes. And it’s better than the overall rate in Kansas City, which shows 46% of renters are cost-burdened.
“The cost of living has definitely impacted everybody,” Gomez said. “That being said, Hispanics have actually closed the gap during the pandemic on homeownership.”
The data backs him up: The percentage of Hispanic residents living in rented housing dropped from 52% in 2018 to 44.6% in 2023 — meaning that more than half of the community now lives in owner-occupied housing.
“Culturally, for the Hispanic community, owning a home means ‘I’ve arrived, I’ve made it in this country,’” Gomez explained. “So has (the cost of living) affected us? It has, but we are still going out there and buying our homes.”
Data shows some lingering challenges
While many metrics of economic prosperity are slowly improving for Kansas City’s Hispanic population, census data shows lingering challenges in areas like the cost of living and pay equity.
One factor impacting economic prosperity is the rising cost of rent for Hispanic Kansas Citians. The average Hispanic resident paid just $922 per month in rent in 2019. By 2023, that number was up to $1,194 per month — and may be even higher today. That’s an increase of 29.5% in just four years.
The newly released 2023 data also shows that Hispanic men working full-time in the Kansas City area earned around $50,518 in 2023. Among women working full-time, average yearly earnings were around $36,464. This significant gender pay gap is evident over the past five years of data as well — and Gomez says his group and others are working to tackle the issue.
“We now have a monthly coffee for Latinas that’s all in Spanish, and in there we’re doing empowerment — how do I ask for a raise, how do I look to move up within the company, how do I grow my business?” he said.
“Overnight the attendance of this coffee has just grown tremendously, which tells me this is a need that hasn’t been filled. That (wage) gap does exist, and I would say we definitely need to do more.”
He added that local municipalities have made significant strides in recent years, including by providing financial literacy education and increasing Spanish-language access at the city level.
“There’s many things that can be done to make it easier for people to prosper and to feel welcome,” he said. “Those intentional initiatives are going to truly make a difference for not only that immigrant that’s new to Kansas City, but for Kansas City.”
Do you have more questions about population data for Kansas City? Ask the Service Journalism team at kcq@kcstar.com.
This story was originally published September 18, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
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