KC developer kept deposits for homes he never built. Now he wants $50M more
Often nobody but the dreamers get hurt when their impossible dreams fall flat.
Daniel and Ebony Edwards’ big dream gone wrong was that other kind.
Their more than eight years of failed attempts to revive an East Side neighborhood by filling vacant blocks with new, affordable homes left over a dozen Kansas City families who bought into that dream feeling disappointed, bitter and abused.
Taxpayers, too, invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into the dream. And years later, there’s almost nothing to show for it.
Even Daniel Edwards told The Star that his dream has turned into “a nightmare, a shitshow.”
Those families made down payments on houses that were never built. The Edwardses kept the deposits.
Edwards had promised the potential homeowners “CRAZY INSANE!!!!” views of downtown from the front porches of their new homes, according to the sales material that he sent them.
And he encouraged them to act quickly and become the first to put down roots in what he said would be a sprawling new housing development.
“Over the next three years, the South Vine (SoVi) District will add 100+ new households in 7 COHORTs to a 4 block areas, from 25th to 27th Streets between Euclid and Highland Avenues,” according to the design-to-build agreement that one man signed in January 2021.
But none of that happened.
The vacant lots where the houses were to go are still vacant and littered with trash and tires. The property taxes on those lots are three years in arrears.
Since 2017, the Edwardses have collected at least $50,000 in deposits from hopeful future homeowners and have given none of them refunds, including the family that successfully won a court judgment against them.
The Star talked with five of the roughly 20 people who put money down to live in the community Edwards said he would build who haven’t been paid back. None of them were pleased with how things turned out.
While trying to sell future neighbors on his dream, Daniel Edwards served on city boards doling out tax breaks for major development projects in the city, and the couple has formed multiple businesses, acquired a lumberyard and recently took part ownership in a cocktail bar in the same block where the Royals had hoped to build a ballpark in the city’s Crossroads area.
Only the In Good Company bar remains operational at last check.
Jackson County records show the Edwardses owe $114,000 in past-due property taxes on their real estate holdings, and many of those parcels are at risk of being sold to anyone willing to pay the bills at this August’s tax sale at the downtown courthouse.
One former city official and the president of the neighborhood association where the housing project was supposed to be suggested the Edwardses got way in over their heads, saying the couple’s lack of capital and inexperience in real estate development and working with local government might have doomed their efforts.
But the setbacks haven’t stopped the couple. The Edwardses have once again revived efforts to raise cash to build their housing community that has yet to materialize.
While many of the families who bought into the couple’s dream in the past wrote off their losses and moved on, others who lost money on the first and second go-arounds are warning potential new investors that they best be wary of Daniel Edwards and his big talk.
“I have watched him strut around Kansas City like nothing happened,” said Karamel McCoy, whose family lost $15,000 on a house that was never built. “So sad.”
Edwards, 38, hasn’t confined his strutting to KC, either. Last fall he went national in an attempt to raise big money for his project. No more is he merely soliciting a few thousand dollars from potential local homebuyers.
He’s now set on accumulating $50 million in commitments from investors to build thousands of houses nationwide as part of what he calls his OneMillion.Homes campaign.
And he’s not above stretching the truth to woo those outside investors.
“Today, we’ve become the second-largest private landowners in downtown Kansas City,” he claimed in his online sales pitch.
He backed off that claim when a reporter challenged the assertion.
“I can correct this and say it may be safer to say that (we’re) one of the largest private landowners … on the East Side of downtown KC,” he said.
Yet even that may be stretching it, as he is only referring to owners of vacant land near the city’s jazz district. Barbecue baron Ollie Gates and investor Vewiser Dixon both own more parcels, he said.
Too good to be true?
Over the years, the news media, podcasts and others with public platforms have often let Edwards’ boasts go unchallenged.
On the Feb. 22 episode of the Reluctant Billionaire podcast, host Andrew Cartwright devoted the entire hour to Edwards’ embellished narrative, describing him as “an expert in construction and real estate development,” and asked about his aim “to build a million homes” to help address the nation’s affordable housing crisis.
Viewers of the YouTube version of the podcast were left with the impression that Edwards is a successful real estate developer, when there is no evidence that he has ever developed any real estate.
Edwards declined to provide The Star with the address of the one “demonstration home” he claims he helped build in midtown for a member of his “team.”
“These people are not who you think they are,” McCoy said she told one local TV station that ran a glowing report on Edwards.
“I need you to do some fact-checking and digging,” she told the station. “They owe people. They owe a lot of people a lot of money.”
Two years ago, local public television station KCPT announced that it planned to showcase a series of videos to a national audience featuring the couple with the proposed title “Breaking Ground.” But the station, whose brand name is Kansas City PBS, scuttled the series and took down the online promotional trailer after McCoy and others saw the promotion and told the station about their bad experiences with the couple.
“PBS was going to run a special on them and I’m like, no, no. Other families are not going to get scammed by this man,” said the woman who sued the Edwardses to get her money back.
In a written statement, Kansas City PBS said it “did not keep a record of complaints” and said the decision to halt production of the series was based on other considerations.
“We were genuinely excited about the Breaking Ground series and the opportunity to collaborate with the Edwardses,” said Kynala Phillips, the station’s communications and engagement manager.
“After some pre-production planning and ongoing conversations, we realized that we were not able to meet our original production timeline. As a result, we never completed anything beyond the initial promotional video and could not proceed with any episodes as planned.”
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A decade-old dream
Daniel and Ebony Edwards first gained local media attention a decade ago. Young, Black and idealistic, they were attractive protagonists for stories about the revitalization of historically Black neighborhoods that had suffered from decades of disinvestment.
He had a bachelor’s degree in architectural engineering and she both a master’s and a doctorate in psychology. They were following their dream of rejuvenating one specific neighborhood on Kansas City’s East Side where Daniel had gone to high school at Lincoln Prep.
The inspiration for that dream, Daniel Edwards says, was a neighborhood meeting he attended around 2011 or 2012 where city officials outlined plans for demolishing more than 40 houses in the Wendell Phillips neighborhood to make room for the police department’s East Patrol campus at 27th Street and Prospect Avenue.
“I was like, how do we stop this? How do we change this stuff from happening?” he said during a 90-minute interview recently at the idled lumberyard that he and Ebony bought with help from a city agency a few years ago.
“The deal was already done at that point, so there was no stopping it. And I tried to find a way to get the company that I was working at to help relocate those families and literally, like, pick the houses up, move the houses down the street, replant them on new foundations, make this resilient neighborhood.”
That didn’t happen. Edwards left his job at J.E.Dunn Construction Co. and began forming a series of limited liability corporations aimed at revising the East Side one way or another.
Mayor Sly James appointed him to the Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority board and other unpaid posts with city-affiliated agencies that authorize tax breaks through the Economic Development Corp.
Daniel and Ebony Burnshide got married in 2014. They exchanged vows at the former “workhouse jail” that looks like a castle at 2001 Vine St. Volunteers helped them clear out the trash, and the couple told reporters they dreamed of turning it into an event space, with a stage for live performances and maybe “an Internet café,” which was a thing at a time before Wi-Fi was prevalent and not everyone had a smartphone.
Based on that publicity, they went on to get lots of favorable mentions in the news when they announced their plans to do this or that, and along with it came grant funding from various foundations to help them pursue their dreams.
They didn’t own the castle, and their plans to turn it into a community gathering space never materialized. It still stands vacant.
But a few years later, they bought a former day care center at 2445 Michigan Ave., across from the planned housing development, and announced plans to turn it into a recording studio with a focus on jazz. The Kemper Foundation had given them a research grant that paid for trips abroad.
Daniel told a reporter in 2018 that the studio would be the “creative inspiration” for the couple’s plan to revitalize the area.
“We’re rebuilding this neighborhood with jazz at the center,” he said then.
But the International Jazz Legacy Project fizzled. And the day care building is decaying. These days it’s almost always vacant other than when squatters move in, according to city code inspection reports.
A recent visit there found the south parking lot piled high with scores of tires, junk furniture and other detritus that tends to collect at abandoned properties that are magnets for illegal dumping.
Building a neighborhood house by house
Daniel and Ebony Edwards’ biggest idea was to repopulate the area south of the city’s historic jazz district — where acre after acre of houses were abandoned and demolished over the past half-century — not with a massive housing development all at once, but a block at a time, starting in that 2500 block of Michigan.
They called it Movement KC and recruited people who wanted to do more than build a house — progressive people of all races without a lot of money who wanted to make a positive difference on the East Side by moving there.
“I’ll build you the most diverse community Kansas City has ever seen,” Daniel told a group of 70 who gathered to hear his pitch back in 2017. That was before he and Ebony had assembled all the land, and before people began signing contracts and checks.
Years after they lost thousands of dollars on the Edwardses’ dream, McCoy and others still wonder: Was the couple’s failure to fulfill their promise to build along Michigan Avenue due to well-intentioned ineptitude, or were the people who lost money marks in an elaborate con?
“They wooed us with … this whole holistic approach to the neighborhood and bringing back the community,” says McCoy. “It was a very great concept, but they have no follow-through, and they are scammers, and it’s unfortunate.”
Daniel Edwards denies scamming anyone. Things simply didn’t work out as planned, he says.
“If it was a scam, I wouldn’t be waking up crying in the fetal position,” he said during a recent interview.
But as he later added: “We were never trying to burn people. Kansas City is too small of a place to, like, be crooked. You can’t screw people over in the city.”
John James, president of the Wendell Phillips Neighborhood Association was disappointed when nothing came of the project.
“I only got the elevator pitch but I do know that a lot of his setbacks were because of not having the capital,” James said. “There are a lot of reasons why he didn’t have the financial capital to do what he wanted to do and not being able to partner with someone was one of them.”
Potential neighbors feel cheated
McCoy is one of five frustrated people who spoke with a reporter after The Star published an interview last month giving Daniel Edwards an opportunity to talk all about his plans and accomplishments.
They included a Lee’s Summit woman who, along with her husband, won a $2,100 court judgment against the couple in 2018 for the return of her down payment. The couple had sold the house they were living in and moved in with the woman’s parents while waiting for construction to begin on the new home they were promised.
The judgment remains unpaid.
Another burned buyer who also contacted The Star said he lost $8,250 on a $165,000 house that was never built.
Both people provided supporting documents and copies of the text messages and emails they exchanged with the Edwardses over a several-year period that The Star reviewed.
The correspondence showed the same progression in both cases: big promises from Daniel and Ebony Edwards, excitement from the buyers about their new homes, followed by delays, excuses and finally a break in the relationship when it appeared construction would never begin.
Those two provided the names of other people the Edwardses recruited between 2017 and 2021 who also lost money. They knew those names because the Edwardses recruited groups of people in “cohorts” who got to know each other by socializing at cookouts and other events the Edwardses arranged.
The 10 members of that first cohort held a draft to decide which lots they wanted and who would live next door to whom. Bo Nelson, the owner of Thou Mayest coffee shop, was part of that original group and had the second draft pick right below the Edwardses, according to the email Daniel Edwards sent to the group in June 2017 that The Star reviewed.
Nelson, who was featured that year in a Star story about the project, did not respond to requests for comment.
A couple raising their grandchildren was part of cohort No. 2, which formed in 2020 after the first one became inactive due to construction delays. That couple needed a bigger place than the one they had in Brookside to raise the kids. They gave the Edwardses $9,000 to arrange for construction of a house for them on Michigan Avenue and never got a dime of it back.
“Like most people that were in the group, we were pretty excited about the opportunity to do something within the city,” said the grandfather, who did not want his name published because he was concerned the publicity might negatively impact his new business.
But after two years with no progress, he told the Edwardses that he and his wife needed to make other plans. The grandkids were growing. They needed more space and asked for their money back.
“They said, ‘Hey, we understand, you know, but we don’t have the money right now. We’ll plan to have it in the next six months. We’re waiting for a few things to come into play and that kind of thing.’
“And it never happened, and we never had any further communication with him after that.”
Out of all the aspiring homeowners The Star spoke with, only Ken Parsons forgave the couple for falling short of their goals.
“I get the sense they’re trying to do something beneficial to others, but yet, I’m not sure they have the capacity for it,” said Parsons, who formerly taught philosophy and social justice at Avila University.
He met the Edwardses when Movement KC was just getting started. They were neighbors in Kansas City’s Manheim Park neighborhood. The couple had him and others over on many occasions, and Parsons was impressed at how much time Daniel put into the project.
“They had put on a number of gatherings in their home for a lot of people who are interested in developing community on the East Side,” he said.
Parsons stuck with them longer than most, but ultimately lost his $4,000. He says he doesn’t want it back.
“They went well above and beyond the money I invested in it. And when I walked away, I told him I didn’t want the refund of the deposit I had put down,” Parsons said, “because I knew the amount of time he spent with me in terms of the architectural drawings, in terms of materials discussion and the rest.”
What went wrong?
Daniel and Ebony began buying the vacant lots for their SoVi housing district in 2016. Their plan was to rehab and live in the one boarded-up house still standing on the east side of the street in the 2500 block of Michigan Avenue, then build houses on either side of that house all down the block.
“We were going to move into the house and build an artist space next to it as well,” Daniel said. “Then not too long after we bought it, we got a demolition notice.”
As much as they tried, they couldn’t get banks to finance the renovation, and the house was torn down.
That same problem doomed their attempts to get financing for their housing project, after accepting down payments from those dozen people they’d promised would have new houses within a matter of months.
The problems didn’t stop there.
“We ran into pretty much thing after thing after thing,” Daniel Edwards told The Star earlier this month.
Thing No. 1: Through their persistence, they’d been successful in getting city officials to award their project $300,000 in federal grant money. Those dollars were supposed to go toward tree removal and building sidewalks, curbs and an alley.
Instead, the grant money had to be repurposed for environmental remediation. The top 2 feet of dirt at the Michigan Avenue site was scraped off and hauled away because of contamination from lead paint peelings from the houses that once stood there.
Thing No. 2.: The Edwardses learned the hard way how federal grants work even when the city is doling out the funds. The feds don’t front you the money. They reimburse, which meant the couple had to arrange loans for the remediation work.
Daniel described it this way:
“We had to do the work, pay the contractors, get reimbursed from the city. Pay the contractor a partial amount. Do some more work. Pay the contractor. Get reimbursed from the city. So it was that process that was, I mean, those are … the challenges of doing this kind of work.”
Thing No. 3, is that the city government did not have the support structure to help people like them, Edwards said, with no experience in East Side infill development. Several of the city’s longtime urban redevelopment officials retired during the course of the project.
“Our project managers – went through about four of those,” Ebony Edwards said.
She and Daniel both acknowledge that they were naive and had a rosy idea of how their dream would work out.
“We literally thought it was just gonna be like, we’re young families. We got site control. We own the land. We got design teams. We have the buyers ready to go,” Daniel said. “This should just be a no-brainer.”
One of the retired key city officials who worked with the couple said their inexperience worked against them.
“I liked both of them, and I was trying to help them,” that official said. “But it was a combination of them being younger and not understanding how City Hall worked, and them relying on money from City Hall that never came in. They were not able to fulfill all of their obligations.”
In the face of adversity, the Edwardses shifted their plan. They’d get their own lumberyard to be able to build houses themselves.
In 2021, Kansas City’s taxpayer-supported Economic Development Corp. lent the couple $250,000 to buy the former Albert Tamm Lumber Co. at 3.75% interest for 10 years. The couple touts East Side Lumber as one of the only Black-owned lumberyards in the country.
Since purchasing the lumberyard, the couple has closed the retail operation, planning to make it a manufacturing center for components to use in building pre-fabricated houses.
But production has yet to start, and they haven’t paid property taxes on the lumberyard in four years. That means that it could potentially be sold on the courthouse steps in August to anyone willing to pay the $82,000 in back taxes and penalties.
Property taxes are similarly three or more years past due on the former day care center on which the Edwardses owe $34,000. Taxes are similarly past due for three years on all but a few of the 42 narrow residential lots the couple owns along Michigan and Woodland avenues. But Daniel Edwards said that he and Ebony typically bring their taxes up to date before someone else can acquire the land.
A new plan
Daniel Edwards says he has learned from what went wrong before and thinks he’s found the solution: raising $50 million to try again.
On his Substack account, he bills himself as the leader of the God Dam Action Network with an aim to “effectuate over 10 years construction of 1,000,000 Scale-Free Homes, Crossing The Economy Chasm of 200 Cities.”
After The Star began making inquiries last month, Edwards sent an email to the families who lost their down payments and promised to make them whole, as soon as those multi-million-dollar commitments from investors improve his financial position.
“We haven’t raised any money yet because it takes months. We plan to by May or June 2025,” he wrote.
“We also haven’t started building, and the site looks the same as before,” he acknowledged.
Their money went to pay for all the prep work, he explained, and did not rule out refunds.
“Ebony and I promised that we would find a way to return the money from our profits on the project once we start building and finish the first homes,” he said.
He gave no indication when that might be.
This story was originally published April 17, 2025 at 6:00 AM.
