Kansas City may step in to revive vacant strip mall after fire, years of neglect
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Councilman Curls proposes $1M city purchase to demolish and reset Robandee site.
- City code inspectors investigated more than 50 complaints before the fire damage.
- Curls aims to replace blighted strip mall with development that boosts tax revenue.
Around 2 p.m. on Monday, two Star staffers saw someone in a black pickup missing a license place pull into the parking lot of the vacant Robandee Shopping Center in south Kansas City with two mattresses and a box spring in the bed of the truck.
The truck left empty a couple of minutes later. Its cargo remained in a pile beneath a “no dumping” sign.
Kansas City Councilman Darrell Curls says that sort of thing happens far too often and is one reason why he thinks Robandee needs to be demolished and replaced with something better than the eyesore and dumping ground that it’s become.
“When I got into office, there was an outcry from the neighboring community. Neighbors said, ‘Hey, councilman, this property has been in such disrepair for so long. The owner doesn’t take care of it, doesn’t care about us. He lives out of state, and we just need something to be done. You know, is there a way that we can, you know, tear it down and start over?’”
Might city buy it?
Now, Curls is doing something that he thinks might achieve that. On June 26, he introduced an ordinance that, if approved by the full council, would have the city spend up to $1 million to buy the property at 8202 E. Bannister Road, demolish the buildings and scrape the 12-acre site back to bare dirt.
His aim is to then sell the property to someone who would build something beneficial to the neighborhood and bolster the city’s tax base.
It could be a combination of offices and retail, or maybe something else, Curls said.
“I believe that once the city takes it over, we’ll stand a better chance of having a developer do something on that,” he said. “I’ve had three people reach out to me since I’ve been in office that are interested in doing something on that property.”
Make that four.
While Curls was at the shopping center on Monday, a guy in a Honda got out of his car and asked to have his name put on that list. Curls reached into his suit jacket and handed him his card.
“Please contact my aide,” he said.
Curls has plans
Curls was elected citywide two summers ago as the at-large representative of the 5th District on the promise that he would bring new investment to that southeastern part of town, which he claims gets short shrift from a city government that focuses most of its redevelopment efforts in the central city and north of the river.
Robandee is east of Interstate 435 and as far from downtown as downtown is from KCI. It’s one of three ragged shopping centers that Curls aims to have redeveloped in his district.
But Robandee — named for the men who built the surrounding subdivisions in the 1950s and 1960s, developers Paul Roberts and Wilmer Andes — is by far the worst of that bunch.
Years ago, a toy store, a dry cleaners and a stereo shop filled some of the storefronts there. The supermarket changed hands a time or two, and then it closed.
Recently, the center’s sole remaining tenant was a liquor store that the city shut down because it had no running water and other violations, Curls said. The store was in the wing of the Robandee center that caught fire in June.
The cause of the blaze has not been determined. A fire department spokesman said Wednesday that the case has been turned over to the bomb and arson squad at the Kansas City Police Department for investigation.
“And so the owner, once the property burnt a couple of weeks ago or three weeks ago, or however long it’s been, reached out to me through his representative,” Curls said.
“And he said, ‘Hey, look, we’ve done a market study. We think that we’re ready to kind of move forward redeveloping this property.’ Obviously, you know, they want some incentives from the city.”
Many code violations
But Curls doesn’t trust the owner to follow through, as the owners have done nothing but let the center deteriorate.
Instead, he thinks the better course would be to have the city’s Planned Industrial Expansion Authority buy out the Texas-based company that holds the deed, Commodity Express LLC.
It would be more of a sure thing, he said, By buying it, the city would then have a say in how the property was redeveloped and the timing of that project.
The city would then transfer ownership to the developer, rather than own it long term, Curls said. In that way, the project would differ from the Linwood Shopping Center on Prospect Avenue, which the city bought and continues to be the landlord.
Commodity Express LLC chief executive Babar M. Khan did not respond to The Star’s requests for comment.
Curls said he contacted Khan long before the fire to discuss with him the need to take better care of his property. The center has been subject to more than 50 complaints in the past five years registered through the city’s 311 system.
Records show those complaints ranged from concerns about tall weeds, graffiti and multiple reports of trash and garbage being dumped on the parking lot’s broken asphalt.
One person reported seeing two rats feeding on filth in the area closest to houses on the center’s northern border. Twice the city investigated reports of a homeless camp inside the center and in 2022 declared it a dangerous building.
On each of two visits to the shopping center in the past week, a Star reporter saw people coming and going from the structure.
Khan bought the shopping center on Dec. 27, 2019, the deed says. A month later, the first case of COVID-19 was reported in the United States. Khan told Curls that the pandemic and other issues ruined his plans to redevelop the site as planned.
“And true, I mean, COVID hit, and nobody knew what that effect was going to have on anything. I mean, you know, you look all around and it had an adverse effect on a lot of things,” Curls said.
“‘But you still own property,’” Curls said he told Khan. “‘And I think that you still could have done a lot more investing in it in order to keep the property going.’ So I shared that with him and his representative, and they said, ‘Well, we still want to do something.’”
Sought big profit
Before the fire and his renewed energy around redeveloping the property, Khan had put the shopping center up for sale with the hope of flipping it for a huge profit. It was listed for more than $3.7 million, nearly nine times more than the recorded purchase price.
Jackson County records show that his company Commodity Express had paid $425,000 for the shopping center and a vacant indoor skating rink behind it in a multi-parcel sale.
Neighborhood leader Brandon Wright doubts Khan ever had the money to invest in a successful project and hopes he steps aside and lets the city make something happen.
“He doesn’t have the capital to demolish it,” said Wright, co-chair of Hickman Mills United Neighborhoods and until a few weeks ago a member of the Hickman Mills school board.
Nor does he think anyone could rehab the part of the shopping center that wasn’t consumed in last month’s blaze. It’s too far gone, he said, given what he’s seen on the inside.
A couple of years ago, a YouTuber posted a video tour of the supermarket’s ruined interior.
“None of it’s salvageable,” Wright said. “He’s just kidding himself,” referring to the owner.
Mayor Pro Tem Ryana Parks-Shaw, who also represents the 5th District, is a co-sponsor of Curls’ ordinance prompting the city to acquire the site. The council’s finance committee is set to take it up for discussion on Tuesday.
This story was originally published July 10, 2025 at 6:00 AM.
