Battered by crime, a downtown Kansas City high-rise seeks a taxpayer bailout
The owners of The Grand, a 21-story residential high-rise a block north of the T-Mobile Center, have been having a rough go of things these past few years.
Trouble surrounds their building at 1125 Grand Boulevard on all sides, they say. There’s the bus stop on 12th Street and the liquor store on 11th Street, both magnets for public intoxication and drug deals. There’s the bar across the street, whose customers sometimes park their cars on the sidewalks and in front of The Grand’s garage exits, trapping residents inside. And there’s the parking lot to the south, where an August shooting left two people killed and three others injured.
Even with lowered rents, The Grand’s residents aren’t staying long. Hard to blame them: The building’s been shot up five times in the last two years.
“Somebody fired an automatic rifle into the building this summer that struck nine different units,” Aaron Mesmer, one of The Grand’s owners, said last week. “Nine units. Twelve bullets in all. These were high-powered rounds — some of the bullets went through the window, through a closet, through a cabinet, and into a living room ceiling. If you lived in that unit, you would of course not feel safe living there anymore.”
Those window replacements don’t come cheap. They’re about $15,000 a pop, Mesmer said, which is part of the reason The Grand recently made a rare and possibly unprecedented request from the city. It is asking the Planned Industrial Expansion Authority, or PIEA, to slice an estimated $2.6 million off the building’s tax burden, arguing that the accumulating chaos at 12th and Grand has made its $69 million investment in The Grand unsustainable.
The request is unusual because PIEA already granted Mesmer (the chief investment officer at Block Real Estate Services) and his partner, Jason Swords of Sunflower Development Group, a generous 25-year tax break for converting The Grand from an office building into a 200-unit apartment building a mere six years ago. The agreement meant their investment group received a 100% tax abatement from 2019 to 2029 and a 50% reduction from 2030 through 2044.
Now, The Grand is saying that crime in this corner of downtown Kansas City — one block from the city’s flagship arena and biggest entertainment district — has gotten so bad that it needs an additional ten-year 100% tax abatement on the building, until 2039, to make the numbers work.
“There is not another building in all of downtown that’s been more impacted by shootings and violent crime and property crime than our property,” Mesmer said. “We have a property at 531 Grand, six blocks away, that doesn’t have any of these issues. It has a waitlist to get in.”
He described a doom loop of rising expenses and declining income at The Grand: new surveillance systems, building repairs, 24-hour private security, less occupancy, lower rents, higher turnover costs. Last year, Mesmer said, they invested another $5 million into the project to pay down debt after lenders balked at refinancing the full amount.
“We are trying to prevent additional blight from moving back into a place where both we and PIEA have made a significant investment,” Mesmer said. “This is a protection of an earlier bet we both made. We can’t be the only ones fighting this fight. You can only go so far.”
Will PIEA approve?
PIEA chairman Tom Porto told The Star he isn’t aware of any past instances where a project with a PIEA abatement came back to renegotiate because of crime-related financial issues.
“One concern I have is that if we say yes here, we might start seeing similar requests from other projects,” Porto said.
He said a hearing date has not been set for The Grand’s request, and that it would only need to be approved by PIEA, not the full city council.
But The Grand has been aiming for buy-in from City Hall nonetheless. In their letter to PIEA, Swords and Mesmer wrote that Lucas and Kansas City’s 4th District Councilmen — Crispin Rea and Eric Bunch — “have agreed to support our request for financial relief in the form of a revised real property abatement structure.”
Lucas said that’s not quite true.
In a statement to The Star, he noted that when his office supports an incentive proposal at a mayor-appointed board or commission, he typically sends a letter communicating that support.
“We have not yet done so here,” Lucas said.
He added that his staff will continue to review the “first-offer proposal from The Grand” and that he expects PIEA’s staff to review how the property tax abatement would affect taxing jurisdictions like Kansas City Public Schools, who would miss out on funding.
“We await the outcome of that work,” the mayor said.
Bunch did not respond to requests for comment. But Rea confirmed his support for The Grand’s request in an interview with The Star.
“We are facing a serious housing shortage,” Rea said, “and if we’re not working collaboratively with folks who provide housing we won’t make our way out of it. And that’s especially true for midtown and downtown redevelopment projects like The Grand, because we get more bang for our buck when we don’t have to build new infrastructure.”
The Grand filed its request with PIEA in late July. That was before Kane Taddese, 24, and John Alfaro, 18, were killed on August 24 in the parking lot that sits between The Grand and T-Mobile Center.
That double homicide compelled Mayor Lucas to introduce an ordinance requiring surface lot owners near entertainment districts to taken great security measures, calling unmaintained lots a “breeding ground for crime.” Owners of lots in the Central Business District, 18th & Vine, the Plaza, Westport, and the Crossroads to get police permits, carry $1 million in insurance, and provide fencing, lighting, surveillance, and annual inspections, KCUR reported.
The incident also spawned a lawsuit. The Grand sued two LLCs associated with Copaken Brooks, the commercial real estate firm that owns the lot, saying that despite ongoing nuisance complaints over noise, drug use, loitering, and gunshots, the firm has taken no adequate steps to secure or surveil the lot, causing economic damage to The Grand.
Attorneys for the LLCs have not filed an answer to the complaint, and Copaken Brooks principal Jon Copaken did not respond to a request for comment. Mesmer declined to discuss pending litigation.
This story was originally published October 23, 2025 at 6:00 AM.
