Solving Kansas City’s affordable housing crisis starts with East Side dirt | Opinion

When people ask why more affordable housing isn’t being built on Kansas City’s East Side, the answers usually focus on financing, interest rates or a lack of developers willing to invest. Those are real challenges. But there’s another obstacle most people never see because it’s underground.

I saw this reality long before I ran for office, and when I became the 3rd District at-large City Council member, I knew we couldn’t talk about urban core affordable housing without first dealing with the land itself.

Kansas City has roughly 17,000 vacant lots. Nearly a quarter of them are in the 3rd District alone. Some are patches of grass. Others are overgrown, filled with trash, or they may have encampments on them. Some fall victim to illegal dumping. To the casual observer, they look ready for new homes. But in reality, many of these parcels are contaminated with toxic materials left behind decades ago.

Contamination comes from our past. Older homes were built with materials we now know are dangerous, like lead-based paint. When those houses were torn down years ago, the debris was left behind. Lead, asbestos and other hazardous substances settled into the soil. In some cases, there are still old foundations, buried basements or even abandoned vehicles deep down in the dirt.

Before a single foundation can be poured, that soil must be cleaned up.

State and federal law regulates the process for safely addressing these issues before new housing can be built. And the cost isn’t small. Cleaning up just one parcel can easily cost more than $30,000. For someone trying to build affordable homes, that up-front expense can make a project financially impossible. So, they walk away. And our neighborhoods are left with persistent blight instead of investment.

This burden isn’t shared evenly across the city. Contaminated vacant lots are disproportionately concentrated in historically Black and lower-income neighborhoods. These are the same communities that have already endured decades of disinvestment and loss due to highways and redlining. When development skips over them again because of environmental barriers, the cycle continues.

And vacant, contaminated lots aren’t neutral. They affect daily life. Imagine standing at the bus stop as a kindergartener, then as a middle schooler and again when you turn 17 — and that same vacant parcel is still there. This kind of blight takes a psychological toll in addition to it being a hazard to health and safety.

That’s why I created Kansas City’s Housing Accelerator. It started as an innovative idea to sell vacant city-owned lots to developers for $1, with the requirement that they rapidly build affordable housing within 18 months. We wanted to move quickly, remove red tape and get homes built where families need them most.

In Washington Wheatley, the neighborhood slated to pilot the Housing Accelerator, an initial assessment tested 51 vacant properties. Every single one of them was contaminated well above regulatory limits. That contamination was driving up development costs far beyond what was deemed to be affordable and stalling new housing.

So, we took a different approach.

Instead of forcing developers to shoulder the cost of testing and cleanup and therefore passing those expenses on to you through higher home prices, we went after federal funding to address the problem preemptively.

Last year, we secured a record $6 million in U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Brownfields Program funding to clean those first 51 lots. That work is now underway. And this month, the City Council unanimously approved my resolution authorizing us to pursue an additional $4 million to clean up 115 more contaminated properties in the same neighborhood.

Beyond Washington Wheatley, my office has also flagged 384 vacant lots in the Blue Valley neighborhood for EPA review.

Unsafe environment raises development costs

It’s the kind of long, hard and unglamorous work that has to happen before development can move forward, even though most people don’t realize it’s what’s holding us back.

For decades, Kansas City leaders have tried to spark development on the East Side. But without addressing these environmental conditions, those efforts were always limited. You can’t build safely on unsafe land.

By cleaning up these lots first, we’re changing the equation. We’re removing a major and expensive barrier to development. We’re making it possible for affordable housing to move forward without saddling future homeowners with higher costs. And we’re sending a clear message: Every neighborhood in Kansas City deserves safe, livable, investable land.

At a time when housing costs are rising across the country, Kansas City is choosing to act.

This work isn’t flashy or attractive. Soil cleanup doesn’t make headlines like ribbon cuttings do. It takes time, and I know how frustrating that can feel. But it’s essential. Clean land is the foundation for safe homes, stable neighborhoods and real investment opportunity.

When a vacant lot becomes a home, it’s more than new construction. It’s a sign of dignity. It’s a sign that a community matters. It’s proof that long-neglected neighborhoods are finally being seen.

Affordable housing starts with the ground beneath us. And on Kansas City’s East Side, we’re finally making that ground solid again.

Melissa Patterson Hazley represents Kansas City’s 3rd District at-large on the City Council.