Kansas City’s homelessness strategy will last long past the World Cup | Opinion
As Kansas City prepares to take the global stage for the World Cup, a question echoes through our community: What are we doing about homelessness for the event?
The question reveals a troubling premise, suggesting homelessness is a problem to be tidied up before guests arrive. I want to be direct: We do not have a “World Cup strategy” for homelessness. We have a Kansas City strategy, built on evidence, not optics.
For the past several years, Kansas City has been methodically building the infrastructure required to end homelessness — not for an event, but because the crisis demands it.
We moved away from aimless sweeps toward an approach that transitions people from streets to stability. We established specialty court dockets so that legal hurdles don’t become permanent barriers to housing. We funded the city’s largest low-barrier medical respite program and expanded access to medically assisted treatment, because you cannot solve housing without solving health.
We formed an interfaith coalition to channel the desire of our faith communities into the most effective, evidence-based practices. The city recently held a housing blitz that connected 82 people to temporary housing. On the same day, the city and Hope Faith unveiled new shower facilities on the Hope Faith campus, funded by federal Community Development Block Grant dollars, creating more access to meet basic needs. And our navigation team continues to treat every shelter night as an opportunity to connect someone to a permanent home.
Temporary services launched for the sake of a tournament are not a solution. They may satisfy the urge to “do something more,” but they are a disservice to the neighbors we are trying to reach.
Will we adjust operational capacity during the event? Of course. Any responsible city plans for the disruption that comes with an influx of people. We will flex shelter capacity. We will expand outreach teams. But those are tactical adjustments, not a shift in strategy.
If the World Cup creates a new sense of urgency around homelessness and housing opportunity, I welcome it. I welcome it only if that urgency is channeled as sustained growth for the systems we know work. That is the purpose of the Kansas City Housing Gateway Program, a coordinated homeless response system designed to move people quickly from crisis to stability by aligning outreach, shelter, supportive housing and long-term pathways out of homelessness. The goal is not to make homelessness less visible to tourists. The goal is to make it rare, brief and non-recurring for Kansas Citians.
We do not solve homelessness for guests. We solve homelessness because our city and our residents, including those experiencing homelessness, deserve a solution that lasts long after the final whistle blows.
Quinton Lucas is mayor of Kansas City.