Kansas City’s World Cup plans target newcomers — not the East Side | Opinion
This June, hundreds of thousands of World Cup visitors are expected to pass through Kansas City. They’ll land at a brand-new $1.5 billion airport terminal, hop on the free KC Streetcar to a gleaming Berkley Riverfront — luxury apartments, restaurants and parks lining the Missouri River. They’ll see a city that looks like it has its act together.
What they won’t see is Troost Avenue.
For decades, Troost has divided Kansas City along racial and economic lines — wealthier, mostly white neighborhoods to the west, historically Black and underinvested neighborhoods to the east. The Berkley Riverfront, the new airport, the streetcar: All of it sits west of Troost. None of it is an accident.
I grew up on the East Side. My parents, refugees from Vietnam, raised our family in a small two-bedroom house in a neighborhood that looked nothing like the glossy riverfront rendering on the city’s website. My elementary school didn’t have air conditioning. I assumed all Kansas City schools were the same. They weren’t. Only the ones on the East Side.
My story isn’t unique. And yet Kansas City’s development strategy treats neighborhoods like mine as an afterthought.
City leaders have been open about their strategy: Build walkable, vibrant neighborhoods full of restaurants and green space, attract young professionals and grow the tax base. The World Cup is the advertisement. Kansas City wants to look like a city worth moving to.
The problem is who pays for that advertisement.
The Port Authority of Kansas City owns much of the riverfront land. To attract developers, it lets some of them pay as little as 5% to 10% of what they’d normally owe in property taxes for the next decade. Port KC argues that some tax revenue is better than none from an empty plot — but that logic ignores who actually benefits. That subsidy reduces tax dollars that would have gone to Kansas City Public Schools, local libraries and the Jackson County mental health fund. And despite promises of citywide prosperity, a 2017 study found Kansas City’s tax break program produced an economic impact close to zero. About 92% of the school funding redirected through these deals went to projects on the whiter, wealthier west side of the city.
Because Port KC is a state-created agency, its projects are exempt from the city rule that requires developers to include affordable units. A studio in one of the Union Berkley Riverfront apartments starts at more than $1,200 a month — out of reach for families whose wealth was deliberately stripped by decades of redlining east of Troost. Meanwhile, East Side schools sit on $300 million in deferred maintenance.
None of this was put to a public vote. Mayor Quinton Lucas — who was born and raised on the East Side — appoints Port KC’s board. His administration approved these deals. He owns this.
Yes, the city has made some improvements east of Troost, such as revitalization of the historic 18th & Vine Jazz District and investments in affordable housing. But Kansas City’s East Side has been funding a waterfront its residents can’t afford to live in, for a tournament nobody asked for, approved by a board nobody elected. That’s not development. That’s extraction.
I know asking people to show up to a Port KC board meeting isn’t a small ask. But the East Side deserves that fight. Kansas City Public Schools has been challenging these tax deals openly and needs backup. And the next time Mayor Lucas talks about what this city is building, ask him who it’s being built for — because it isn’t us.
When the World Cup soccer fans leave in July, the Berkley Riverfront will still be here. So will Troost. The East Side will still have the same underfunded schools, the same deferred maintenance, and the same mayor who chose a riverfront over the communities he supposedly serves.
Raymond Vo is a Kansas City native and college student at Columbia University in New York City.