Kansas City’s East Side isn’t a charity project. It just needs priority | Opinion
I have spent years working in community development, affordable housing and neighborhood stabilization across Kansas City’s urban core. One thing becomes clearer the deeper you go: Kansas City does not struggle to find money for what it decides to prioritize.
When leadership believes a project matters, the funding appears. The Country Club Plaza is now tied to a proposed $1.5 billion reinvestment effort. A proposed baseball stadium near Crown Center is approaching $1.9 billion in total investment, with nearly $600 million in public financing behind it. The Power & Light District and One Light, Two Light and Three Light apartment buildings received decades of property tax abatements and layered subsidy at a scale that, applied to community development, would have transformed every disinvested neighborhood east of Troost Avenue. Those projects moved because leadership decided they were important — given the benefit of the doubt, public financing tools and the speed of political will.
When the conversation shifts to the East Side, the standard changes overnight. Every project must be flawless. Every risk must be eliminated. Every return must be immediate.
Housing for working families is held to a stricter financial standard than a hotel attached to a ballpark. Community development is expected to be self-sufficient in Year 1, while sports venues are given decades to make good on their promises. That contradiction is why I have spent several years working on an East Side master planning framework designed to show that this double standard is not only unjust but unnecessary.
The East Side was never a bad investment. It was an ignored one.
East Side rents have increased four to five times since 2000. A recently completed market-rate apartment complex east of Prospect Avenue launched to a 280-person waitlist and is now at full occupancy. That is not charity. That is what happens when someone builds quality product in a market where supply has been withheld for decades.
Institutional investment is arriving. A major health center recently broke ground on a $126 million campus along a primary East Side corridor. A community development corporation is constructing an $80 to $100 million mixed-use project delivering apartments, office space, and public green space. The City Council committed $500 million to Prospect Avenue in June 2025. Multiple East Side neighborhoods carry active TIF designations, Urban Renewal authority, Port KC abatement eligibility and positions within the city’s transit-oriented development framework — the same tools used everywhere else in Kansas City’s development story.
Framework for neighborhood infrastructure
The master planning concept I have been developing brings together anchor institutions, city agencies, nonprofit organizations and community stakeholders to coordinate investment across every phase of East Side development — from rehabilitating vacant properties through large-scale mixed income and commercial projects at major corridor intersections. The concept also includes a developer training component built to produce the next generation of East Side developers through real project experience. Black and Hispanic developers together represent less than 1% of all private developers in the United States. That is not an accident of aptitude. Kansas City has the talent and the pipeline to change that statistic here, in the communities that need it most.
The East Side does not need sympathy. It needs the same tools, the same urgency and the same benefit of the doubt Kansas City extends to every project it decides matters.
I am not writing this to oppose the stadium or the Plaza redevelopment. I am writing this because housing is infrastructure. Neighborhood stabilization produces measurable reductions in crime, improvements in educational and health outcomes and growth in local business activity — economic returns the city collects in reduced emergency costs, increased property tax revenue and a workforce that can afford to live near where it works.
The East Side is not a charity project. It is the most investment-ready underserved geography in this metropolitan area, with documented demand, active institutional anchors, confirmed public commitments and a community that has sustained itself for decades without the investment it deserved.
Kansas City does not struggle to fund what it prioritizes.
The question is whether the East Side is finally a priority.
Terrell “TJ” Jolly is CEO and founder of Integrity Capital Management, a Kansas City-based real estate investment and advisory firm focused on the East Side urban core.