Residents of Kansas City in Missouri and Kansas should soon start seeing messages trying to persuade them about the need for new home construction. These alerts will arrive via phone, email, social media posts and U.S. mail, and all with one directive: Let builders build.
“We’re going to try to surround our audience,” said Will Ruder, executive vice president of the Home Builders Association of Greater Kansas City, about his organization’s comprehensive media strategy. “There is a lot of competition for the attention of busy people.”
The association's “Let Builders Build” campaign is urging residents to become familiar with and understand the political and regulatory challenges holding back housing development in the bistate city, according to Ruder.
Kansas City, a city that straddles the border between Missouri and Kansas, has seen a 12% population increase since 2010, translating to roughly 240,000 new residents, according to information from the Census Bureau.
“Kansas City is a market that is growing in 360 degrees,” Ruder said. “Our housing production continues to lag.”
Ruder estimates the city is shy of the tens of thousands of homes and rental units it requires, and that is driving up prices.
The problem, Ruder said, stems partially from Kansas and Missouri being two of only six states in the nation that do not have statewide construction standards. As a result, he said, “All of the regulation for what can get built, and where, is done at city hall and in county courthouses."
Dozens of building codes
The builders association’s geographical reach covers dozens of permitting jurisdictions. “That’s 69 different versions of the building code, development code, planning and inspection regimes,” Ruder said.
Planning consultant Abby Newsham is familiar with how disjointed zoning and building standards kill projects. As the founder of the nonprofit Small Developers of KC, she works with what she calls “citizen builders” to transform small properties into community assets.
“In the urban core, we have all these vacant lots and legacy abandoned buildings that are not interesting for corporate real estate companies,” she said. “It’s just not what they do.”
She said that many of her citizen builders may only take on one project in their lifetime, and she has seen the demoralization of people who wind up unable to get through the labyrinthine policies of multiple planning departments.
“If you’re a small builder, and you have to hire an attorney to get through the planning process, you’re done,” she said. “You shouldn’t have to hire an attorney to renovate a little building to have a coffee shop or something.”
The website for the campaign, letbuildersbuildkc.com, breaks down the type of obstacles the association is asking the public to help lower or eradicate, including permitting delays, burdensome environmental regulations and inconsistent building codes.
In some instances, old codes have been left on the books from decades ago without acknowledging changes in the urban landscape that have happened since, Newsham said.
Burdensome process costs homebuyers
She described one project to build single-family homes in an urban neighborhood. “The code did not have any standards that aligned with the reality that was on the ground,” she said. Specifically, the builder was unable to match the written density requirements, even though the neighborhood that was there already didn’t match them either.
“The reason you don’t have a lot of small-scale developers is because it’s harder for them to mitigate the risk associated with a project,” Newsham said. “There’s a lot of risk that is out of our control. But there are things that we can control as a locality. Zoning processes, how we interpret codes, assurances in the overall development process.”
Homebuyers, Newsham said, suffer the consequences of these barriers. “The costs to get through all these additional processes … all of that red tape gets passed through to the buyer of the housing, I would say unnecessarily.”
The campaign doesn’t promote particular candidates as the association has a political action committee for that. Still, it is inherently political. “A lot of this is emphasizing the need for people to get out and vote and determine their community’s leadership,” Ruder said.
Ruder said he wants people to stop focusing on decisions coming out of Washington and to pay more attention to what's happening in Kansas City.
“Whatever housing woes you may have, the first place to start is not at the White House," he said. "What does your city’s posture toward housing look like? It’s about creating the education that housing starts at the local level, so don’t skip a city election.”
Ruder couldn’t supply a budget estimate for the campaign as it is somewhat open-ended. He sees the messaging effort as integral to the association's future and hopes it leads more people to turn to the group as an information source for building in the Kansas City area.
“There’s no terminal point where we’ve solved the housing crisis,” he said. “We’re looking at making continual improvements, and that’s going to require continual communication.”