Ambitious Plan Aims to Bring 500 New Affordable Houses to KCK’s Northeast
One Community Update
January 7, 2026
Source: The Kansas City Star
Kansas City, Kansas’ former Mayor Tyrone Garner said an ambitious project he worked on to bring hundreds of new homes to the city’s northeast side could boost the neighborhood and help erase the invisible dividing line between east and west Wyandotte County.
Officials this month launched the Quindaro Crossings project, which has been in the works for a few years and looks to build up to 500 new houses on vacant lots in areas off Quindaro Boulevard in phases into the early 2030s.
The developers aim to build about 15 new homes per quarter, and prices will start at around $215,000 per new construction home. According to Zillow, the average home value in KCK is about $194,000.
The $94 million project, driven by private funding, will replace hundreds of empty parcels owned by the Wyandotte County Land Bank with houses and duplexes and could bring over 1,000 new residents to KCK’s northeast. Officials said they hope an influx of new residents will also mean new commercial development in the area, including a much-needed grocery store.
The two project areas cover chunks of the city around, roughly, Quindaro Boulevard, Hutchings Street, Brown Avenue and 12th Street; and Quindaro Boulevard, Allis Street, Sherman Street and Manorcrest Drive.
Construction on the first few homes is starting right away in the Hiawatha Street area.
The developers, CJR Construction, plan to use hundreds of lots from the county’s Land Bank, making Quindaro Crossings seemingly the most robust of several efforts taking advantage of government-owned vacant lots to build more housing, especially single family homes, in Northeast KCK neighborhoods. “We’re going to build a micro community within the community that’s already here and revitalize with this rich history in Wyandotte,” Charles Robinson of CJR Construction said at a groundbreaking this month. IMR Homes joins CJR on the development.
The developers are planning on a variety of home designs with one or two stories that will include multiple bedrooms and bathrooms, a garage, living and dining rooms with modern kitchen fixtures.
Quindaro Crossings
The Unified Government is among the county’s largest landowners, with more than 4,300 vacant and abandoned lots in its land bank, the majority of which were once homes.
Properties often become part of the Land Bank through tax foreclosure, which is when the local government takes control of a property when the owner hasn’t paid taxes. If the government isn’t able to sell a property, it’s then absorbed into the land bank, and the government owns it. Such vacant lots can later be sold for development.
Much of Wyandotte’s land bank property is visibly concentrated in the county’s northeast corner, specifically in the area surrounding Quindaro Boulevard, where CJR aims to build.
Michael Sutton, a redevelopment coordinator, has attributed the vastness of the land bank, particularly in northeast Wyandotte, to 20th century redlining and southward and westward flight of the county’s white, wealthy and middle class families. The area experienced decades of economic disinvestment as a result.
For the past five years, the Unified Government has sought to encourage developers — local and large alike — to build on and revitalize its vacant properties at a discounted rate. In that time, developers have built about 150 homes on those lots, according to government staff.
CJR’s new project aims to build nearly 500 homes over the span of seven years.
“This is probably one of the largest slates of Land Bank applications that we have voted on, quite frankly, it might be, in history,” Eighth District Commission Andrew Davis said at a meeting in May.
According to information presented in May, officials will formally check on the project’s progress, including annual reports. The developers have to show work and officials can take action if the project is not coming together.
Affordable housing in KCK
The project so far is privately funded, but the developers could seek public incentives in the future, such as through the Kansas City Area Transit Authority’s START program, Robinson told The Star, which offers support to projects with a focus on transit.
He told county commissioners in April that the development team is using its own money for everything related to infill and the builds, but the KCATA incentive program could be useful to address public works concerns and sewer separation issues in a future phase of the project between 13th Street and 16th Street.
Robinson said the development will also take advantage of a state program that could give homeowners a dramatic rebate on the property taxes they’d owe on their new homes for 10 years, meaning their property taxes would be low for a period of time despite owning a new house.
The new homes will also have a lease-to-own option, and Robinson said the developers will work with neighborhood groups and local organizations to get the word out to potential buyers and help them navigate the process and improve their credit.
Wyandotte County Development
Gayle Townsend, former Wyandotte County commissioner for District 1, said at a groundbreaking that the project will bring much-needed housing to the area that will also be the catalyst for commercial development that people in the area desire.
Townsend said there are people who leave Wyandotte County, even though they have the ability to buy a new home, because the housing stock is not there. She said the Quindaro Crossings project will bring options.
Some neighborhood organizers expressed concerns at a committee hearing in April about neighborhood involvement in the project or the possibility that existing residents could see higher property taxes. At the meeting, Robinson committed to meeting and working with neighborhood associations.
The OCP and Oak Grove associations did not return a request for comment.
Garner, who has also finished out his term, said at the event that he laid out a vision with Robinson and the developers to do better by areas that have been disenfranchised and seen disinvestment for decades in Wyandotte County.
“You should not drive from east to west and see that much of a difference. And there’s that invisible line that I always called the invisible line of economic segregation that we need to tear down,” Garner said. “And so we have to face east, because these people live here. They love their community, just like everybody else. They deserve to have the investments, the goods, the services, the resources and the affordable housing stock that we know that could be available to them.”
Emphasizing other projects and developments around the area, Garner said things are moving.
“We’re going to turn this area around,” he said. “We’re going to take it from blight to bright and make it something that not just people in Kansas City, Kansas can be proud of. We’re going to make it something that the entire metro is going to stop and say, wow, look at what they did in Kansas City, Kansas.”
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