Coping With Kansas City Housing Hot Mess

Credit where it's due . . . We appreciate the follow-up navel gazing from our prog blog betters . . . 

"Ostensibly about teacher housing and the conversion of a long-unused school building into apartments. In reality, it is about what happens when layers of failing policy become tangled together into a kind of municipal rat king—housing restrictions, bureaucratic inertia, school dysfunction and neighborhood vetoes all knotted together until even basic governance seems nearly impossible.

"To start, Kansas City has increased housing costs through overlapping layers of zoning restrictions, costly approval processes and regulations, procedural delays, historic preservation constraints and even neighborhood opposition to new density.

"Mind you, Missouri is not California—almost all measures indicate our housing is more affordable than elsewhere. But local regulations, procedural hurdles and political resistance clearly still distort housing markets enough to make such housing difficult to build."

Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com link . . .

How one vacant Kansas City school became a monument to Missouri's housing dysfunction * Missouri Independent