KC's dangerous buildings list nearly tripled in 2025

There's a list you probably don't know about. The City of Kansas City maintains a public registry of buildings it has officially declared dangerous — structures that are deteriorated, fire-damaged, open to trespass, or otherwise a threat to the people who live near them.

Right now, there are 395 buildings on that list. And the pace at which it's growing should bother you.

In 2025, the city added 192 new cases. That's more than all prior years on the list combined (2017 through 2024 totaled 194). It's a 149% increase over 2024's 77 cases. And the pipeline meant to resolve these cases — through demolition, owner rehab, or any other outcome — has barely moved.

The big picture: an exponential curve

This isn't a sudden spike. If you line up the numbers by year, you can see a curve that's been building for a while — and then broke open.

From 2017 to 2021, the city was adding single-digit or low-double-digit cases each year. Then something shifted. In 2022, the count jumped to 34. In 2023, it was 39. In 2024, it doubled to 77. And in 2025, it nearly tripled again to 192.

To be clear about what that shape means: the list isn't just getting longer. It's accelerating. And the 2025 jump wasn't concentrated in a single month — it was sustained all year. January through June averaged about 16 cases per month. Things dipped slightly in the summer, then surged again in December with 25 new cases.

That consistency matters. It suggests the increase isn't a one-time data dump or a clerical backlog flush. Something structural is driving it — whether that's worsening building conditions, a more aggressive enforcement posture, or (most likely) some mix of both.

The pipeline problem: buildings go on the list, but they don't come off

Here's the part that should worry residents more than the headline number.

Of the 395 buildings currently on the dangerous list, 342 — or 86.6% — are classified as "Ongoing Case." That means they haven't advanced into the demolition pipeline, owner rehabilitation, or any other resolution track.

The rest are scattered across a handful of statuses that suggest glacial progress:

Twenty buildings are in a "Pre-Bid Process" — meaning the city is getting ready to solicit contractors, but hasn't yet. Sixteen have a "Notice to Proceed" for demolition — meaning someone, in theory, has been told to knock the building down. Seven are listed as "Rehab By Owner In Progress." Five are on hold.

One building is "In Bid Process."

That leaves 86 buildings opened before 2024 still stuck in the generic "Ongoing Case" bucket. These are structures the city flagged one, two, five, even eight years ago — and nothing visible has changed in the data.

The oldest cases: nearly nine years and counting

The ten longest-running cases on the dangerous buildings list tell a story that's hard to read without wincing a little.

1815 Paseo was opened in April 2017. It's still listed as "Ongoing Case." That's 8.9 years. It hasn't advanced to pre-bid, demolition, rehab, or any other status.

1505 Westport Rd was flagged in May 2017 and is listed as "Rehab By Owner In Progress" — a status it has presumably held for most of the last 8.8 years.

There are five cases from 2017 still active. Three from 2018. The addresses read like a tour of the urban core's east side: Brooklyn Ave, E 79th St, E Linwood Blvd, Hickman Mills Dr, Manchester Ave, Walrond Ave.

And here's a detail that captures the whole problem in miniature: at least one building — based on other records in this dataset — has had a "Notice to Proceed Issued (Demolition)" for more than seven years. A formal go-ahead was issued, and the building is still standing.

The question behind the question: why is the list growing?

There are two very different stories that could explain a tripling of dangerous building designations, and they have opposite implications.

Story one: Kansas City's aging housing stock is deteriorating faster than the city can respond. Decades of disinvestment in the urban core are compounding. Properties that were borderline for years are tipping into structural failure. This is a crisis of decay.

Story two: The city has ramped up inspections and enforcement. A department that used to flag 10 buildings a year is now flagging 20 a month — not because things got worse, but because the city got more systematic about identifying what was already there. This is a sign of institutional capacity, not collapse.

The honest answer is: this data alone can't tell us which story is dominant. It's probably some of both. But either way, the resolution pipeline is the bottleneck. Adding buildings to the list at 192 per year while resolving almost none is a math problem that only gets worse.

What the data can't tell us yet

• Why each building was flagged. The dataset includes case numbers and addresses but not the specific violation or structural condition that triggered the designation.
• What "Ongoing Case" actually means operationally. Are inspectors revisiting? Are owners being notified? Or are these cases effectively dormant?
• Neighborhood-level demographics. The dataset includes lat/long coordinates, but the Socrata API doesn't expose computed council district fields for this table. A full geographic equity analysis would require spatial joins with census or council district boundaries.
• Buildings that were resolved and removed. This list shows active cases. We can't see the full history of buildings that were demolished, rehabbed, or otherwise closed out and removed from the list.

What to watch next

1. Whether the 2025 pace continues into 2026. Nine cases were added in January alone. If the monthly rate holds, the list could cross 500 active buildings by summer.
2. Whether the demolition pipeline starts moving. Sixteen buildings have a formal notice to proceed. If those don't get demolished in 2026, the backlog becomes its own story.
3. Whether the city publishes outcome data. Right now we can see buildings go on the list, but we can't easily track what happens after. A companion dataset of resolved or demolished cases would make the full lifecycle visible.
4. Geographic concentration. Preliminary analysis of the coordinates suggests heavy clustering east of Troost Avenue and in the midtown east-side corridor. A future article could map this against neighborhood investment patterns.

Methods and sources

• Data covers all active cases on the KCMO Dangerous Buildings list as of February 14, 2026.
• Year-over-year comparison uses case_opened dates for 2024 (77 cases) and 2025 (192 cases).
• Status distribution reflects the statusofcase field at query time — a snapshot, not a historical log.
• "Pre-2024 still ongoing" count (86) is the number of cases opened before January 1, 2024 with statusofcase = 'Ongoing Case'.
• Years-on-list for oldest cases is calculated from case_opened to February 14, 2026.
• Source: KCMO Dangerous Buildings List
• Processed file: data/processed/kcmo-dangerous-buildings-2025.json