Kansas City's land bank holds 3,580 properties — and dispositions have ground to a halt

Drive through parts of Kansas City's east side — Blue Hills, Washington Wheatley, the neighborhoods flanking Prospect and Indiana — and you'll see them. Vacant lots with overgrown grass. A chain-link fence around nothing. A concrete slab where a house used to be. These aren't just empty parcels. Many of them belong to you. Or rather, to the city government that represents you.

Kansas City's Land Bank and Homesteading Authority holds 3,580 properties right now. That's not a typo. The city is one of the largest landowners on its own east side, sitting on thousands of residential lots it acquired over the past decade. And the program designed to move those parcels back into private, productive use? It's essentially stalled.

The data tells a story in three acts: a massive wave of acquisitions after the foreclosure crisis, a promising stretch of dispositions in the mid-2010s, and then — starting around 2020 — a near-total shutdown of the pipeline.

The big picture: a pipeline that opened wide and then shut

The land bank's story really starts in 2013. That year, the city acquired 3,639 properties in a single sweep — likely the downstream result of bulk tax-foreclosure transfers following the 2008 housing crisis. It was, by an enormous margin, the biggest year in the program's history. Subsequent years brought smaller but still significant batches: 930 in 2015, 747 in 2014, 350 in 2016. By 2020, annual acquisitions had slowed to around 100. By 2021, they'd dropped to 5.

On the other end of the pipeline, dispositions — sales of land bank properties back into private hands — tell a more encouraging story, at least for a while. The city sold 19 parcels in 2013, ramped up to 290 in 2014, and kept climbing. The peak came in 2018, when 601 properties were disposed. That's the system working as intended: land comes in, gets cleaned up or packaged, and goes back out.

Then it fell off a cliff.

Dispositions dropped to 111 in 2020 — understandable, perhaps, given the pandemic. But they fell further to 82 in 2021. And the dataset shows no sold dates after 2021. Zero. Whether that's a data-entry lag, a policy freeze, or something else entirely, the result is the same: the outflow side of the pipeline has gone quiet while the city still holds more than 3,000 parcels.

It's worth pausing on what that curve means. Between 2014 and 2019, the land bank disposed of roughly 2,700 properties — an average of about 450 per year. If that pace had continued, the city would have worked through most of its backlog by now. Instead, the inventory just sits.

Where the land sits: an east-side story

The geographic concentration is stark, though probably not surprising to anyone who lives in these neighborhoods.

The 3rd Council District — which covers much of the urban core east of Troost — accounts for roughly 2,094 of the currently held properties. That's about 59% of the entire active inventory, concentrated in one district. The 5th District, covering much of the southeast side, holds another 746. Together, these two districts account for nearly 80% of the land bank's footprint.

Zoom in further and the pattern sharpens. The top three zip codes — 64130, 64127, and 64128 — hold 1,974 properties between them. That's more than half the active inventory in just three zip codes, all on the east side. The neighborhood-level data reinforces the picture: East Community Team South (234 properties), Washington Wheatley (214), East Community Team North (185), Blue Hills (137), and North Town Fork Creek (133) top the list.

The disposition rates vary by district, too, and not in the direction you'd hope. The 3rd District has a disposition rate of about 45% — meaning for every property it ever acquired, fewer than half have been sold. The 5th District's rate is lower: around 33%. The 4th District, with far fewer properties, has managed to dispose of about 51%.

Those aren't just abstract percentages. In neighborhoods where vacancy is already a drag on property values, safety, and quality of life, every unsold lot represents a missed opportunity — for a side yard, an affordable housing build, an urban garden, or simply a neighbor.

What these lots are (and what they could be)

Nearly all of the currently held inventory — about 95% — is classified as residential vacant land. Only 134 parcels are commercial vacant, and 18 are industrial. Just 9 are "residential improved," meaning they have a structure on them.

The condition data confirms this: 2,105 properties (68% of current inventory) are described as "vacant lot or land — usable." Another 575 (19%) are "vacant lot or land — little or no use." Only 14 have structures, and most of those are in fair or severely distressed condition.

Where the city has tagged a potential use, the most common designation is Side Yard (1,232 properties), suggesting the primary strategy is selling lots to adjacent homeowners. After that: Affordable Housing (923), Assemblage (817, meaning combining lots for larger projects), Public Purpose (278), and Infill Construction (207). Urban Agriculture accounts for 86.

But here's the catch: 2,154 properties — roughly a third of all records — have no potential use assigned at all. That's not necessarily a failure. Some of these may be recently acquired or still under evaluation. But for a program whose core mission is moving land back into productive use, a large share of inventory without even a tagged plan raises questions about capacity and prioritization.

The 2013 cohort: a case study in stalled momentum

The single best lens for understanding the land bank's performance is the 2013 acquisition class — the largest cohort by far.

Of the 3,639 properties acquired that year, 1,872 remain in "Acquired" status today. That's 51.4% — still owned by the city after more than 12 years. Another 183 are "Reserved," meaning they're earmarked for a purpose but haven't transitioned. Only 1,573 have been disposed.

Put differently: for every two properties the city took on in 2013, it managed to move roughly one back into private hands over the following decade. The other one is still there. Still vacant. Still publicly owned. Still, in most cases, an empty lot on a residential block.

524 properties across the entire dataset are flagged as needing demolition. That means structures are standing — or were standing — that the city has identified as needing to come down before the lot can be reused. Whether those demolitions have happened isn't clear from this data.

What the data can't tell us yet

• Why dispositions stopped after 2021. The absence of sold dates could reflect a real policy pause, a data-reporting gap, or a change in how dispositions are recorded. Without confirmation from the city, we can't be sure.
• What happened after disposition. A property marked "Disposed" left the city's hands — but did it become a home? A garden? Another vacant lot held by a speculator? The dataset doesn't track post-sale outcomes.
• Cost of maintenance. Holding 3,580 lots isn't free. Mowing, boarding, liability, administration — those costs don't appear in this dataset but matter enormously for understanding whether the program is financially sustainable.
• Racial and income demographics of surrounding areas. The geographic concentration is suggestive, but this dataset alone doesn't include demographic overlays. A full equity analysis would require joining with census tract data.

What to watch next

1. Whether 2022-2025 dispositions show up in updated data. If the city has been selling properties but not updating the portal, that changes the story significantly. If not, the stall is real and getting worse.
2. The 3rd District pipeline. With more than 2,000 lots, this district alone could sustain a full-time disposition operation. Any policy changes — community land trusts, bulk developer partnerships, side-yard sale campaigns — will show up here first.
3. Infill construction and affordable housing conversions. Of the 923 properties tagged for affordable housing, how many have actually become housing? That's the metric that matters most for residents.
4. Integration with the dangerous buildings pipeline. Some land bank properties are former dangerous buildings. Connecting these datasets could reveal how long it takes from "dangerous" to "demolished" to "back in productive use" — or whether that chain ever completes.

Methods and sources

• Data covers all 6,356 records in the KCMO Land Bank & Homesteading Authority dataset as of February 14, 2026.
• "Currently held" combines properties with status "Acquired" (3,089) and "Reserved" (491) for a total of 3,580.
• Council district totals combine variant capitalizations (e.g., "3rd" and "3RD") present in the raw data.
• Disposition rate is calculated as disposed count divided by total records for each district.
• Average market value ($7,280) is for currently acquired properties with non-null market value fields. Assessed values are from the market_value_year field, most commonly 2019.
• Potential use counts reflect the primary (first-listed) use in multi-use fields and may undercount secondary uses.
• Source: KCMO Land Bank & Homesteading Authority
• Processed file: data/processed/kcmo-land-bank-2025.json