Kansas City doesn’t need more luxury towers, it needs engineered missing-middle housing

Missing middle housing Kansas City neighborhoods actually need isn’t being built — and Maximillian D. Howell has watched this gap widen across the urban core for more than two decades. Drive through any revitalizing Kansas City corridor today and you’ll likely see one of two extremes: a gleaming tower with rooftop amenities priced for high earners, or a vacant lot that’s been sitting empty since the last cycle of disinvestment. What you won’t find nearly enough of is the middle — duplexes, fourplexes, courtyard apartments, and small mixed-use buildings that house working families, teachers, tradespeople, and seniors at rents they can actually afford.

That gap isn’t accidental. It’s the predictable result of financing structures, zoning codes, and developer incentives that have systematically discouraged exactly the housing type most communities need. After 25 years of urban development in Kansas City, Missouri, the pattern is unmistakable: the market builds what the incentives reward, and right now, the incentives are badly misaligned.

The Current Landscape: What’s Being Built vs. What’s Needed

Kansas City has attracted real investment in recent years. Downtown and the Crossroads have seen genuine transformation. That progress is real and worth acknowledging. But a closer look at the pipeline reveals a concentration problem: the majority of new residential units being added are either luxury rental towers targeting households earning well above the area median income, or heavily subsidized affordable housing projects that require stacked layers of Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) financing to pencil out.

The missing middle — housing for households earning 60% to 120% of AMI — is largely absent from that pipeline. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, this income band represents the largest share of American renters, yet it’s the segment most underserved by new construction. In Kansas City, Missouri, that means nurses, electricians, municipal workers, and small business owners are competing for a shrinking supply of older housing stock while new units are built for a narrower demographic above them.

What most observers miss is that this isn’t a market failure in the traditional sense — it’s a systems failure. The zoning codes, the construction cost structures, the financing instruments, and the permitting timelines all converge to make a 48-unit courtyard apartment building nearly as complicated to develop as a 200-unit tower, with far less revenue to absorb the overhead. The incentives don’t match the need.[/P>

Why the Engineering Approach Changes the Equation

Maximillian D. Howell’s background runs through Ford Motor Company’s manufacturing automation division before moving into Kansas City urban development — and that background shapes how he diagnoses housing production problems. In manufacturing, when a production line consistently fails to deliver a product category, you don’t blame the market. You examine the system: the inputs, the constraints, the feedback loops, and the cost structure. Then you reengineer it.

Applied to missing-middle housing, that systems lens reveals several specific leverage points. Construction costs for smaller multifamily buildings are disproportionately high on a per-unit basis because they can’t achieve the economies of scale that large towers enjoy, yet they carry similar soft costs — architecture, permitting, environmental review, legal, and financing fees. Reducing those soft costs through streamlined design, modular construction approaches, and early engagement with city planning offices can shift the economics meaningfully.

LEAN thinking — the methodology Maximillian D. Howell applied at Ford and later brought to Kansas City development — focuses relentlessly on eliminating waste in the production process. In construction, waste shows up as redundant inspections, design rework, procurement delays, and financing gaps that extend timelines and inflate costs. A disciplined, engineering-driven developer attacks those inefficiencies directly rather than accepting them as the cost of doing business.

Explore Maximillian D. Howell's development and consulting services for a closer look at how this approach is applied in Kansas City projects.

The Innovative “Affordable Market Rate” Model

One of the more consequential frameworks to emerge from 25 years of Kansas City development is what Maximillian D. Howell calls the “affordable market rate” housing model. The premise is straightforward but its execution requires precision: design and construct missing-middle units at a cost basis low enough that market-rate rents remain affordable to moderate-income households, without relying on deep subsidy stacks that add years to a project timeline and restrict tenant eligibility.

This is different from traditional affordable housing development, which typically layers LIHTC, HOME funds, CDBG grants, and other public subsidies to serve households at 30% to 60% of AMI. Those programs serve a critical need, and Maximillian D. Howell has extensive experience navigating them — including recognized expertise in HUD grants and LIHTC syndication. But subsidy-dependent models can’t scale fast enough to address the full housing gap. The affordable market rate model targets the layer above: households who earn too much to qualify for subsidized housing but too little to afford what the private market is building.

The Small Business Administration's real estate financing resources offer one underutilized tool for smaller-scale developers working in this space, particularly for mixed-use projects that combine residential units with ground-floor commercial space.

What Kansas City’s Zoning and Policy Environment Can Do

The developer can only work within the rules the city sets. Kansas City, Missouri has made incremental progress on zoning reform, but the gap between policy intent and ground-level reality remains significant. Parking minimums that require more square footage for cars than for people, setback requirements that make small-lot development impractical, and design standards written for larger projects all add friction to exactly the building types the city claims to need more of.

For community leaders and municipal officials engaging with this issue, the most productive frame is not “how do we get more affordable housing?” but “how do we remove the barriers that prevent the private market from building it?” Those are different questions with different answers. The first tends toward subsidy programs. The second tends toward regulatory reform, streamlined permitting, and cost-basis reduction — tools that scale without requiring public dollars on every project.

Maximillian D. Howell has worked closely with neighborhood associations across Kansas City — including five years as Vice President of the Wendell Phillips Neighborhood Association — and the consistent observation is that residents want density done well, not density avoided. A well-designed fourplex on an infill lot is a neighborhood asset. A vacant lot is not.

The Path Forward: Discipline, Precision, and the Right Projects

Kansas City doesn’t have a housing problem it can build its way out of with luxury towers. It has a housing problem that requires disciplined, engineering-driven development of the right product types in the right locations at cost structures that serve the workforce that makes the city function.

That means smaller projects, more of them, built by developers who understand both the financing structures and the construction process well enough to extract efficiency at every stage. It means zoning environments that reward missing-middle typologies instead of penalizing them. And it means capital partners willing to accept the moderate but stable returns that workforce housing generates, rather than chasing the yield projections of luxury product in a market that may not sustain them.

The Howell Method — built on discipline, sacrifice, and persistence — has guided Kansas City development work for over two decades precisely because those values align with what missing-middle housing actually requires: patience with the process, precision in the execution, and a long-term orientation toward community building rather than a quick-exit financial play.

To learn more about this approach or explore partnership opportunities, visit Maximillian D. Howell's professional background and development philosophy or connect through the contact page at MaximillianDHowell.com. For direct conversation, reach Maximillian D. Howell at 913-704-6740.

The towers will keep getting built as long as the incentives favor them. The question for Kansas City is whether it will reengineer those incentives before the missing middle disappears entirely.

*This article provides general information about housing development and urban policy. It does not constitute financial, legal, or investment advice. Consult a qualified professional for guidance specific to your situation.*