Why did we follow this story?
For months, the Post has been digging into what was behind a sudden drop in interest by developers to consider multifamily projects in Shawnee. We conducted interviews with developers, as well as current and former planning commissioners and city leaders, reached out to every city councilmember and requested a number of public records.
While development proposals and rezoning requests get rejected in every city, nearly every person our reporters talked to for this story said what is happening in Shawnee is different and causing a chilling effect on developers. We felt it was important for readers and Shawnee taxpayers to better understand what’s going on behind this trend and how it could impact Shawnee.
Shawnee is at odds with itself over where future multifamily projects should be built — or if they belong at all in the city.
Over the past few years, debates over how to develop the remaining parcels of land within Johnson County’s third largest city and reimagine its older sectors that are ripe for redevelopment have grown fierce and hostile.
These debates have led to confusing processes where projects are left in limbo and neighbors scramble to block what they see as objectionable proposals in their backyard.
Widespread opposition from nearby homeowners has led to an almost predictable series of events: A project comes before the planning commission; that body supports it nearly unanimously; neighbors come en masse to oppose the project, sometimes with signs, but always citing the same concerns about density, traffic and safety; the city council kills off the project or sends it back to the planning commission. The cycle repeats.
Some fights with developers have landed the city in court, while others have turned vitriolic and devolved into personal attacks. The chaos has chilled developers raising their hand to build these projects that Shawnee’s long-range development plans supposedly call for.
And Shawnee is not alone. How to address a housing shortage and rising home values in Johnson County has been the focus of contentious back and forths in many suburban city halls. Meanwhile, more and more residents are getting priced out of Johnson County.
While building its comprehensive plan — known as Achieve Shawnee — a few years ago, Shawnee was at the forefront of these conversations. The city made intentional decisions to identify areas that nontraditional housing solutions could fit, particularly out west where there’s room to grow and around the downtown core where reinvestment booms.
Now, as some of those plans take shape, residents have pushed back, saying no to multifamily developments, and in effect, saying no to the potential commercial projects that follow.
Since the November 2021 election — a month after the city council adopted the Achieve Shawnee plan — more of the city council outwardly represents a faction of the community intent on keeping Shawnee a “bedroom community” almost exclusively by bolstering single-family neighborhoods and rejecting multifamily housing plans.
Over the past few months, the Post reached out to all current city councilmembers requesting commentary about the city council’s vision for future development. Councilmembers Eric Jenkins, Mike Kemmling, Tony Gillette and Jill Chalfie agreed to speak to the Post on the record.
5700 King: Plans to redevelop old museum go sour
One particular development proposal appears to be a key tipping point that seemingly marked the beginning of the city council’s shift away from supporting multifamily projects, instead cooling toward developments that would bring more density to areas of the city seeing booming demand.
In 2020, Sunflower Development Group, a local developer, proposed building a five-story apartment building at 5700 King St., the site of the old Wonderscope Children’s Museum near the heart of downtown Shawnee.
Neighboring single-family homeowners pushed back hard against the project. However, business owners in the area generally supported the plan because they saw the potential for more customers to support their shops and restaurants with the expected influx of residential growth.
The project, the developer insisted, was formulated at the city of Shawnee’s request, and the Shawnee Planning Commission had unanimously recommended approval.
That November, the city council ultimately voted down the required rezoning, 5-4, dealing a fatal blow to the plan. A valid protest petition from neighbors raised the standard for the project’s approval, requiring at least seven “yes” votes.
At the time, some councilmembers cited concerns about whether the project would fit in with the character of the neighborhood. Just down King Street is the seven-story Bluejacket Lodge apartment building.
“In my mind, if this plan does not move forward, we’re going to have a blighted building on our hands here in downtown Shawnee for quite some time,” Jason Swords, a founding partner of Sunflower, predicted in 2020.
Swords’ words turned out to be true: The building just north of Splash Cove remains abandoned and is deteriorating. Shawnee city councilmembers complained in a July 2022 meeting that the building was becoming a public safety hazard, with a few reported break-ins. (See the minutes here, on pages 46-49.)
A pared-back plan by Sunflower Development Group for the site gained city council approval in 2021, but the project stalled. Swords said his company has no current plans to build there anymore.
“We couldn’t make the numbers work,” Swords told the Post earlier this year, estimating his firm sunk roughly half a million dollars into the failed 5700 King project.
“You know what would be great there today as opposed to what exists, would be 175 to 190 people living in Shawnee, spending money in Shawnee, paying taxes in Shawnee, earning income in Shawnee,” he continued. Instead, “it’s a blighted, abandoned building.”
Beyond the disappointment Swords said he felt at the failure of the project, he and his team came under attack as well, he said.
At city meetings, Swords and other leaders on the project had to be escorted to their cars by police officers, and he said people spit on him.
The city council has rejected other rezoning requests for projects featuring multifamily housing elements across the city as neighbors’ opposition flared, including Austin Homes’ plans to build mixed-density housing near the Woodsonia neighborhood and Sundance apartments at Woodland Drive and Johnson Drive.
Just this week, the Shawnee City Council sent back another multifamily housing plan in western Shawnee called The Zarah, after hearing a litany of the same complaints from residents that sank previous projects like 5700 King. The Zarah project proposes townhomes and apartments.
The Shawnee Planning Commission, which voted nearly unanimously to recommend The Zarah’s approval, will be tasked with reexamining the project’s density and safety plans as well as concerns about flooding and parking.
What the data says: Development chilled
Shortly after 5700 King was scuttled, the Johnson County Community Housing Study — published by United Community Services of Johnson County in 2021 — predicted that developers’ interest in pursuing projects in Shawnee would drop.
One theme that emerged from a listening session conducted for the study about the housing market in Shawnee was the perception that almost all multifamily developments face opposition from neighboring residents.
“Uncertainty for development approvals in Shawnee is high compared to other cities and is starting to deter developers from wanting to build in the city,” one sentence in the study describing the listening session said. (See page 135.)
That turned out to be prescient.
The past few years have seen a sharp decline in developers pursuing rezoning requests and site plan applications in the city of Shawnee.
Five years ago, Shawnee saw 13 rezoning applications come through the planning process. As of mid-May this year, Shawnee had seen just one.
The same can be said of site plan applications as well. Shawnee saw 25 in 2018. By mid-2023, developers and property owners submitted a fraction of that: Five.
One such developer is Kevin Tubbesing, a former councilmember and principal of real estate brokerage company The Land Source.
Tubbesing said he sees the current city council as hostile to multifamily projects, particularly in proximity to long-standing neighborhoods. He and other developers he’s worked with are no longer bringing projects that would have fit in with the city’s long-range land use plan and would have been economically viable.
“We did not bring those projects, so those projects never existed,” Tubbesing said. “We are not encouraging or engaging in multifamily projects in the city at this time.”
One of Tubbesing’s projects near the downtown corridor that would have brought townhomes to the area was withdrawn under mounting opposition in late 2021 and reimagined as a small collection of single-family homes the following year.
Planning Commissioner Kathy Peterson alluded to a chilling effect on development in Shawnee, as well.
In an interview earlier this month, she told the Post that planning commission agendas are smaller and meetings are shorter, as developers shy away from the city.
“Look, I don’t have a crystal ball,” Peterson said. “There is less building going on in Shawnee because there are not projects approved to be built.”
Housing (both owned and rented) in Shawnee reaches capacity
Residents who oppose multifamily projects at city council meetings often say that Shawnee doesn’t need more apartments, and that the apartments already built in the city have high vacancy rates.
“We market the heck out of Shawnee being a single-family community. And it is our trademark,” said Shawnee resident Kendall Herman, a vocal opponent to the failed Sundance apartment project near Woodland Road and Johnson Drive. “And we do not want to compete with Lenexa, Overland Park, downtown Kansas City with their apartments. We kind of like the way things are. …
“My concern is that we may have a surplus of multifamily, which is our weakest housing market, and a shortage of our strongest housing market, which is the single-family homes.” (See Shawnee City Council May 9, 2022, Meeting Minutes pages 31 and 32.)
But a market analysis of the city as described in the Achieve Shawnee comprehensive plan tells a different story.
Shawnee is growing and expects to see the residential population reach nearly 83,000 by 2040, thus generating the need for more housing. (See Achieve Shawnee, Appendix D, page 5.)
Also, included in the analysis are results from the American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2019, which showed that Shawnee’s housing stock of roughly 25,800 dwelling units — about 18,200 of which are owned and 6,400 are rented — was 95% full. That left about 1,100 vacancies citywide.
Looking exclusively at apartment market trends in Shawnee, the city had a vacancy rate of 3.6% during part of 2020.
On top of that, according to the comprehensive plan, Shawnee has older and fewer rental units.
Given their relative scarcity, Shawnee’s “rents in recent years have surpassed the metro-wide average” and the vacancy rate in the units that are available is lower than “market equilibrium.” (See Achieve Shawnee, Appendix A, page 23.)
Over the past few years, people have moved into the Sixty16 apartments in downtown Shawnee and the Westbrooke Green mixed-use development at 75th Street and Quivira Road will add more than 300 units. More units are planned on K-7, close to 75th Street.
How all of these projects could impact the city’s vacancy rate is unclear. And even with these projects opening up new units, Shawnee will need more housing to accommodate its growing population, according to the county housing study.
Some city leaders see comprehensive plan as out of touch
The greater comprehensive plan — land-use map and all — was developed with extensive community engagement and buy-in from stakeholders. That means these recommendations were seen, at the time it was adopted in 2021, as the will of Shawnee’s taxpayers and the broader community.
The city spent at least $250,000 in consultancy fees, plus months of staff time, building it.
Achieve Shawnee prioritizes adding more apartments and to “cluster density strategically” by earmarking land along Kansas Highway 7, Interstate 435, Shawnee Mission Parkway, Johnson Drive and the downtown area.
The now-stalled multifamily project The Zarah in western Shawnee fit exactly into the comprehensive plan by adding apartments and townhomes to the area surrounding both K-7 and Johnson Drive.
Over the past few months, some councilmembers, including multiple who voted for Achieve Shawnee in 2021, have argued for a new comprehensive plan, calling into question the document’s validity as a roadmap for the city’s development.
What is a comprehensive plan?
- Comprehensive plans are used by municipal governments to identify long-term ideal development patterns within their jurisdictions.
- Ken Boone, a land architect with Olsson Studio, said at a spring Shawnee City Council committee meeting these plans can serve as a roadmap for developers who want to build in the city as well as for planning commissioners and city councilmembers tasked with considering those projects.
- These plans usually focus on zoning and more specific land uses and tend to last 10 to 20 years.
- They also are usually approved after a prolonged process of community engagement and public discussion.
- Shawnee adopted their most recent plan called Achieve Shawnee in 2021 — the first new one in roughly 30 years.
As part of the conversation about The Zarah, the city council’s ongoing dissatisfaction with the comprehensive plan reemerged Monday night, with multiple councilmembers suggesting it was time to scrap the plan altogether.
Even Councilmember Chalfie, who offered the lone vote in support of The Zarah project, wondered if it might be time to come up with a new plan. She showed frustration at what she sees as the project’s eventual demise despite its apparent fit with the comprehensive plan — and seemed resigned to her fellow councilmembers’ opposition to multifamily projects more generally.
“We have said that multifamily belongs near the highway, and this is literally between two roads that are called highway,” she said. “So if [The Zarah] does not go here, I think we probably should look at rewriting the [comprehensive] plan to say we just absolutely do not want any multifamily.”
Council President Jenkins said this week that he opposed adopting Achieve Shawnee in 2021 so close to an election, suggesting that he voiced some kind of protest. However, the Post found no evidence of Jenkins’ supposed protests in meeting minutes from past public meetings where the comprehensive plan was discussed.
In fact, Jenkins spoke in favor of Achieve Shawnee in the weeks leading up to its adoption, applauding how well he thought it emphasized Shawnee’s essence.
“We’ve got something special here. We don’t want to lose it. We think we can develop. We think we can do things in concurrence with maintaining that hometown feel. And that’s what we want to do,” he said in October 2021, according to meeting minutes. “So, I’m really happy we captured that and highlighted it significantly in the Comprehensive Plan. So, I just wanted to give you kudos on that and picking that up.”
This week, Councilmember Gillette, who was elected in November 2021 after Achieve Shawnee was adopted, also questioned the validity of the comprehensive plan and what it prescribes for Shawnee.
Gillette blamed the city’s old guard for pushing through a plan that he believes is the wrong path for the city by encouraging multifamily projects he sees as inappropriate for the areas where they’re proposed.
“[The] comprehensive plan is the vision offered by the previous city management, who at multiple levels are no longer with the city staff, and a planning commission mostly seated by the previous governing body members with their shared vision,” Gillette said. “The voters of Shawnee elected this current governing body to reshape that vision.”
Current councilmembers Jenkins, Tammy Thomas, Kurt Knappen, Kemmling and Chalfie were all on the city council when it unanimously adopted Achieve Shawnee in 2021. Gillette is one of three new members elected to the council since the comprehensive plan was adopted.
In Gillette’s view, the people of Shawnee want development that aligns with the city’s “existing communities and neighborhoods of mostly single-family, R-1 homes,” with some “lower-density multifamily developments.”
“Essentially, what the comprehensive plan, that was formulated by the previous council, was multifamily everywhere. And that’s what the citizens are concerned about, and they’re upset about that,” Gillette told the Post. “It’s incumbent on us as a group to respond to that.”
Jenkins worried too that Achieve Shawnee fails to accurately tell developers what is possible to get approved in the city. After all, just about every multifamily project that’s come through this city council has died, stalled or been changed past recognition.
“If we don’t live by our comprehensive plan, then that’s a problem because people use that comprehensive plan in order to make decisions about purchasing a piece of property or what can you develop, that kind of thing,” Jenkins said. “I am concerned about our comprehensive plan sending false signals out.”
Tubbesing, in his interview with the Post earlier this year, seemed resigned to the fact that Achieve Shawnee is basically defunct without the current city council’s support for what’s prescribed in it.
“The land use guide, it talks about certain land areas being supportive of multifamily projects, but that’s not true. So, we just need the documentation that is published by the city to align with council intent,” Tubbesing said, urging the city council to publish “what they’re supportive of.”
Not everyone in Shawnee city leadership seems so keen to ditch Achieve Shawnee outright.
“We want it to be reflective of what the governing body thinks,” City Manager Doug Gerber told the city council in April. “But we also don’t want to change the comprehensive plan every 20 minutes because there are new views, right?”
Mayor Michelle Distler, who is not running for reelection, also warned against making changes to the comprehensive plan, underlining the extensive public engagement that went into building it.
“By saying that we don’t vote for it or we don’t support it,” she said in the most recent city council meeting, “we’re basically saying ‘Well, thank you, all you residents that came and told us what you thought was proper and what you wanted where, but we disagree with you.’”
How to strike a balance between neighbors and developers
In August 2020, several months before the county housing study and attached toolkit were published, Shawnee city leaders discussed a lack of multifamily housing at a Shawnee Chamber of Commerce event.
Half the city councilmembers at that event voiced support for building more multifamily projects in Shawnee as part of the city’s economic development approach.
Jenkins didn’t expressly voice support or opposition for multifamily development but called it “the elephant in the room.” He acknowledged its role in the city’s growth but worried about how it fits in with long-established parts of Shawnee’s community.
“The people of Shawnee aren’t really fond of apartments, new apartments, being put in,” Jenkins said then. “I think that is the truth. This is probably one of the most difficult issues I have to deal with on city council, is proposals for new apartment buildings.”
He urged developers to try to get more buy-in from neighboring homeowners so that multifamily projects can be a “win-win” for all. A few months later, he voted no on the failed 5700 King proposal.
More recently, Jenkins pushed back hard against any insinuation that the city of Shawnee, at the behest of the city council, is against growth and development.
“There’s been these rumblings out there that this is an anti-development council. Really? Look what’s going on. Get a clue people, whoever is saying that is out in left field somewhere,” Jenkins said during a June council committee meeting about the 2024 budget. “I would like to dispel those ridiculous rumors at this point.”
On the contrary, he sees the current city council as the one actually making things happen for Shawnee, alluding to his belief that former city councils were just “mouthing” about development.
“I think it’s a paradigm shift, quite frankly, moving from the ‘BS’ stage to the ‘make it happen’ stage,” Jenkins said.
Some see multifamily as an attack on “bedroom community” culture
Behind closed doors, Shawnee city leaders have explicitly discouraged denser residential developments. In private guidance to the former City Manager Nolan Sunderman, councilmembers steered him away from encouraging such developments in Shawnee.
In an email sent to Sunderman in spring 2022, councilmembers told him he should “embrace the fact that more apartment projects are wildly unpopular, and homeowners want to strengthen Shawnee’s single-family neighborhoods.”
The email, sent by Councilmember Jacklynn Walters on behalf of her colleagues, was part of Sunderman’s annual employment review. Walters’ email outlined goals and objectives for Sunderman in the coming year of his employment, but he resigned a few months later.
“Citizens are very concerned about there being the demise of single-family homes and developments, which is what this community was built upon 30 years ago,” said Councilmember Gillette in an interview with the Post earlier this year. “I’m in favor of apartments and multifamily dwelling, but it shouldn’t be our only answer for development across the city of Shawnee.”
Councilmember Kemmling, who has been on the Shawnee City Council for roughly a decade and is running for mayor this year, echoed similar sentiments in an interview with the Post in August, drawing a stark contrast between Shawnee and some of its neighbors, including Lenexa and Overland Park.
Both of those communities have intentionally grown their urban footprints in select districts with mixed-use and higher-density residential development projects .
“I think some of these really large, really dense multifamily proposals have just not been in line with what’s around it and the surrounding neighborhoods and the character of what we already have in place,” Kemmling said.
He thinks some of the previous multifamily developments, like Prairie Pines Townhomes, shouldn’t have been approved at all. He voted against the project about a decade ago and believes it’s proven “detrimental” now, citing a perceived parking problem.
Not everybody sees the blockade on certain types of development as a net positive for the city.
Peterson, the planning commissioner serving her third term, thinks the city council values the feedback of single-family homeowners who oppose multifamily projects over the community input that informed the comprehensive plan in support of higher-density development.
“I am sometimes disheartened because some of the voices that they hear, it appears that those voices override what may be best for a city of 70,000,” she said.
Randy Braley, a former planning commissioner who resigned because the 5700 King project failed, agreed. He said that he thinks the city council is paying more attention to a vocal minority than the broader community and the city council’s approach to development is “misguided.”
“I would say the current city council’s approach concerning multifamily is a very closed mindset, and, to a certain extent, very aggressive in a negative way,” Braley said in an interview earlier this year. He thinks the governing body “currently seems to be locked into the point of view that apartments are bad.”
Braley worries that approach is locking a big chunk of the next generation of potential residents out of the city entirely.
The cost of being a bedroom community
In the short term, single-family homeowners are already facing the consequences of living in a city that’s historically been closed off to denser residential development.
Councilmember Chalfie, who is not seeking reelection, told the Post that when she was campaigning back in 2019, she heard time and again how badly residents wanted some of the amenities neighboring communities boasted, like restaurants and more retail.
Repeatedly, developers have insisted none of that is possible without increasing housing density in some areas of the city.
“As a developer, I think it’d be better to have more options [for dining and shopping],” said Tubbesing from The Land Source. “The reason why Shawnee has such a small number of retail options, especially in the vein of restaurants and variety of restaurants, is because we do not have the population density that other cities do.”
Tubbesing also warned, if the market wants more of those commercial developments that feature sit-down dining and retail, those opportunities will materialize in other cities. That means money (and tax revenue) that could have stayed in Shawnee is going down the road to neighboring cities instead.
“Anytime you export your dollars, your spending to a neighboring community, that of course has a negative effect,” Tubbesing said, noting that it can bear out immediately in a hit to sales tax revenues and long term in overall property tax collection. “So anytime a citizen of Shawnee would go to J. Alexander’s for dinner in Overland Park, we’re exporting that income that otherwise could be spent in Shawnee.”
Swords of Sunflower Development agreed that adding denser housing options will bring some of the key amenities residents want.
“I’m not saying that they don’t care about progress,” Swords said. “Progress is hard to swallow sometimes, right? And change is hard to swallow. And I think they have the best intentions. But, you need more bodies, you need more commerce to actually grow the city, in my opinion.”
And beyond that, Chalfie sees growing the commercial tax and multifamily residential tax base as a solution to cutting down the individual tax burdens of homeowners.
“We hear time and time again from the dais that we are a bedroom community, but unfortunately, bedrooms then have to pay the taxes to fund our city services,” she told the Post.
But, this week, during the discussion about The Zarah, Chalfie also worried that Shawnee is closing itself off to growth out of a fear of change. At some point, she said, someone else probably opposed building all of these single-family home neighborhoods too.
“Somebody probably thought the traffic was going to be horrendous, and the crime was going to go up, and the density was terrible, and their truck farm was going to flood,” Chalfie said. “It didn’t happen, and now you guys have this great community where you love your neighbors and you found a home. …
“I don’t think it’s like we have to deny that to somebody else because one neighborhood was built before the other. I can’t subscribe to the ‘I was here first, so now nobody else can be here,’” she continued.
Many members of the audience jeered at her and grumbled at her comments, prompting Mayor Distler to gavel the meeting back to order more than once.
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