Editor’s note:
It’s no secret: housing is one of Johnson County’s hottest topics.
The Post hears frequently from readers who voice concerns about why it seems so hard to find an affordable place to live in this place we all call home.
From older adults who are stuck in their home because they can’t afford a new mortgage on a smaller home or condo, to young couples struggling to buy or rent in the community where they want to send their children to school, to middle-class professionals, like teachers and police officers, forced to live outside the cities they work because the cost of living here is too high.
We wanted to try to start to find some answers.
Over the past year or so, Post reporter Kaylie McLaughlin dug into Johnson County housing data, interviewed dozens of local officials and developers and also talked to real people searching for a home.
In the course of her work, she discovered that home builders and developers simply aren’t building enough housing stock to keep up with demand.
The first part of this series introduces the data we looked at, as well as some of the factors that contribute to the housing shortage in Johnson County. We also put real faces to the data, sharing stories from readers who shed light on their personal experiences of trying to find somewhere to rent or buy here.
Later this week, we’ll explore some of the factors that contribute to high housing costs and low availability of homes, as well as some small-scale solutions communities across Johnson County are working on.
We recognize that housing is one of the most complex issues facing Johnson County and the U.S. more broadly. This series only grazes the surface, but we have to start somewhere. We hope this series explains the topic a bit more for our readers, while making room for nuance, and equipping readers with the information they need to better understand an issue that impacts all of us.
By the time Katy Thompson and her husband, Mike, had all their children grown up and out of the house, they were looking for something different than their split-level single-family home in western Shawnee.
Thompson, a former teacher in her 50s, had her heart set on a smaller ranch-style home on one level.
So in 2022 they decided to sell their home and planned to rent a duplex for a year while they looked at what was on the market.
“The market wasn’t great, obviously, because I made a ton of money on my house, but I wasn’t going to go pay [a lot] for a way [smaller] house,” Thompson said.
A year passed, but the kind of home they had envisioned buying remained elusive. Meanwhile, the duplex they were renting had maintenance issues, so they decided to move into a nearly brand-new apartment in Lenexa.
Now, three years since they sold their home in Shawnee and three moves later, they’re still renting and paying roughly the same amount as their old monthly house payment for significantly less space.
“It’s just been a nightmare,” she said. “I wish I hadn’t sold my house, and I’m telling all my friends, ‘Don’t sell your house’ now.”
Johnson County’s housing shortage is getting worse
Thompson isn’t alone. A housing shortage in Johnson County exacerbates situations like hers. The low housing supply across Johnson County, combined with high demand, leaves many in the lurch or stuck in financially unsustainable living arrangements.
A landmark countywide housing study released nearly five years ago tried to put a number on Johnson County’s housing shortage. It laid out goals for the number of new housing units that more than a dozen local cities needed to build in order to meet demand.
Building permit data obtained by the Post over the past several months in those communities shows the situation hasn’t improved. In fact, the shortage has only gotten worse: Johnson County currently faces a roughly 3,500-unit deficit when it comes to housing, putting the cities that participated in that housing study collectively even further behind on achieving the study’s goals of having enough housing to meet demand.
At the same time, barriers to addressing the shortage persist. Entrenched opposition to changing residential landscapes has lingered, and in some cases, only deepened. Costs to develop housing continue to skyrocket as land values, materials and labor costs all climb.
Still, across the county, local leaders bill the lack of housing as one of the biggest problems facing the community. In local elections this November, the need to improve housing affordability remained a key talking point among candidates running for mayor and city councils in their respective cities.
Some local officials, community groups and cities have taken steps to try to address it, but a dearth of actual, widespread solutions to address the issue continues.
This week, the Post is tackling the broader issue of housing and will publish a series of in-depth stories that drill down on some of those specific issues that continue to get in the way of addressing the wider housing shortage. An additional story also looks at some of the smaller-scale solutions communities and local groups are trying in order to at least begin to address the problem.
“We don’t have enough of anything”
Johnson County’s housing shortage has been a problem for years — part of a national trend following the 2008 recession — but the aforementioned housing study quantified the problem with hard numbers for several cities and offered concrete recommendations for improvements.
In early 2021, United Community Services of Johnson County released the county- and city-backed housing study they had facilitated with the help of a Kansas Health Foundation grant detailing a broad housing shortage and high occupancy rates in the community. The study, along with an associated toolkit that UCS released later, offered solutions and suggestions for change.
Within those resulting documents were a series of specific recommendations for 13 Johnson County cities to add a certain number of rental and owner-occupied housing units annually through 2030. Each city profiled in the study came with detailed looks at its own unique housing situation as well as solutions tailored to those circumstances.
Some solutions focused on straightforward barriers to housing development, like neighborhood opposition. Others emphasized more inconspicuous barriers, like the cost of it and zoning.
The picture painted by the UCS study illustrated gaps in the housing system across Johnson County.
More than a year of reporting, a series of public records requests, and dozens of interviews with industry leaders, local officials and community development directors in multiple cities revealed that several of those issues endure or have gotten worse in the past five years.
Johnson County cities, for the most part, continue to experience housing shortages amid high demand. While some communities have made strides to address the challenge, gaps remain, particularly in some of the county’s largest cities.
“We don’t have enough of anything, and we need to build something of everything,” Overland Park Assistant City Manager Jack Messer told the Post in late 2024.
And it’s not just affecting empty nesters looking to downsize; the shortage is also putting pressure on families wanting to buy their first homes, as well as renters who are getting priced out.
Michael Loya, a nearly lifelong Johnson County resident, and his fiancée Valorie Salgado have been searching for a home in Johnson County for their family. In the meantime, they’ve been renting an apartment in Overland Park for themselves, their 1-year-old daughter and his fiancée’s child from a previous relationship.
But high prices are forcing them to look outside of Johnson County, probably on the Missouri side, where Loya said he isn’t seeing the amenities he grew up with and wants for his family.
“It’s just not really what I was hoping to be working with,” said Loya, who is a full-time technician at Walmart and a part-time IT student. “The vast majority of what’s available is extremely overpriced and outside of my budget.”
It’s become so frustrating that Loya has started to think maybe there’s something to the narrative that people like him, who aren’t wealthy, are being pushed out of Johnson County. And he doesn’t think local leaders are doing enough on the housing front.
“The agenda here is for rich people to live here and to push the poor people out,” Loya said, adding that with rising rent, he’s not even sure he can afford to stay in the apartment his family is living in.
What does the data say about housing in JoCo?
When UCS was drafting the housing study, the idea was to give cities “tangible data” about the specific housing situation in their respective communities, former executive director Julie Brewer, who currently sits on the Board of County Commissioners, told the Post earlier this year.
That’s something she recalls the cities specifically asking for and that the study delivered.
Data obtained by the Post shows that while some cities are making progress toward the housing study’s goals, others aren’t keeping up. When taken collectively, the communities in the housing study’s analysis fell short of the study’s goals by more than 3,500 dwelling units from 2021 to 2024.
Kristy Baughman, the current executive director of UCS, put it succinctly: “Things have not improved.”
Cities like Spring Hill and Merriam have exceeded their goals, whereas Overland Park, Prairie Village, Gardner, Lenexa and Olathe are falling behind. The remaining cities analyzed in the study, including De Soto, Edgerton, Leawood, Mission, Roeland Park and Shawnee, are on par with or nearly where the study says they need to be.
Each city has a different situation when it comes to housing, and the housing permit data tells a distinctive story from city to city.
For example, Shawnee has remained on pace with its goal, even though the number of new building permits slowed dramatically in recent years.
That’s because Shawnee signed off on more than 800 permits for new multifamily and single-family housing units in 2021 alone, but approved just about 100 in 2024 following several years of tense debates among city leaders over whether multifamily housing developments belong in the city and where.
Shawnee declined the Post’s request to speak to the city’s community development or planning officials for this story.
On the other hand, Overland Park and Olathe have the largest average annual housing construction needs by far, with a goal of more than 1,400 and roughly 900 new units per year, respectively. So, even though both cities have approved more housing permits than any of the other cities the Post tracked between 2021 and 2024, they’re both falling short of the goals laid out in the housing study.
However, Olathe and Overland Park city officials have said they believe there is space for housing development, particularly more diverse housing options.
“There’s certainly growth and things to come,” said Cody Kennedy, Olathe’s spokesperson. “But we’re trying to make sure that regardless of who you are, Olathe is a viable destination for you to live here.”
(Find a more comprehensive look at the housing situation in your city here.)
The Post’s methodology and some caveats
To calculate progress toward these per-unit goals laid out in the housing study, the Post utilized building permit data, or the number of housing units that have received building permits in a city from 2021 to 2024.
The Post only requested this data from cities with specific unit goals in the housing study, which leaves out some smaller Johnson County cities and omits residential development in the rural unincorporated areas of Johnson County.
Permit numbers do not distinguish whether a housing unit is owner-occupied or a rental, and they also do not consider what housing developments a city may have already approved or are actively under consideration in a calendar year. Additionally, permit numbers do not factor in the cost of the dwelling unit to own or rent.
The number of permits, though not a perfect metric to measure actual development, does offer a look at the number of potential new housing units that may be built in a given city in a calendar year, offering an approximate look at the current and future housing situation.
More housing “would only benefit everybody”
While the housing study and resulting toolkit themselves are not legally binding, and there’s no penalty for cities that do not follow through on the goals of the study individually or collectively, there are implicit consequences for people who live or wish to live in Johnson County.
Travis Schram, president of Overland Park-based GRATA Development, said the lack of housing puts pressure on everyone looking for options across the cost spectrum.
“Johnson County specifically does not have enough housing at all price points,” he said. “People in lower-priced homes can’t move up to their next home because there’s nothing for them to move into, right? And the people in their second home can’t move into their third home because there’s nothing to move into, and so the housing market is essentially frozen.”
That market freeze also comes as Johnson County’s stock of homes valued at $350,000 or less has nearly halved over the past 25 years, declining precipitously in the previous 10 years or so. In 2000, there were 117,609 homes in Johnson County at that price point or lower. Now, there are fewer than 50,000.
The current situation makes it harder for nearly everyone to find the right housing options for their situation, whether they’re a retired adult wanting to downsize, a young professional trying to get their start, a family looking for their first home, or a public employee who wants to live in the community they serve.
Pat Forman, a retired widow living in Olathe who returned to Johnson County a couple of years ago after living out of state, is finding it hard to buy a home that’s even remotely close to meeting the criteria she’s laid out for herself. Feeling stuck in a house that’s much too large for just her, she’s started looking for a smaller home or an owner-occupied unit in a duplex under $500,000, but she’s coming up short.
“The pricing has just gotten out of hand,” Forman said. “You work your whole life and you have this savings, but you don’t want to blow it all.”
At the same time, because options are so few and get snatched up so quickly by other buyers, she feels “pressured” to buy something, even when it’s not the right fit.
“Everything moves real quick, so I feel pressured to jump on something, and I don’t want to feel pressured like that, but that’s how it feels,” Forman said.
Aside from the challenge of supply, the cost of housing can also be a factor and eat into other areas of people’s lives, said Baughman, the executive director of UCS.
“When you’re paying a larger proportion of your income on housing, you are struggling to save for emergencies. You’re struggling to save for retirement,” she said. “You’re struggling maybe to buy healthy food, you are maybe working more than one job, and you’re not spending as much time with your family as you would like to spend with your family. So housing costs can impact so many different parts of people’s lives.”
Housing cost and supply can also impact the community’s health. Results from a Community Health Assessment study released earlier this year by the Johnson County Department of Health and Environment revealed that the high cost of living — and the role housing costs play in that — remains one of the largest local impacts on health.
With that in mind, Baughman said, “Increasing our housing stock would only benefit everybody in the county.”
“This is not where I wanted to be in life”
For now, Johnson County’s housing shortage leaves people like Thompson, the former teacher, stuck.
She said she feels trapped in a never-ending rental loop. Thompson still hopes to find that ranch-style home, though she fears that vision is getting further away.
For one thing, she and her husband had to take on some debt to cover some unforeseen financial changes.
“I would still love to find that, but because of our financial situation,” she said, “it’s going to take a while for me to be able to.”
If nothing else changes, Thompson thinks it’ll be a year or two before they can scrape together a good down payment and pay off the debt.
Even so, she said she’s having to rethink what she’s looking for because prices for older homes are increasing. That leaves her potentially settling for something that needs a lot of work or pushes her out of her price range.
All of it is “very depressing,” she said, and makes her feel like she isn’t “good enough” to live in the community she’s long called home.
“This is not where I wanted to be in life,” she said with a mournful chuckle.
Looking back: Housing study finds Johnson County real estate market remains unaffordable for many
