K-12 Tax Base decline: Kansas City edition
As the core city of a large metropolitan area, Kansas City is designed around — and financially reliant upon — the cluster of white collar office employment in its downtown. Office towers pay a huge share of our commercial property taxes and the people who work in them live in our neighborhoods, go to our schools, and contribute to our earnings tax. They generally choose to live in the city in no small part because it’s where their jobs are. Office towers are a critical anchor of the city, fiscally, demographically, and socially.
And yet this anchor has been eroding for a long time and is now in some trouble. The long-run shift of white collar workplaces to the southwestern suburbs, the explosion of remote work after 2020, and the ongoing pivot of suburban office parks to a model that competes more directly with downtowns are all serious headwinds for KC’s office base.
For just one datapoint, this chart from a 2025 Federal Reserve of Kansas City report shows that occupied office space in downtown has shrunk by nearly 10% since covid while it has grown by nearly 5% in the suburbs
