Cameron Seip describes his job as being a connector.

As the executive director of Mo-Kan LECET — the Western Missouri and Kansas Laborers-Employers Cooperation and Education Trust — he tries to make “connections that make sense” among union workers, contractors, developers and governments. All so the union members and contractors he represents are able to create more work opportunities.

Many of the people he deals with in Kansas City are increasingly focused on the area’s lack of affordable housing. Seip has a possible solution in mind.

“The thing I want to focus on — that I feel we can bring opportunity to — is to create the affordable housing that the city keeps talking about,” Seip said. “And do it in a way that we can help people find careers and opportunity that has longevity.” 

So for the past couple of years he’s been trying to make a surprising connection that he says may help solve several pieces of the affordable housing puzzle. He’s been trying to introduce Kansas City builders to union pension investors.

“It’s basically to introduce all the various investors that we have for our (union) pensions … to developers and people who want to build projects,” he said. “But do it in a way that we can ensure that the project can be used for workforce development for the community at the same time.”

This has been done in cities across the country for decades, but would be unique in Kansas City. Union pensions can be harnessed to finance hard-to-fund affordable housing projects. A developer or agency owns and oversees the project, the construction crews swinging hammers are trained from within the community and earn union wages. When the building is completed, rents pay back loans or bonds, community members have learned a valuable trade, and the pension — supported by hours worked on projects — is a little healthier than before.

Seip says he’s floated the idea to several parties, but one is known to have shown early interest. The Kansas City Housing Authority has started early discussions exploring a potential partnership to train community members, fund and work on its ambitious 10-year, $2.6 billion housing development plan. 

The talks with organized labor were first acknowledged publicly May 1. Mayor-appointed Housing Authority Commissioner Tate Williams — also a community housing banker for the Central Bank of Kansas City — described discussions during a Greater Kansas City Regional Housing Partnership forum.

“The Housing Authority has begun forming a relationship with the laborers union,” Williams said. “It’s a really creative partnership that we’re discussing … possibly even financing through pension investments, some of the projects that the laborers union would then construct. And as part of that, would develop a workforce partnership with the residents of the complex in which they’re working.”

Nothing is set in stone. A handful of preliminary conversations, by Seip’s account, do not add up to a deal. But they do present an intriguing possibility that could address several community needs.

Kansas City needs affordable housing, it needs funding for affordable housing, and it will need more trades workers as construction booms locally.

Pension funds tied to organized labor have helped fill funding gaps — in exchange for union labor working on the projects they fund — for affordable housing in cities like Boston, Chicago and St. Louis. The projects trained locals in the trades, and the workers left with union benefits including higher wages, healthcare and a pension.

Here’s how it might work in Kansas City.

Size of the problem(s)

The local affordable housing need is well documented.

The Mid-America Regional Council estimated that the region was short 63,828 affordable rental units in 2023. The Kansas City Housing Authority reported 14,347 applications on its public housing waitlist and 27,523 on its housing voucher waitlist in their 2026 annual plan. 

Meanwhile, the money to chip away at that shortage lags well behind the need.

Because financing for affordable housing is difficult to find, Kansas City voters approved an additional $50 million for the city’s Housing Trust Fund in 2022. Since 2021, it has helped finance the construction or preservation of more than 2,000 units — a small fraction of the local shortfall.

At a February Keystone housing forum, Local Initiatives Support Corp. Greater Kansas City Executive Director Geoff Jolley put the gap between that funding and the demand in stark relief.

“The city has received over $1 billion dollars in requests for the Housing Trust Fund for $75 million worth of funding,” Jolley said. “The need is out there.”

The question of who would build all that housing is its own problem.

Nate Zier, executive director at the National Institute for Construction Excellence, was blunt about it at a May 1 housing forum put on by the Greater Kansas City Regional Housing Partnership.

“The biggest constraint right now isn’t land. It’s not materials — though the prices of materials are certainly cause for concern at times,” Zier said. “A big part of it, if you ask around, it’s the workforce.”

Citing national data, Zier said about 41% of construction workers are set to retire by 2031. He noted that while there are now some strong programs to bring young workers into the fold, the pipeline of qualified professionals behind those about to retire isn’t keeping pace.

“It’s not just a shortage,” he said. “It’s a mismatch between the skills we need and the pipeline that we’ve built.”

The structure of the housing construction industry also doesn’t help.

Residential construction is fragmented compared to commercial construction. Small businesses, subcontractors and independent crews stitch residential jobs together, which means people doing the work have less stability and less access to things like healthcare, retirement and formal training pathways.

“Workforce development isn’t just about keeping people in or getting people in,” Zier said. “It’s about creating a system where they can stay employed and stay active.”

Seip is pitching the union pension funding solution to address all three challenges — a lack of affordable housing, the need for funding and a high demand for a workforce to build it — at the same time.

How union pension-funded housing works

To understand how Seip’s proposal could work, look at South Boston.

Old Colony, originally built in 1940, was one of the Boston Housing Authority’s largest properties, spanning 16 acres and 22 buildings. When the city went to rebuild it, conventional financing wasn’t enough.

Starting in 2010, the Boston Housing Authority partnered with the state housing finance agency and a private developer to redevelop the site in phases. The financing they leaned on came in large part from the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust. The trust pools portions of union member pensions and public employee retirement plans across the country and invests in housing construction.

The AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust has put more than $240 million into redeveloping hundreds of housing units in the Old Colony project so far. Since the trust began in 1984, it has helped finance 632 projects that produced 248,600 jobs and 217 million hours worked nationwide. 

“Cities across our country face an affordability crisis only made worse by the pandemic. In Boston, union capital and union labor are proactively addressing that need,” said AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust Chief Executive Officer Chang Suh in a 2023 release. 

The money came with one condition: Every project funded by union pensions had to be built by 100% union labor. Over the course of the project nearly 2.4 million hours of union labor went into the project. 

“If our (union pension) money is involved in any way, then part of that agreement is that the work will be done with signatory contractors who participate in our apprenticeship and employ our members,” Seip said.

There are currently 31 projects under construction funded in part by the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust nationwide, totaling just under $1 billion dollars from union pensions. Due east down Interstate 70 in St. Louis, the housing investment trust has invested $614.2 million in 32 projects over 30 years.

Seip told The Beacon that his group of laborers unions could tap pension funds beyond the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust to fund housing projects in Kansas City. He said there are also the Laborers International Union of North America’s pensions, largely held by Fengate Capital, and a series of smaller diversified funds from varied union trades and regions. He says the exact funding source that could be used would depend on the specific project.

“Imagine the Mississippi, it’s a huge river and that’s the main source but you also have lots of little rivers flowing into it,” Seip said. “We do these things collectively and that’s how we find these opportunities of strength.”

Workforce development engine

Those investments don’t just build housing.

Boston paired the construction with a nonprofit pre-apprenticeship workforce development program that gave Old Colony residents a path into the construction trades. Residents were also given the first crack at the jobs rebuilding their neighborhoods.

The structure of the workforce pipeline associated with a union pension-funded project in Kansas City hasn’t been finalized, but there are options. In addition to other training programs, East High School is expected to have classes mirroring those of the laborers union’s training center starting this fall. Those classes would allow graduates to enter the union’s apprenticeship at a more advanced stage, not too differently than taking college credits while in high school.

While pre-apprenticeship does not have a union requirement, the next step of apprenticeship would require signing on with a union contractor to work on pension-funded projects. Seip said that is partially because training is paid for by signatory contractors based on the number of hours worked. The same is also true for the union’s healthcare and the pension itself. 

“If we’re the funding device, we’re priming our own pump,” Seip said. “And there’s good reason for (developers) to be interested in that, because the quality of work, the workforce development we do for the community, the way that we combine with the community, it’s really just a lot of upside.”

The Kansas City International Airport is a glimpse of what that training and support could look like. A three-week pre-apprenticeship training program run with construction trades and paid for by the project’s developer graduated about 200 students across 10 classes. About 65% were people of color and roughly 70% remained in construction after they graduated.

Seip stressed that the union was open to everyone, and they would seek to have as many local residents working on these proposed projects as possible.

“The point of hiring local is so that locals can feel the employment,” Seip said. “When you have people that live here, get their paychecks from contractors here, buy their groceries here, you actually feel it within the economy, you feel it through income taxes, it helps the school system, it helps it all.”

Could a partnership in Kansas City work?

“We’re looking at all relationships everywhere,” Seip said. “If somebody wants to meet with us and learn about what our pension investors need for us to all strike a deal, then I welcome all conversations.”

While they are the first to be tied publicly to the idea — at least in early discussions — the Kansas City Housing Authority did not reply to requests for comment.

A partnership could make sense given the housing authority’s stated goals and desire to find unconventional solutions for the ambitious set of projects. 

In November, housing authority commissioners approved a $2.6 billion plan to redevelop all of the city’s existing public housing over 10 years. The multiphase project would result in 7,159 units of new and rehabilitated mixed-income housing. For a project that size, the housing authority’s Executive Director Nona C. Eath said in an interview with LISC in March that it would take some creative partnerships.

“It is going to take everybody. It’s not just a specific group. We anticipate partnering with local, state and federal agencies,” Eath said. “We’re looking at development partners locally, businesses and entrepreneurial groups to see what opportunities exist. We’re talking to resident groups and neighborhoods. We’re talking with financial partners. So, it’s everybody.”

Two other things about the housing authority’s situation make Seip’s pitch line up more closely than it might first appear.

The first is wage law. The housing authority’s federally subsidized projects will almost certainly be bound by the Davis-Bacon act, which requires workers on such projects to be paid prevailing wage. The cost premium often associated with fully union jobsites is negated when prevailing wage is already required by federal law.

Hiring law also points to alignment of ideas. Federally funded projects have mandated hiring preferences for low-income workers and residents of public housing. Seip has described this as key to the union’s mission to invest in the community.

“The idea is to look at the communities within Kansas City, find the ones that would benefit from the most opportunity,” Seip said. “And figuring out a way to inject wages as the opportunity into the community.”

Limitations and unknowns

The first limitation is that the idea is in its infancy in Kansas City, with only conversations and no flagship deals or details just yet.

“This would look like something that we haven’t seen before,” Seip said. “So we have to be ready to pivot in the moment.”

Another challenge is likely to be the 100% union requirement on pension-funded projects. Even setting aside anti-union bias, there is no formal homebuilders’ union in Kansas City. The pool of union signatory contractors in general is also not as deep as in cities like Boston or Chicago. Spreading awareness of the potential opportunity to local contractors and people interested in the trades is a high priority.

“Our membership should have a wide variety of all of the people who are interested in being builders,” Seip said. “We are certainly not gatekeepers. And the only thing that we ask is show up with readiness to join in.”

Political headwinds may also be building as President Donald Trump has proposed a $10.7 billion cut to federal housing programs, including Community Development Block Grants and rental assistance.

What happens next depends on someone, a developer or agency, taking the leap. Seip has a handful of possibilities, but no firm commitments just yet.

For now, the work is focused mostly on introductions — the meetings, the explanations, making the case for a model that has built tens of thousands of homes elsewhere and none in Kansas City. Whether any of it results in concrete and steel will come down to a decision made by a developer or agency.

That choice has not yet been made. But the pieces are in place to make it possible. Pension capital is sitting in trusts that already invest in housing, just not here. A workforce pipeline is being assembled while a housing crisis is deepening by the year. And a man whose job is to make introductions keeps walking into rooms in Kansas City, looking for the person willing to be first.

“To me, it’s the builders of our community trying to solve the problems that we hear everybody talk about, and very few coming to the table with solutions,” Seip said. “The reason that we’re at the table trying to make sure that these projects happen is because everyone benefits when the whole community has the basic needs for what this life requires.”