Being homeless in Kansas City, Kansas, comes with its own set of challenges. Wyandotte County has no permanent emergency shelters. And it has notably fewer resources and less funding available for homeless services than the Missouri side of the Kansas City area. Yet several agencies in that city and Wichita can help homeless people with […]
Mili Mansaray
Mili Mansaray is The Beacon’s former housing and labor reporter and began covering the beat in 2022. She’s documented the concentration of housing ownership by corporate interests and explored challenges to Kansas City’s homeless shelter capacity. She received training through the Solutions Journalism Network’s labor cohort. She has a bachelor’s degree in digital journalism and Africana studies from New York University. She also studied abroad in Argentina. She was a business reporting intern for the Dow Jones News Fund. She was an audio intern for The Urban Scene with Don Frierson on WGCV 105.1 in Columbia, South Carolina. She has lived in Kansas City since 2022.
Posted inElections
What you need to know to vote as a homeless person in Kansas City
Douglas Zaerr has been voting since he turned 18 years old. Now 61, he last cast his vote on the stadium sales tax in April. He was homeless at the time. He found housing recently, but he’d been homeless for much of the past 10 years — and it never stopped him from casting a […]
Posted inHousing
How green technology is reshaping what buyers expect from Kansas City’s housing market
Twenty years ago, only the most environmentally minded of homebuyers worried much about solar panels, insulation ratings or the value of a heat pump. Today, all those factors matter in a market where energy bills take on growing importance in homebuyers’ calculations. Green home technologies have become more ordinary, even expected (and sometimes mandated by […]
Posted inKansas City
Kansas City home builders push back on energy efficiency rules, blame them for housing crunch
Correction: This story originally misstated which emissions reduction target is related to the city’s energy efficiency goals. It also misstated the number of permits Kansas City issued under the new building code. The Kansas City Council gave homebuilders new rules last year designed to make housing easier on the environment. Those rules told them what kind […]
Posted inHealth
How the Kansas City heat this week, this summer and beyond threatens your health
The sort of heat wave baking Kansas City looks to be increasingly common, and increasingly dangerous.
“The climate crisis isn’t one single moment of disaster,” said Laela Zaidi, an organizer with Sunrise Movement KC, a group fighting climate change. “It’s also days and weeks of extreme heat, of drought, of failing infrastructure.”
Here’s why severe heat is so dangerous and what you can do to keep yourself, your neighbors and your loved ones safe.
Posted inKansas City
World Cups displace homeless people. What’s Kansas City’s plan for the event in 2026?
The 2026 World Cup will squeeze Kansas City’s already tight housing market in ways that could make shelter particularly scarce for homeless people. Many thousands of soccer fans flocking to the region will need places to stay. But some housing experts say that the World Cup’s short-term impact on the housing market could prod the […]
Posted inHousing
Residents want input, concessions before backing a low-barrier homeless shelter in Northeast Kansas City
People gather near the Hope Faith Homeless Assistance Campus all day long. Some carry backpacks sagging with belongings. Others come empty-handed. Many have no interest in going inside. Instead, they hang out to chat, organize their belongings, or simply stare into space. In the blocks surrounding Hope Faith at 705 Virginia Ave., people sit in […]
Posted inHousing, Kansas City
Neighborhood blocks the low-barrier shelter pitched as key solution to Kansas City’s homelessness problem
Ken Simard mainly slept under the Blue Parkway bridge near the railroad tracks along the Blue River for the seven years he was homeless, numbing himself with meth and weed. “If it were not for the drugs that I did, I would have been suicidal,” he said. “I would do anything to take my mind […]
Posted inCivic Engagement
Kansas City police jump-started a missing persons unit. Now they need to build trust with Black families
Takeaways: T’Montez Hurt had just started working at a Price Chopper in Grain Valley to save money after a semester away from Missouri Western State University. Then in the early hours of Feb. 1, the 19-year-old placed an anxious phone call to his grandmother, Tecona Donald-Sullivan, saying he thought he’d been drugged. The day before […]
Posted inEconomics, Housing
New Kansas City housing subsidies set by ZIP code could avoid segregating renters
For generations, federal housing subsidies have provided a lifeline to families struggling to afford rent. But the maximum amount families got for rent stayed the same regardless of which neighborhood best suited their needs — effectively segregating them into low-income areas. Come this fall, the rent cap for a standard apartment will vary from one […]