Kansas City

Kansas City’s Striking Tenants Want Biden To Act Fast On Rent Cap

January 12, 2025 Roshan Abraham, Next City. Organize! Biden administration, Housing, Kansas City, Rent Strike, Tenant Unions, Unions

On Oct. 1, 2024, tenants at two Kansas City, Missouri, apartment complexes started a rent strike. Residents of Independence Towers and Quality Hill Towers, organized under KC Tenants and a newly formed national coalition known as the Tenant Union Federation, had been asking their landlords to fix their dilapidated buildings for two years. They demanded repairs, called for collectively bargained leases, and agitated for the federal government to force the sale of the apartment complexes to more responsible owners.

Hundreds Of Kansas City Tenants Will Strike

September 29, 2024 Rebecca Burns, In These Times. Resist! Kansas City, Landlords, Rent Strike, Tenants Union

Fed up with paying escalating rents in buildings whose conditions they say range from dirty to dangerous, tenants at two Kansas City-area apartment complexes have voted to launch a rent strike on October 1 — a coordinated action that could soon spread to other cities, as a new national tenants union flexes its muscles. Anna Heetmann, 29, says she has spent three years trying to secure a fix for the gaping hole in her living room ceiling caused by water damage in the unit above. Earlier this month, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, II, the Democrat who represents Missouri’s 5th Congressional District, toured the building and pledged to support tenants should they strike.

Voters Reject Stadium Sales Tax To Help Fund New Royals Ballpark

April 3, 2024 Celisa Calacal, Flatland - Kansas City. Resist! Kansas City, Missouri, Stadium, Taxes, Voting

Jackson County voters handed the Kansas City Royals and Chiefs a major setback on Tuesday, rejecting a stadium sales tax extension that would fund a new downtown baseball stadium and renovations at Arrowhead Stadium. Question 1 would have repealed Jackson County’s existing 3/8th-cent sales tax and replaced it with a tax at the same level until 2064. The results mean that the existing sales tax will end in 2031, when the Royals and Chiefs’ leases expire, and can only be used on the existing Truman Sports Complex properties.

KC Tenants Announces Launch Of Citywide Tenant’s Union

May 8, 2022 Aarón Torres, Kansas City Star. Organize! Evictions, Housing, Kansas City, Tenant Union

Kansas City, Kansas - Pat Lucas received the notification last August: She would have to vacate the Armour Flats building in the 3400 block of Holmes Street in Kansas City — her home for more than 17 years — by November. The management company was going to renovate the property, causing her rent to shoot up, from a little over $500 a month to more than $1,000. She was priced out and had to move. Lucas shared her story Saturday as KC Tenants, a local organization advocating for housing rights, held a rally to announce it was creating a citywide tenant’s union. The organization will work with every local neighborhood association with a goal of getting 10,000 union members.

DOE Officially Marks SunShot’s $1 Per Watt Goal For Utility-Scale Solar

September 14, 2017 Julia Pyper, www.greentechmedia.com Create! Energy, Kansas City, Missouri, New Economy, Solar Energy

By Julia Pyper for GTM - It's official. The solar industry has met the 2020 utility-scale solar cost target set by the Energy Department's SunShot Initiative -- three years early. The DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) released new research today that shows the average price of utility-scale solar is now under $1 per watt and below 6 cents per kilowatt-hour. That’s higher than the record-breaking project bids we’ve seen in the U.S. and abroad in recent years. But that’s because DOE calculations for levelized cost of energy (LCOE) do not include subsidies -- such as the federal Investment Tax Credit -- and are based on the average climate in Kansas City, Missouri. (Note: GTM documented the sub-$1 per watt milestone earlier this year, but the department is using its own metrics.) “Our mission is to make solar affordable for all Americans, and so our goals are defined for average U.S. climates. We use Kansas City as that example,” said Becca Jones-Albertus, acting deputy director of the SunShot Initiative. “Hitting a 6 cents per kilowatt-hour target for Kansas is a more significant metric than hitting 6 cents in sunnier parts of the country.” GTM Research reported that U.S. utility-scale fixed-tilt system pricing fell below $1.00 per watt earlier this year using a different methodology.

Google Fiber Isn’t The Only Revolution In KC

June 25, 2014 Carl Franzen, www.theverge.com Create! Google Fiber, Internet Freedom, Kansas City

Kansas City, a metropolitan area of about 2 million that straddles the border between Kansas state and Missouri, seems an unlikely place to see what the future of internet connectivity could look like. But nearly three years after Google announced that this midwestern metropolis best known for jazz and barbecue would become the first place in the world to get the company’s experimental, ultra-high-speed broadband internet service — Google Fiber — Kansas City is looking more futuristic. Just not in the way Google or Kansas Citians originally anticipated. That’s because Kansas City is also home to another experimental broadband internet service effort that hasn’t received nearly as much international attention as Google Fiber. Just over a year ago, right around the same time Google actually began installing Fiber here, a ragtag alliance of affordable-internet advocates including a jazz club proprietor, a Pentecostal Christian minister and a former Occupy Wall Street protester began building their own nonprofit wireless internet service specifically designed for low-income households, a system they call the KC Freedom Network. Even though it can’t match Google Fiber in terms of raw speed, the KC Freedom Network offers something to users they say Google does not: truly affordable internet.

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