Promise Place: 85 Families, One Promise

Press Coverage: Mass Transit Magazine, 2023

Transit oriented development has a credibility problem. In most American cities, when a new transit line goes in, what follows is not opportunity for existing residents. What follows is displacement. Property values rise. Rents rise. The people who were there first — the people the transit was supposed to serve — get pushed out. I have watched this happen in cities across the country, and I have spent my career making sure it does not happen in the communities where I work.

Promise Place is our answer. Eighty five units of affordable housing, approved by the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority, designed from the ground up as transit oriented development that actually serves the people who need transit most.

The Problem With Conventional TOD

The standard model for transit oriented development goes like this: a city invests public money in a rail line or bus rapid transit corridor. Private developers follow the transit investment with market rate housing, retail, and office space. Property values increase. Tax revenue increases. Politicians celebrate. And the low income residents who lived along that corridor before the transit arrived? They are priced out. They move further from the transit they were supposed to benefit from.

This model is economically rational and morally bankrupt. Public transit funded by public dollars should create public benefit, not private profit at the expense of the people who need the most help.

I have studied this pattern in cities across the United States and internationally. In Portland, the MAX light rail system triggered property value increases that displaced low income communities along its corridors. In Atlanta, the BeltLine project has become a cautionary tale of transit investment that accelerated gentrification. In San Francisco, BART expansion reshaped entire neighborhoods in ways that priced out the communities it was designed to serve.

The common thread in every one of these examples is the same: transit investment was treated as a catalyst for market rate development rather than as infrastructure for the existing community. The economic logic is clear. When you improve transportation access, land values increase. When land values increase, developers build to the highest value use. And the highest value use is never affordable housing.

Promise Place was structured to break that pattern. By integrating affordable housing directly into a transit corridor, we ensured that the families who benefit most from transit access — people who depend on public transportation to get to work, to school, to medical appointments — can actually live where the transit is.

The Name

I am deliberate about naming our projects. Promise Place is not a marketing exercise. It is a commitment. The promise is this: development along this transit corridor will serve existing residents. It will not displace them. It will not price them out. It will give them better housing with better access in the neighborhood they already call home.

That promise matters because too many communities have heard promises before. They have been told that new investment would benefit them. They have been told that development would bring jobs and services. And then they watched as the investment displaced them and the jobs went to newcomers who could afford the higher rents.

Eighty five families depend on our promise. We intend to keep it.

The Structure

Promise Place required navigating multiple layers of public approval and financing. The Kansas City Area Transportation Authority had to approve the project's integration with the transit corridor. The city had to provide land use approvals and public incentives. Tax credit investors had to underwrite the deal. And the community had to believe that this time, development would work for them instead of against them.

That last part is the hardest. When a neighborhood has been promised investment for decades and received neglect instead, trust is not the default setting. You earn trust by showing up, by listening, and by delivering what you said you would deliver. We are committed to all three.

The community engagement process for Promise Place was extensive. We held multiple meetings with neighborhood residents. We listened to their concerns about displacement, about construction impacts, about the kinds of services they wanted to see. We incorporated their input into the project design. And we made commitments about affordability that are legally binding, not just aspirational.

The financing structure reflected the complexity of the project. Affordable housing along a transit corridor requires a capital stack that supports below-market rents while also meeting the development standards that a transit-adjacent site demands. The project had to look and feel like quality development — because it is — while maintaining rent levels that working families can actually afford.

Why This Project Matters

Promise Place matters because it proves that equitable transit oriented development is not a theory. It will be a building with 85 families living in it. Real people with real leases paying affordable rents in a location that will give them direct access to public transit.

For any city considering transit expansion, Promise Place answers the question that community advocates always ask: who is this transit for? If the answer is only for the new residents and new businesses that follow the transit investment, then you are building gentrification infrastructure. If the answer includes the people who are already there, then you need projects like Promise Place to make that answer real.

The affordable housing industry talks about equitable TOD at conferences. We are building it.

Every project we develop at The Nash Group connects to a simple idea: housing is infrastructure. It is as essential to a neighborhood's function as roads, water, and electricity. When you remove affordable housing from a transit corridor, you do not just displace families. You break the infrastructure that makes the whole corridor work.

Promise Place is infrastructure. Eighty five families who will be able to get to work, get to school, and get to services without a car, living in quality housing they can actually afford. That is what transit oriented development is supposed to look like. And that is what we are building.