Lenexa City Center: A New Urban Dream Realized

Discover how Lenexa, Kansas, transformed farmland into a modern downtown gem, demonstrating the power of vision, citizen engagement, and bold leadership

Today we return to our on intermittent series on downtown redevelopment. I come back to these stories because they encompass so many aspects of government done right: vision, smart citizen engagement, political courage and creating opportunities for private sector investment and job creation. They show how governments can be entrepreneurial.

The work of local government doesn’t have to be limited to public safety, infrastructure management, parks, and libraries, though those are critical services that need to be handled efficiently and effectively. If you do nothing else, get the bread-and-butter stuff done right. In fact, you better have a solid grasp on the basics before you embark on the much sexier work of placemaking. I think it’s unlikely your citizens will support more ambitious projects if you can’t get the potholes filled in a timely manner and if people feel unsafe in their neighborhoods.

So, let’s take a trip to Lenexa, Kansas, a fast-growing city of 60,000 in the Kansas City metro area. Specifically, let’s head to Lenexa City Center, a mixed-used, new urban gem built on what used to be farmland and find out how it came to be.

The year is 1996 when then-Mayor Joan Bowman decides it’s time to think hard about Lenexa’s future. Who better to ask than the 38,000 souls who live there?

“She just decided that she wanted to hear from the community about what they wanted to be when they grew up,” is how current City Manager Beccy Yocham put it. “And it was a really extensive process, involved dozens and dozens of community members, working on task forces, talking about big picture goals for the city in the year 2020.”

The Vision 2020 plan was adopted in 1997, the year Yocham stared working at the city. This video produced by the city four years ago provides a nice overview and shows what can result from a well-designed and executed visioning process.

Now, let’s dig into the story of what happened from plan adoption to the thriving development you see in the video.

As you can see in the video, there’s no historic redevelopment, or adaptive reuse going on in Lenexa City Center. That’s because Lenexa has a historic downtown, but it was just too constrained for what citizens told the city they wanted back in 1997.

“We have an area that we call Old Town, which is the original town site,” Yocham says. “It’s a lovely, charming place, but it’s very geographically constrained because there’s a railroad on one side, a very small commercial area, but then really ringed by single-family residential with no opportunity for growth. And so that could never really be more than it is. We love it. It’s special, but it can’t be more than it is.”

It also sits in the far eastern corner of the city. What folks in the Vision 2020 plan said they wanted was a new, modern downtown in the middle of the community that would serve everyone. Yocham said the vision was specific in other ways as well.

“It should include mixes of uses like office, residential, retail, those you would expect, but civic uses like libraries and those sorts of things,” Yocham said. “And really very specific. And I think that helped the council at that time, say, to really get a picture for what that could be. And coming out of that, there was just so much excitement that the community had been so engaged that really, they went to work pretty quickly on it.”

Step one was getting control of the dirt at the intersection where the development was envisioned to occur. Yocham says by 2001, the city had started to “get options on all the property in that geographic region where the City Center would eventually happen.”

This, folks, is political courage. Lenexa’s elected leaders took a risk, i.e. spent real taxpayer dollars, to get control of property at the intersection of the two most heavily trafficked roads in the center of the community. And it’s not like developers weren’t interested in the vacant land. As then-Mayor Mike Boehm says in the video above: “We were approached many times by developers ready to build a traditional smorgasbord of drive-throughs and some strip-center retail and we kept saying no, even during the recession, because that’s not what the vision had for us. Our thought then was a mixed-use, new urban development.”

So, work gets underway to begin the design and planning for a city center with a developer who was “doing some new urbanist development in Florida,” Yocham says. He’s got great ideas “but no money,” and the city isn’t going to bankroll vertical development. So they put together a tax increment financing (TIF) district for the area to provide incentives for private development.

And then, as often happens in these stories, disaster hits. Not just to Lenexa, but to the entire United States of America. TIF approval occurs on Sept. 11, 2001.

Hello, war on terror and major recession. Still, the city council had the patience and the courage to respect the community vision and hold the line.

“And, so, things are falling apart with our first developer,” Yocham says. “We’re in a major recession, and (the city council) had so many opportunities to say, ‘This is too hard, let it go to something else.’ And they just had the political will to say, ‘No, this is what our community wants, and we’re willing to wait for that.’”

In Lenexa, Yocham says, “I like to say we put our money where our mouth is.”

This is why I write this newsletter. To share these kinds of stories. To remind readers that we do indeed have principled leaders willing to forgo a quick fix so a much-better, long-term solution can come to life. Use the button below to send this to someone you know who’s understandably cynical about government’s ability to work its way out of a wet paper bag.

Back to our regular programming.

They find a new developer — one from Kansas City, who better understands the local market — and get to work putting the infrastructure in place to accommodate the mix of uses and density planned for the town center. Things are starting to happen but then the Great Recession hits and pretty much no one is lending any money to anyone for anything from 2007 to 2009.

So, what then? What else? Road trip!

“The real game changer was probably in about 2011-ish,” Yocham said. “We went out to a bunch of different mixed-use developments around the country.”

They toured developments in metro areas of Minneapolis, Dallas-Fort Worth and Denver, “and we started to visit and see what we liked about them and what made them, you know, feel alive and really feel like a downtown,” Yocham said. “And we saw was that there was community investment there. The cities, in almost every instance, had put something of theirs in that area.”

A growing Lenexa needed to build a new city hall, as well as amenities like a recreation center. A council member and then-City Manager Eric Wade recommended the facilities be built in Lenexa City Center. Then-Mayor Boehm didn’t agree.

“He was not on board with that at first. Really not on board with it,” Yocham said. “But eventually the rest of the council sort of won him over.”

Regular readers will recall the GGF post of the city center in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. The hero of that story, Mayor Steve Scaffidi, was also opposed to building a new city hall in the Drexel Town Square project that we came to know and love. He, too, was amenable to having his mind changed. God bless you, Mayor Boehm, for your flexibility and willingness to listen.

And they did more than just build a new city hall. On one of their road trips, this one to Milwaukee, they were inspired to create a Public Market — a kind of food business/restaurant incubator — in the project, which opened in 2017. So now it looks like this.

Yeah, the Lenexa City Hall building is much cooler than your city hall. Source: PGAV Architects

OK, here’s a shot of the City Hall side of the building.

Yeah, it’s much cooler than your city hall. Source: Leigh + O’Kane.

The fact the City of Lenexa was putting skin in the game was another turning point for the project, Yocham said.

“When the city said, we’re going to invest in City Center, we’re going to move our City Hall, then that was when the tone of the development community really changed,” she said. “It was like, OK, if you’re willing to invest there, then we are willing to invest there. And it really was sort of a game changer for us.”

In 2017, the city opened its 200,000-square-foot campus, including the new City Hall, Park University, the Public Market, and Lenexa Rec Center. The Shawnee Mission School District opened a 1,200-seat competitive aquatics facility in November 2019 and the Johnson County Library system opened a new branch library in June 2019.

“So, we have this real concentration of civic uses, and that is what brings life to the campus, morning, noon and night, weekends, weekdays, and it’s all very dense,” Yocham says.

The library, rec center, and City Hall all share one 500-space parking garage. Employees in city hall use the garage primarily eight to five, then leave, about the time the rec center and the library get busy.

“It serves all of us in this very compact area where we would have had to have thousands of parking spaces to serve individually in surface parking lots,” Yocham says.

Sure enough, that kind of smart, new urban design attracted businesses like B.E. Smith, a talent agency for the healthcare industry, Pinion, a food and agriculture consultant, and Kiewit, an engineering firm. Those companies are “paving the way for even more retail and office opportunities that are under construction or coming soon,” according to the city website.

One of those is Advent Health, Yocham said, which is currently building a $257 million first phase of a medical campus across the street from city hall.

“What they decided to do in City Center was instead of just building a freestanding hospital like they’ve done in other parts of the metro, they bought 27 acres and decided to build a health and wellness focused campus,” Yocham said. “So, in addition to a hospital, there’s medical office buildings, (and) also health and wellness focused retail is planned as well. And they have a thing called a lifestyle center, which is where they’ll do some of their wellness activities. And it was a matter of Advent saying, we believe in what you’re doing at City Center, and we want to be a part of it. So, the private investment has been mind blowing.”

Along with the TIF — which uses the increased property taxes (increment) generated by new development to finance costs related to the development such as public infrastructure, land acquisition — the city also uses a Community Improvement District (CID) to help pay for public improvements or private projects through a sales and use tax and, finally, industrial revenue bonds.

“I think the thing we do really well in Lenexa is we have been always very strategic about how we use those incentives and we’ve been able to connect those to important community goals,” Yocham said. “And City Center is one of the most important community goals we have. And so my council, again, has had the political will to say, this is what we want. It comes at an extraordinary cost, and this is a tool we can use to help achieve that.”

The Public Market, which is subsidized by the city, draws tons of foot traffic, not just from area employers but the 2,000 or so multifamily units in the district. Of course, there was a hitch in this aspect of the project as well. Just as business in the Public Market was picking up the COVID global pandemic hit and shut everything down.

“It was terrible, but (the City Council) was willing to wait it out because they understood that was true everywhere,” Yocham said. “But in the budget process that year, I had one of my most conservative council members say, ‘This Public Market is part of the fabric of this community now. I can’t imagine not having it.’ And so, today, now in our seventh year, we still subsidize it, but to a much lower extent. And the council doesn’t even blink at that because of the tourist benefits, the community building (and) placemaking benefits, all of that is completely worth it to them as a valid expense for this community to take on because this place is so important to us now.”

I’m conservative (and a liberal — as covered in this post) and lord almighty I wouldn’t blink either at making sure my constituents maintained access to the following:

A light lunch from Cosmo Burger. Two for me, please. Source: Public Market Instagram

Or this …

A build your own pie featuring basil herb chicken, sliced roma tomatoes, fresh chopped basil, red onion and mushrooms from Toppd Pizza. Pass the parmesan, would ya?

Or the friendly folks serving up good eats at African Dream Cuisine …

Owner/chef Neba Ngwa and wife Stella Musongong serve up authentic African food. We have it on good authority the Spaghegg and puff puffs are amazing.

And who could refuse the Pakistani delights of Sohaila's Kitchen? Certainly not Kansas City Chiefs tight end Blake Bell.

Bell is a total fanboy of Sohaila’s buttery chicken bowl.

And you’d lose your Midwest Nice card if folks couldn’t enjoy their suds.

Because of course Toppd Pizza pours craft beer to go with their gorgeous pies.

You get the picture(s).

There’s a good reason why the entire project is so successful. It’s new urbanism 101.

“People want an urban experience but don’t want to have to relocate to the urban core,” a local attorney and restaurant owner said. “They want to be able to walk out their front door and walk to dinner, they want to be able to walk to the gym or for that matter talk a walk in the park ... and people who live nearby and get here in 5 or 10 minutes and still have that urban experience without driving to the urban core.” 

It’s come at a price, certainly. The transportation network improvements have been especially expensive. But the payoff — the bringing to life of a vision cast more than 25 years ago — has been totally worth it.

“You have to be willing to take the long view and make those investments today, knowing that it will pay off in the future,” Yocham said. “But you have to have a community that’s willing to also be patient with you, or else all these people could have gotten voted out immediately by the people who didn’t like what they were doing.”

Indeed, that continuity of leadership and consistent governing philosophy is one of the primary reasons for the City Center’s success.

Both Yocham and former Mayor Boehm note Lenexa’s property tax rates are a little higher than their neighbors. And that’s OK.

“Lenexa does things right,” Boehm says in the video. “I hear all the time, yeah, my taxes may be a little bit higher here in Lenexa, but I know where the money’s going. I get great services. I love living here.”

That’s not just a politician blowing smoke. Lenexa earned a “Leading the Way” award from survey firm ETC Institute for amazing citizen satisfaction ratings in three areas: overall service quality, customer service by employees, and perceived value of local taxes and fees.

Yocham recently moved to a new home in Lenexa and when introducing herself to new neighbors said she worked for the city. Sure enough, they said, “taxes are a little high, but you get what you pay for.”

“And I said yes, I agree and nobody on the council will apologize for that,” she said. “And I think that our residents because they have those high expectations and are used to that high level of service, they trust the council, they’re happy with what they get from the city. And so, they had the trust in the political leaders to say, you haven’t steered us wrong yet, so we’re going to give you some leeway to pursue this.”

Onward and Upward.