KC's West Bottoms will be transformed with $527M project. See what's happening

Yahoo

08-07-2025

Down in Kansas City's West Bottoms, development executive Grant Hromas stepped from his office — inside the 125-year-old Fire Station No. 1 on Union Avenue, modernized with couches and high-def video screen — and outside into the searing heat.
Around him in the summer haze: A cityscape of brick historic warehouses, streets, alleyways and empty parcels that, over the next three to 5 to 15 years, are to be at the heart of what Hromas and his colleagues at the New York-based development firm SomeraRoad plan to be a transformative, mixed-use development in the historic quarter.
'These streets,' Hromas, a Leawood resident and SomeraRoad's vice president of development, said, pointing along Union Avenue. 'From building face to building face, all of this will be torn up. . . .All this is to be improved. They're going to be pavers.'
Just as the Power & Light District and T-Mobile Arena helped spark a downtown renaissance, and the Kansas City Current's stadium — with its adjacent luxury apartments, hotel and emerging retail — is changing the face of the riverfront, SomeraRoad's five-phase, $527 million redevelopment is similarly geared to transform the West Bottoms, renovating 10 of its 100-plus-year-old buildings into offices, retail and luxury apartments, but also building anew.
Eight months after city and SomeraRoad officials in October plunged shovels into dirt for a ceremonial ground-breaking, phase 1 of the project — which, for some tenants, has raised concerns over gentrification, higher property taxes and rents — is moving forward.
As planned, the entire five-phase project, if completed as envisioned over the next 10 to 15 years, would be huge: some 1,200 apartments, new storefronts and offices, a public park, a 40-room luxury hotel.
In 2018, SomeraRoad's founder, Ian Ross, began eyeing and slowly amassing some 29 properties in the West Bottoms that included vacant warehouses and unused parcels on about seven blocks of land.
Ross first dove into the Kansas City market in 2016 when SomeraRoad made the 3Y building, 300 Wyandotte St., the company's very first purchase. The building had been the former home of the architectural firm Populous, which moved from the River Market to south of the Country Club Plaza in 2015. In 2019, SomeraRoad would also buy, then completely overhaul, the 30-story lightwell building, 1100 Main St., which had formerly been City Center Square.
Taken together, its West Bottoms purchases comprised some 21 acres in a rough triangle bounded by the 12th Street viaduct to the south, the Union Pacific Railroad tracks to the north, Santa Fe Street to the east and Liberty Street to the west.
Visitors to the area now may see what appears to be little progress. No sky cranes yet. No piers being sunk, steel frames erected or old warehouses being gutted. But over the last seven months, city workers have been heaving up roads, digging trenches, some 20-foot deep for catch basins, as part of the city's $42.3 million commitment to upgrade the underground infrastructure.
'As we walk around,' Hromas said, 'what you'll be seeing, in a lot of cases, is hard to see. It's basically every underground utility. We're talking sewer, storm water, electric, gas, telecom: All of that is being put in right now.'
By mid June, nearly 40% of the below ground utilities had been finished.
In May 2024, months before the project's official ground-breaking, the project burst into public consciousness with a literal series of bangs. That's when the 10-story Weld Wheel building, built at 933 Mulberry Street in 1910 as the Ridenour-Baker Grocery Co., building, was set with 714 pounds of explosives and imploded.
Mayor Quinton Lucas and other city officials watched from the bluffs. The structure, which had sat empty for 21 years, collapsed. It crumpled, folding in on itself like an ocean wave, spewing forth a froth of brown dust, a dramatic event captured on video and news footage.
The three-acre plot currently sits empty. It's a massive hole behind a chain link fence across from The Ship, the restaurant and bar at 1221 Union Ave.
The Weld site is to be part of phase 1 development, a phase that includes six major projects, one of which is to begin within the next few weeks to months.
All six phase 1 projects are expected to be completed on a rolling reschedule into 2028. A polished video created by SomeraRoad reveals their West Bottoms vision.
On the site of the former Weld Wheel: The Henning, a 290-unit luxury apartment complex, with a pocket park and first-floor commercial and retail spaces built to the style of the surrounding warehouses.
▪ Next door, the four-story Perfection Stove Co. building is a warehouse built in 1919 at 1200 Union Ave. The first floor will be commercial. Renovation is expected to begin sometime toward the end of this year.
'We have an entertainment use on the ground floor,' Hromas revealed. 'We have a signed lease. We just haven't announced it yet. We'd like to start construction on the building, and then we'll probably release it. So it will happen within the next few months.'
The interiors of the second, third and fourth floors, he said, will likely be custom designed and built as commercial office space for whatever specific tenant or tenants signs on.
▪ The five-story Crooks Terminal building sits across the road, 1201 Union Ave. The ground floor, currently showing delivery bays with garage doors, is slated for commercial and retail businesses. 'These garage doors,' Hromas said, 'they will end up being glass on the ground floors. They'll be storefronts. There will probably be three tenants that front Union (Avenue) in this building.'
The east and south faces of the building, currently solid brick, will be opened to provide windows. The south-facing windows will look out onto an open-air plaza, named The Depot, considered to be a public centerpiece of the project. Floors two to five of the Terminal building contain 80,000 square feet of office space, at least half of which SomeraRoad hopes to lease to a single anchor tenant, Hromas said.
▪ The Depot, located on Santa Fe Avenue between Union Avenue and W. 11th Street, is a park, a 2/3 of an acre plaza designed to be a central public gathering space, with benches and public art. Hromas said it is feasible that The Depot could be ready by the middle of next year, in time for a public watch party during the World Cup in June 2026.
'There will be a lot of shaded seating,' he said. 'There will be a food kiosk. We want to program it. We want to be able to have events and activate it year-round for different things: In the winter, sell Christmas trees out of it, make it part of First Fridays in the summer.'
▪ The Moline. Built in 1906, the seven-story former home of the Moline Plow Company, 1015 Mulberry St., is to be remade into a 121-unit luxury apartment building. Some apartments will have tin ceilings. Others will feature columns with ornate cornices. The first floor will be for commercial tenants.
'There's a specific ice cream shop,' Hromas said, 'local to another neighborhood in Kansas City, that's going to go in here.' He did not reveal the vendor.
Renovation of the structure is scheduled to begin in the next one to two months. The project is likely to take at least two years.
▪ The Avery Building, a gray, seven-story warehouse built 122 years ago is to become a 40-to-50 room luxury hotel. Hromas did not say what hotel company they may partner with to brand and operate the hotel, but SomeraRoad currently is building a 30-story hotel/condominium tower in Nashville in what it is calling the Paseo South Gulch.
On that project, Hromas said, the company is working with Pendry Hotels & Resorts, a luxury hotel brand that is part of Montage International hospitality company. In Baltimore, nightly rates for mid July at the Pendry hotel in Fell's Point ranged from $431 per night to over $4,000 for a specialty suite.
'On the ground floor,' Hromas said of the Avery, 'the idea is to have like what you see at The Crossroads Hotel, where you walk in and you're not walking up to a lobby desk. You're greeted with a signature bar/restaurant space that really anchors that hard corner. The lobby is secondary to that.'
Phases 2 through 5, to include more apartments, retail and office spaces, are to roll out over 15 years.
'I mean, these are all, individually, eight-digit investments,' Hromas said. 'They all take a lot of time. Buildings don't just pop out of the ground. I mean, if you're talking from 2025, you're talking to 2040. So there is certainly patience that's needed.'
At the project's completion, the vision is create a bustling West Bottoms neighborhood that is as vibrant as the urban renewal neighborhoods in other cities, such as the Bottle Works District in Indianapolis, Denver's RiNo Art District, the Pearl District in San Antonio, New York's Dumbo (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) neighborhood in Brooklyn.
'That would be the ultimate goal to have it like Dumbo, where people live, where they work, where they go for entertainment. It's continuously vibrant,' said Mark Horne, the project's senior architect and manager in Kansas City at HOK, the architecture and engineering firm.
HOK, which began creating SomeraRoad's master plan for the West Bottoms as early as 2018, is one of seven major firms that have signed on to the project. Other companies on the development team include Draw Architecture + Urban Design, S9 Architecture, Burns & McDonnell, SK Design Group, MCM Company, Inc., and HR&A Advisors, Inc.
In phase 1, HOK is to design and construct the Moline, Crooks Terminal and Perfection Stove buildings.
'This is where the birth of Kansas City happened, right?' Peter Slaon, HOK's senior principal architect, said of the confluence of the Missouri River and Kansas River. 'So (the West Bottoms project) is singularly most significant because it is honoring where Kansas City started, and it's bringing back to life the significance of what the moment is, and paying tribute to that by creating this incredible place.
'That was latent, but it is now just happening.'
Officials in Kansas City are fully on board.
'The SomeraRoad West Bottoms redevelopment,' Lucas told The Star in a statement, 'represents one of the most significant urban transformation projects in Kansas City's recent history, fundamentally reimagining the birthplace of our city, while preserving its authentic character and historic architecture.'
The project, he said, 'will not only revitalize a historically significant, but underutilized area of Kansas City, but also demonstrate how thoughtful development can celebrate our city's past, while building for its future.'
The city put $2 million toward the destruction of the Weld building. Historic tax credits are being used to redevelop the 100-plus-year-old warehouses. Tax revenues generated by the project are paying for the millions in infrastructure repair.
In October 2023, the Planned Industrial Expansion Authority (PIEA) voted 9-2 to approve a 20-year tax abatement incentive plan worth $64.3 million — 90% over the first 10 years, 70% for the following 10.
'SomeraRoad's efforts in the Historic West Bottoms are transformative to say the least,' David P. Macoubrie II, the authority's executive director, said. 'SomeraRoad's acquisitions in the West Bottoms are nudging local property owners to increase their property's productivity.
'I've spoken to owners of property surrounding the SomeraRoad project and their 2025 proposed assessed values have increased 300% to 800%. While this is bad news for the property owners, it sometimes forces their hand to either redevelop their properties or convey them to a developer who will increase its productivity.
'More productive real estate is good news for Kansas City.'
While many West Bottoms business owners are supportive — anticipating that the redevelopment will eventually bring more residents, more office workers and thus more customers to the West Bottoms — it has also raised concerns.
Ian Davis, the owner of Blip Coffee Roasters, 1301 Woodswether Rd., north of the tracks and of the proposed development, has already complained about his tax assessment rising more than 600%.
Brady Vest, owner of Hammerpress, a print shop just outside the project's western edge, 1413 W. 11th St., worries about rising rents. His shop used to be the Crossroads.
'I think we really moved here out of the need to cut our rent as much as we could and still have enough space,' Vest said. 'Just a raw space that doesn't cost much is really difficult.
'My only — I wouldn't say fear. The thing I don't want to happen, which may happen eventually, is that it kind of runs people out of the neighborhood, and here's where I sound cynical, so that it can be another playground for adults. I hope that really doesn't happen down here.
'There's still a lot of people who work down here who aren't art-related. There's still warehouses and shipping hubs, light manufacturing and stuff. I kind of like that about it.'
There's an authentic and eclectic feel about the West Bottoms. He's concerned that that will gradually disappear.
'I think that's probably the fear of a lot of people,' Vest said.
Others, including Josh Mobley, the co-owner with Bob Asher of The Ship bar and restaurant, a thriving business on Union Avenue since 2014, are generally supportive, but skeptical.
So far, all the major work he's witnessed in the quarter has been conducted by the city — demolition of the Weld building, infrastructure.
'They (SomeraRoad) haven't actually started construction,' Mobley said.
He's waiting for them to begin, but also wonders how much of the scope of SomeraRoad's plans may change, given rising economic uncertainty, the rising cost of borrowing money and the rising costs of construction materials.
Hromas said that once the vital underground infrastructure is fully in place, above ground building will jump-start from there.
'I'm hoping they get it started and get it done,'Mobley said from his back deck, watching city workers dig trenches. 'I mean, to me, all these buildings were vacant. That's vacant. This is vacant. Most of this stuff was unused.
'It's not like they're displacing people at this point. . . What's going to hurt us probably is the property tax situation. That's what's going to screw us, if we don't get some kind of property tax freeze.'
Should the project come to fruition:
'We'll definitely benefit if it happens,' Mobley said, looking out to the lot that is to be a park, to the Moline and to the Avery. 'If this is full of people, and that is full of people, and that is full of people. I mean . . .it can't hurt.'