The $1.5 Billion Rescue Plan for Kansas City’s Most Iconic Shopping Plaza

The gaps are the first thing you notice when you stroll through the Country Club Plaza on a weekday afternoon. Paper in the windows and empty storefronts. A coffee shop operating steadily between a recently closed store on one side and an empty space on the other. Even in the Missouri winter, the buildings themselves are still striking, with their terra-cotta ornamentation, Spanish-inspired facades, and fountains that give the entire district a subtle Mediterranean feel. However, about one-third of the plaza’s 732,000 square feet of retail and office space is vacant, and hundreds of millions of dollars are needed to repair the deteriorating infrastructure beneath all that architectural beauty, including the water mains, parking garages, and sewer lines. Nearly everyone in Kansas City is aware that America’s first outdoor shopping center has been losing the plot for years.

Before moving on to the rescue strategy, it is important to comprehend how it got here. The plaza was acquired in 1998 by national retail landlords Taubman Centers and Macerich, who paid $660 million for it in 2016. This amount represented both the high value of trophy retail assets at the time and, looking back, a great deal of optimism about the future of brick-and-mortar shopping. The era of corporate ownership was never entirely successful. According to Kate Marshall, founder of the Plaza District Council, the businesses failed to recognize the community’s exceptionally strong attachment to the plaza as a civic space rather than just a commercial one. Foot traffic was diminished by e-commerce. The pandemic was severe. Following George Floyd’s murder, there was an increase in crime and vandalism. In 2018, Nordstrom made a big announcement that it would anchor the plaza. However, in 2022, the plan was quietly canceled. Taubman and Macerich had fallen behind on a $295 million loan by 2023. The decline started out slowly before becoming noticeable all of a sudden.

Despite the intricate financial details, Kansas City residents appear to genuinely appreciate how the 2024 sale altered the ownership story. The plaza was purchased by Gillon Property Group, which was established in 2025 to oversee the Hunt family’s commercial real estate holdings, for $175.6 million, a sum that shows how much the asset had dropped from its 2016 peak. In contrast to the anonymous corporate landlord model, the ownership group consists of about eighteen investors with direct connections to Kansas City. The group includes two great-granddaughters of Texas oil magnate H.L. Hunt, a detail that has special significance for Kansas City because Chiefs chairman Clark Hunt is H.L. Hunt’s grandson. It appears that the family attempting to stabilize one of the city’s most significant civic pillars is also the one relocating the football team to Kansas. Those who are paying attention are aware of this irony.

Gillon’s $1.5 billion plan is ambitious in scope and somewhat predictable in form, but this isn’t meant to be a criticism because there is a fairly well-established playbook for rescuing failing urban retail districts. A new public park, 278 hotel rooms, at least 645,000 square feet of office space, 750 apartments and possibly condos, and more walkways are all included in the plan. In order to lessen the plaza’s reliance on seasonal events—the 200,000 Christmas lights draw tens of thousands in winter, the art fair draws nearly 100,000 in September—and to generate the kind of daily foot traffic that sustains retailers, the plan is to bring locals and employees into the district throughout the year. Gillon’s CEO, Drew Steffen, has been straightforward about the reasoning: density is necessary for investment at this scale, and no great place remains great without investment.

The friction resides in that final word. In certain places, the plan calls for buildings to reach a height of 275 feet, which is more than twice the current zoning limit of 45 feet for a large portion of the area. The Plaza Westport Neighborhood Association’s treasurer, Matt Fuoco, aptly summed up the neighborhood’s reluctance when he said, “The plaza is not downtown, where towers already define the skyline.” It is located in a suburban transitional zone, and adding structures two or three times the existing height limit would alter the neighborhood’s character in ways that some locals find unacceptable. Although it leaves some room for interpretation, Steffen’s response—that the idea is to build up without erecting a wall of towers—is a reasonable framing.

The other flaw in the approval process is the public funding question. With the potential for an additional $100 million, Gillon has obtained preliminary approval for approximately $110 million in tax increment financing. In order to fund the project, the company is also requesting that the Port Authority of Kansas City issue bonds worth up to $1.4 billion that would offer tax exemptions. As would be expected from an organization that depends on property tax revenue and has seen similar agreements divert funds that would otherwise go to classrooms, Kansas City Public Schools has rejected that request. Although the conflict between massive redevelopment and the tax base used to pay for public services is not exclusive to Kansas City, the scope of what is being requested here is significant enough to warrant ongoing attention.

As all of this is happening, there’s a sense that Kansas City is going through a truly challenging period, where the city’s sense of urgency regarding economic identity is being compressed by the plaza’s decline and the Chiefs’ imminent departure to Kansas. The plaza must be successful, according to Mayor Lucas, who has framed it as a competitive necessity against suburban communities that are actively attempting to divert economic activity from the city proper. Gillon appears to be aware of the risks. The question of whether the proposed plan can pass the approval process unaltered and whether a mixed-use area centered on office towers and apartments can revitalize what was once a century-old shopping center is still genuinely open. This Christmas, the lights will come back on. Decisions made today will determine the district’s appearance in five years.