By BILL FIANDER
Insight Kansas
If you were traveling through Kansas over spring break and wanted to show the kids something they’ll likely never see again, you might swing by Cawker City’s World’s Largest Ball of Twine or to Lucas for the Garden of Eden. Or maybe those giant sandstone spheres near Minneapolis (a personal favorite). All rare sights that make Kansas, Kansas.
Similarly, you could have swung by the 24-duplex Flintwood senior living community in Russell. Or the 250-unit Union at Tower District apartments under construction in downtown Topeka. Or any of the other 74 affordable housing developments that will dot the Kansas landscape soon thanks to the state’s Kansas Affordable Housing Tax Credit (KAHTC) administered by the Kansas Housing Resource Corporation (KHRC).
Because unless something changes, they also will become as rare as mysterious sandstone outcroppings.
Most of us understand by now we are in a national housing crisis. One born from the 2008 recession and bursting housing bubble. New housing production miserably sagged over the years, building costs skyrocketed post-Covid, and incomes lagged to leave us unsheltered or overpaying for housing.
With the average first-time homebuyer now closer in age (40) to drawing retirement than graduating high school, the housing crisis finally touched a unifying nerve in Washington recently. But while Congress, a model of legislative futility with a 16% approval rating, created enough momentum to pass the most significant housing bill in 35 years, Kansas legislators chose to tap out the last two years.
Nationally, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act includes a staggering array of tactics designed to incentivize attainable housing construction, spur local zoning reforms, and allow greater financing for a variety housing types.
In the “year of affordability,” ROAD’s bipartisan landslide in the Senate (89-10) led by odd-couple champions Elizabeth Warren (D) and Tim Scott (R) still shock. The bill needs to endure some testy House negotiations, but even the most do-nothing Congress in our democratic history understands it’s time to lead on housing.
Meanwhile…crickets back in Topeka this session.
Approved by the Kansas Legislature in 2022 at historic funding levels matching existing federal credits, the KHATC program leveraged $1,500,000,000 of new private construction from 2023-2025 generating an unprecedented 6,463 affordable homes: a fourfold annual increase from 2022. As administered by KHRC, it broadened the number of counties it touched from 9 to 27 including rural counties seeing their first appreciable housing construction in decades. Cities redeveloped critically blighted sites. Families re-gained their dignity. Local economies were infused.
Simply put, it was the most productive affordable housing program in state history.
But on the last day of the 2025 legislative session, against the backdrop of a documented statewide housing crisis, cavalcade of pleading opponents, and an incomplete economic impact analysis, the same legislators reversed course citing $1B of foregone income tax revenue over 15 years to dramatically reduce and sunset KHATC by 2028.
No veto followed. Neither did any interest to revisit in 2026.
If the KAHTC experience taught us anything, it’s that housing is a team sport – private sector and all levels of government. It must be, particularly for struggling communities. And that’s really the state’s role here…not just to increase housing where it’s already occurring, but where it’s not.
It’s also about choices. Just weeks before the reversal, the legislature approved a monumental income tax cut that in the words of Governor Kelly, could cost $1.3 billion annually.
Something had to give. Those at the bottom know the feeling.
Bill Fiander teaches courses state/local government, public administration, and city planning at Washburn University in Topeka.