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Podcast: St. Louis BOA Indictments And The Future Of Tax Subsidies With Patrick Tuohey And David Stokes

Posted on June 10, 2022January 13, 2026 by Susan Pendergrass

Susan Pendergrass is joined by David Stokes and Patrick Tuohey.

Patrick Tuohey is co-founder and policy director of the Better Cities Project.

He works with taxpayers, media, and policymakers to foster understanding of the consequences — sometimes unintended — of policies regarding economic development, taxation, education, and transportation. He previously served as the senior fellow of municipal policy at the Show-Me Institute.

David Stokes is a St. Louis native and a graduate of Saint Louis University High School and Fairfield (Conn.) University. He spent six years as a political aide at the St. Louis County Council before joining the Show-Me Institute in 2007. Stokes was a policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute from 2007 to 2016. From 2016 through 2020 he was Executive Director of Great Rivers Habitat Alliance, where he led efforts to oppose harmful floodplain developments done with abusive tax subsidies. Stokes rejoined the Institute in early 2021 as the Director of Municipal Policy.

Read Patrick’s report here.

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Financial Data on Missouri’s 20 Largest Cities

Posted on June 9, 2022January 13, 2026 by Corianna Baier

The Tax Burden in Missouri’s 20 Largest Cities report that I published earlier this year displays financial information from Missouri’s most populated cities. To complete this project, I collected Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports from these cities for the years 2005 to 2020. A decent amount of leg work (and sometimes money) went into collecting these documents, so we are sharing the documents so anyone can access them. Feel free to use these documents to analyze the financials of Missouri’s largest cities. You can find the documents here.

Part Four: Does Kansas City Have an Affordable Housing Problem?

Posted on June 8, 2022January 13, 2026 by Patrick Ishmael

(You can read part one, part two, and part three in this series here.)

In the previous blog post in this series, I posited that (generally speaking) able-bodied individuals should be expected to pay for their housing, and that for housing to be “affordable” to an individual, it should take up no more than about 30% of their salary, both as a rule of thumb and by the federal government’s own definition. But that’s not the end of the story when it comes to establishing what affordable housing is.

Another major question is this: How far away from one’s employment can housing be to still be functionally affordable for that worker? If I work a minimum wage job on the moon, renting a house on Earth and paying to commute daily to outer space won’t cut it.

For a more grounded example, if a worker’s job is in Overland Park, Kansas, but their housing is 25 minutes away east of downtown Kansas City, would that housing—meeting all criteria before considering location—qualify as “affordable housing”, given the added cost of transportation? If the same job were in Independence—nearly 40 minutes away from Overland Park—would we expect that worker to change jobs to something closer to home, or move to housing closer to their job? How do our expectations change if instead of gas being $2 per gallon, it jumps to $5 per gallon?

This question of affordable housing in the context of geography is a nuanced question that doesn’t necessarily have an intuitive or universal answer. But that doesn’t mean answers aren’t being proposed.

For example, the Housing and Transportation Affordability Index, or H+T Index, attempts to simulate what residents of a given census tract might expect to pay in housing and transportation combined as a percentage of their income. Keep in mind that “transportation” here includes all transportation, including trips to the grocery store, for entertainment, etc., so the H+T Index isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison to the HUD definition or other housing-only definitions of affordability. But the H+T index is helpful for understanding that affordable housing that isn’t close to gainful employment is, for all intents and purposes, not affordable.

Other factors can also play into the definition of affordable housing, including whether affordable housing includes homes for purchase as well as homes for rent; whether affordability considers the mitigating costs of roommates where appropriate; and the extent to which affordable housing could still be inadequate housing in some other qualitative way.

That said, a reasonable baseline definition of affordable housing includes the following: it should generally be paid for by the individual, should not exceed 30% of their salary, and should be available in rough proximity to their place of employment. Now, we can turn to the question we’re exploring in this series: Does Kansas City have an affordable housing problem? Stay tuned.

Part Three: Does Kansas City Have an Affordable Housing Problem?

Posted on June 7, 2022January 13, 2026 by Patrick Ishmael

(You can read part one and part two of this series here.)

One of the primary problems in the affordable housing debate is that the phrase “affordable housing” means different things to different people—and, more to the point, that different people don’t know what they might be agreeing to by accepting the premise that housing is “unaffordable.”

What is meant when someone says that we don’t have affordable housing? What if my underlying definition of “unaffordable housing” is “housing that isn’t free”? To have a useful conversation about affordable housing, we must establish some consensus around what our expectations are for both “affordability” and for “housing.”

From my perspective, the first necessary point of consensus has to be that able-bodied Americans are expected to pay at least something for their housing. While that might seem like a superfluous thing to stipulate, it isn’t. If housing is in fact a “human right” as some activists assert, then assigning any dollar figure or percentage of anyone’s income is inherently a violation of that right. What sort of “human right” could be denied on the basis of cost?

If there is an expectation that people (in general) should be paying for their own housing, how much should people be expected to pay?

As the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, notes, there are many ways in which “affordability” can be defined by researchers and policymakers. Researchers and policymakers could look at average incomes in a metropolitan statistical area (MSA). They could use median incomes in a county and establish an absolute floor for affordable housing costs. They could create ratios, they could bundle together utilities with housing costs or not consider utilities at all, and they could transform data in myriad ways to come to reasonable, but radically different, conclusions.

You can see the issue.

But despite the plethora of possible (and possibly contradictory) affordable housing definitions, HUD has generally settled on a set definition of what is “affordable” that it applies to many of its programs. As the department explains on its website:

In the 1940s, the maximum affordable rent for federally subsidized housing was set at 20 percent of income, which rose to 25 percent of income in 1969 and 30 percent of income in 1981. Over time, the 30 percent [gross income] threshold also became the standard for owner-occupied housing, and it remains the indicator of affordability for housing in the United States. Keeping housing costs below 30 percent of income is intended to ensure that households have enough money to pay for other nondiscretionary costs; therefore, policymakers consider households who spend more than 30 percent of income on housing costs to be housing cost burdened.

Defining affordability can be like listening to good music—you recognize it when you hear it, and others may still disagree with you. But the HUD definition would seem to be a reasonable one, and that it has been adopted beyond the bureaucracy as a general rule makes it more compelling as a starting point for this discussion. While this “general rule” is a good starting point, the details for defining “affordable housing” matter, too. More on that in the next blog.

Something Is Rotten in the County of Perry

Posted on June 6, 2022January 13, 2026 by David Stokes

I support the privatization of many government services; I wrote an entire paper on it. I know you’ve all read that paper several times, but here’s the link if you need a refresher.

In many cases, privatizing services—either by sale, contracting, or other options—can lead to better service at lower costs for taxpayers and residents. Privatization is, in short, a good thing.

But it has to be done right. It has to be done as part of an open and transparent process. In Perry County, an attempt to privatize the local county hospital is not being handled properly.

But let’s step back, because the further back you go the worse it gets. In the 1990s, control of Perry County Memorial Hospital (PCMH) was passed from the elected, county hospital board to a private board. I was informed this was done behind the scenes and under the cover of night, like when the Colts left Baltimore. I’m further told everyone involved in that decision is gone now (i.e. dead), so who knows how or why it happened. Perry County still owns the physical hospital itself, but that is all.

Now, that private board is leading the effort to turn over management of PCMH over to Mercy health systems. There has been basically zero public input on this decision. Some community leaders scheduled a public forum on the issue, and nobody from the private board attended. A letter released by community leaders after that meeting stated:

This decision is being made by a small group of people in private meetings. This lack of transparency and secret maneuvering calls for your immediate attention as the PCMH private board has historically acted without transparency. The community’s citizens have a right to information that directly affects their access to health care.

Outsourcing the operations of PCMH to Mercy may be a great move. Heck, it probably is a great move. The economics of small, publicly operated hospitals are hard and getting worse. But that doesn’t mean that an unelected board gets to make these decisions behind closed doors without public input.

I fear the private board will frame its final plan to the county commission as a fait accompli with an implied threat to do something drastic if the county commission does not approve it. Possibilities there could include large cuts to hospital services, shutting down PCMH entirely, or hiring Joe Exotic to turn it into a big cat animal sanctuary. (Okay, probably not the latter.)

This process is bad public policy and bad for democracy. If the Mercy plan is good for the community, make the arguments in public and do the hard work required to convince the people of Perry County. After all, it’s still their hospital, even if just barely.

Part Two: Does Kansas City Have an Affordable Housing Problem?

Posted on June 3, 2022January 13, 2026 by Patrick Ishmael

(You can read part one in this series here.)

It is often taken as gospel by some local (and many national) media outlets that “affordable housing” is elusive for Americans. While that is certainly true in places such as New York and San Francisco, high housing costs are often due to bad government policies, not just housing demand. A city with a solid economy and ample developable property can still experience an affordable housing problem if policymakers distort their housing markets with unwise housing policies.

For instance, rent controls freeze rents for some below market rates and can disincentivize the improvement of existing rental properties. It also deters investments in new housing that may be more affordable to the public and can put downward pressure on the rents of older properties. Government meddling in the housing market could be dissuading market participants from meeting each other’s needs.

Rent controls aren’t the only supply-limiting policy that can reduce affordability. Washington, D.C. is one of the most expensive cities in the country to rent or buy a house, and that’s in no small part due to government interventions such as the 110-year old Height Act. The Height Act, a federal law, caps buildings in the nation’s capital at 160 feet, making it impossible to convert low-lying properties into high-density high rises.

For perspective, the tallest residential building in Kansas City, the Power and Light Building, stands at 481 feet—three times Washington, D.C.’s height cap. The reason for the D.C. law is aesthetic—to keep buildings in the city shorter than the Capitol Building—but the practical effect is to drive up the price of available housing for all residents by reducing housing supply. Again, this isn’t the market failing; it’s the government failing.

State and local governments can also impose costs on the provision of housing through other regulatory practices. For example, land use limitations prohibiting multi-family dwellings on single-family lots, particularly in dense urban settings, can prevent obsolete structures from being replaced with housing consistent with present day housing stock needs. Needless red tape slowing the construction of new housing stock or slowing its development can also be a barrier to lower prices.

For its part, the City of Kansas City doesn’t have rent controls, nor are its other regulatory excesses terribly pronounced. There is also plenty of developable land throughout the region, even if such burdensome limitations were in place in Kansas City proper. Knowing all of this, the basis for Kansas City’s “housing crisis,” if it exists, would not seem to be closely correlated with government policies regionwide.

If Kansas City has an affordable housing problem, could it have more to do with how it’s defined? More on that in the next blog post.

Part One: Does Kansas City Have an Affordable Housing Problem?

Posted on June 2, 2022January 13, 2026 by Patrick Ishmael

Kansas City has long been the crossroads of the United States. Once a frontier outpost in the 1800s, the region served as the trailhead for the Santa Fe, California, and Oregon Trails and was a robust riverboat shipping port. In modern times, Kansas City is among the most prominent intermodal hubs in the country. It is the largest freight center in the country by tonnage and the country’s third-largest trucking center. It’s far from an ocean or mountain, but its geographic advantages—its location and ample land—are at the heart of what the region is and how it sees itself.

That short description of Kansas City isn’t to imply that the region is some monolithic cow town with roads, and Kansas Citians have a plethora of living options to serve their lifestyle needs. Residents can make their home in a rural area and commute to an office downtown in as little as 15 minutes. Urban living options are plentiful, and the local art scene is vibrant and growing.

Indeed, variety is a hallmark of living in the City of Fountains, and that variety is facilitated by the vast geographic space available to its citizens. The Kansas City Metropolitan Statistical Area, or MSA, is the 31st largest in the country, but in terms of population density, the Kansas City MSA ranks far down the list at 121st. There’s space to live in Kansas City, and for years the living’s been relatively cheap.

With a variety of lifestyle choices and ample land, could Kansas City nonetheless be suffering from an affordability problem? Local reporting on its housing stock and costs has reflected many of the housing affordability journalism trends nationally, with most journalistic conclusions pointing to the Kansas City region being in the middle of some sort of a “housing crisis.” A June 2021 report by KCUR captures this dynamic well, suggesting that a “shortage of affordable housing in Kansas City is not a new problem. But the pandemic exacerbated the crisis and exposed the region’s failure to act” (Emphasis mine).

How can a region become “unaffordable” for housing, and what should constitute the region’s “action” to fight this “affordable housing” crisis? Often the solution provided by public officials to solve affordable housing problems is subsidies, typically either for new housing construction or some form of direct rent assistance. But the basis of the underlying claim—that affordable housing in Kansas City isn’t a “new problem”—requires greater evaluation than is typically given in news reports.

We’re told we have an affordable housing problem in Kansas City. But do we? This blog series will explore this question and consider whether the city and the state’s policies are aligned in a way to address the issue if it exists, or protect against its formation if it doesn’t.

Podcast: Canceling Student Debt with Neal McCluskey

Posted on June 2, 2022January 13, 2026 by Susan Pendergrass

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Neal McCluskey is the director of Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom. He is the author of the book Feds in the Classroom: How Big Government Corrupts, Cripples, and Compromises American Education and is coeditor of several volumes, including School Choice Myths: Setting the Record Straight on Education Freedom and Unprofitable Schooling: Examining Causes of, and Fixes for, America’s Broken Ivory Tower. McCluskey also maintains Cato’s Public Schooling Battle Map, an interactive database of values and identity‐based conflicts in public schools, and oversees Cato’s Private Schooling Status Tracker.