DEVELOPER, CALVARY SUE BELTON

Proposed Westover project turned away

in part due to racism, lawsuit claims

By Allen Edmonds

allen@northcassherald.com

KANSAS CITY – A federal lawsuit filed against the City of Belton and Belton City Council on Tuesday by developers behind the rejected Commons of Belton project, proposed for Westover Road north of Markey Road, claims the 252-unit affordable housing project was turned away by the city council due in large part to “discriminatory opposition” where community members used “racially charged language and employed insidious racial stereotypes and code words about the types of tenants who would live in affordable housing.”

The developers, Commons of Belton Development, LP; Commons of Belton DVLPR, LLC, and Jabal Companies, LLC, were joined in the action by Calvary University, a private Christian university located in Belton, which had carried on a positive relationship with the city throughout its existence in its present location.

Mayor Norman K. Larkey, Sr., said he was “unable to comment on pending litigation,” but had read the suit on Tuesday.

In the action, lead attorney Casey Symonds of Kansas City, called the city a “predominantly white suburb” that shares a northern border with Kansas City.

The proposed development would have provided “affordable units for the area’s lower income families and workforce, who are disproportionately Black and in significant need of affordable housing opportunities.”

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When talk of the project began in the fall of 2024, “City officials, including many Council members, expressed their strong support, signing a letter of intent and a purchase option agreement for the City parcel where the Commons would be located,” according to the lawsuit.

However, the suit described, this support “abruptly ended in response to the mobilization of a vocal minority of Belton residents who rallied against the development at the May 2025 Planning Commission and and City Council meetings.

“The neighbor opposition was steeped in discrimininatory rhetoric, making clear that these City residents did not want a disproportionate number of Black families and families with children moving into an affordable housing development in their neighborhood.”

In reality, the majority of neighborhood opposition to the development was centered around the use of designated parkland for high-density housing.

Though the property had not been improved, it had been maintained by the Belton Park Department and used for occasional soccer practices in the warm weather months, as allowed by its Parks zoning designation.

The city’s Park Board had expressed heated opposition to the proposed sale of the property, though such a decision would have been legal.

The surrounding neighborhoods, both Cimarron Trails as well as the military housing development directly across Westover from the planned development, both feature racially diverse populations whose complaints during the hearings were focused on the loss of parkland and the lack of designated parking spaces on the property of the project, which would likely result in an overflow of vehicle parking into the neighborhoods and surrounding streets.

There were some references to “Section 8,” housing, “subsidized low-income housing,” and “increased crime,” which the suit called “explicitly or implicitly grounded in discriminatory stereotypes and views about the likely residents of the development.”

With a significant Hispanic population not just in Belton, but also in the neighborhoods surrounding the project, the suit failed to note that many of the speakers against the project during the public hearing were, in fact, of non-white descent.

Calvary, which joined the action despite its previously cooperative relationship with the city, claimed its “ability to recruit students has been diminished, especially since its accreditation may be affected due to the drop in enrollment” because of a potential loss of a soccer program.

Developers had also planned to purchase adjoining property from the university and had promised to build a competitive soccer field for the purpose of building a women’s soccer program and expanding its men’s program.

“Calvary had recruited and accepted students specifically to play soccer. Most of those accepted students chose not to matriculate because Calvary did not have a usable soccer field and a fully rostered team – causing loss of tuition income for unfilled spots. Moreover, the University was also required to lay off staff as a result of the decline in expected enrollment and lack of resources and funding to continue buildng out the soccer program,” the suit said.

It also cited the loss of $50,000 that the developer would have paid Calvary for a plot of land adjacent to the city-owned site.

The suit did not explain why the university had “recruited and accepted students” assuming a set of conditions that had yet to be approved by the Planning Commission, much less the City Council.

Yet the plaintiffs in the suit maintained that the city and city council “intentionally interfered with” the business relationship between the developer and the university by “yielding to the discriminatory ojections of certain Belton residents and denying the rezoning of the city-owned land parcel.