“There’s an ideological problem with granting incentives to luxury apartments,” he said. “It certainly wasn’t a given that downtown was going to come back,” said Nick Benjamin, a vice president of development for Cordish who oversees the company’s investments in Kansas City. “But we saw that the pieces were there in terms of the metro’s size, and its location, big local companies and civic spirit.”One Light and Two Light are fetching top-of-the-market rents of around $2.25 per square foot, up from around $1.85 per square foot in 2015. The average rent in the Kansas City area is $1.04 per square foot, according to the website Rent Cafe, but renters can expect to pay about 60 percent more to live downtown. To a large degree, the success of the first two towers fueled criticism of providing incentives for the third, the $130 million Three Light, which will begin construction in early 2019.

Source: New York Times September 11, 2018 18:00 UTC