She Was Going to Lose Her Home to Taxes. Her Neighbors Had Other Plans.

Cedar Valley News
April 20, 2026
She Was Going to Lose Her Home to Taxes.
Her Neighbors Had Other Plans.
By Teresa Nikas

You pay sales tax on every board, every nail, every bag of concrete. The workers who build your home pay income tax and payroll tax on every hour they work. You pay income tax on every dollar you earn to afford it. Every truck delivering materials pays fuel tax on every gallon. By the time you move in, your home has been taxed a dozen ways before you ever turn the key.

Then the government taxes you again. Every single year. Not on income. Not on a transaction. On the fact you own it. And if you do not pay, they take it.

Barbara Bailey found out.

Barbara is seventy-five years old. She has lived in the same house on Jarboe Street in Kansas City since the nineteen-eighties. She paid for it. She kept it up. She is not a developer. She did not profit when money started moving into her neighborhood. She just owned a house in a place where others had decided to live.

Between 2018 and 2020, assessed values in her West Side neighborhood rose by one hundred twenty-eight percent. The county average was eighteen percent. Barbara’s property tax bill climbed more than fifty percent. When a reporter asked whether the rising taxes would force her out of her home, she said one word.

Yes.

A retired attorney named Michael Duffy volunteers for a community organization called Westside Housing. When the reassessment hit, he and his colleagues started looking for tools. They found one in Missouri’s Chapter 353 — a developer tax incentive law written to attract investment to blighted areas. Developers have used it for decades. Westside Housing asked a different question: what if we turned it on the people already here?

The Kansas City Council approved the plan in September of two thousand twenty-two. Homeowners making less than seventy-five thousand dollars a year now pay property taxes based on their income, not the assessed value of their home — two point six five percent of income, frozen for twenty-five years.

There was a catch. To trigger the break, homeowners had to temporarily transfer their deed to a corporation. Families whose homes had been in their names for generations were being asked to sign the title over to an organization and trust they would get it back. Volunteers went door to door. Some people said no. Some people said yes.

Barbara Bailey’s hand was shaking so badly she could barely sign her name.

She signed. Two hundred seventy-two families enrolled. At least 30% make less than $25,000 a year.

Barbara Bailey is still on Jarboe Street. She told a reporter exactly where she plans to be carried out from, and she did not say it gently.

What Michael Duffy and Westside Housing did was find a workaround. A workaround is not justice. Barbara Bailey should not have needed a retired attorney and a clever statute to stay in a home she already owned. But the claim was on her house, and the workaround let her keep it.

Cedar Valley has people like Barbara Bailey. People who built a life inside four walls, paid what they were asked to pay, and now watch the annual bill arrive for the right to keep what they built. The question Westside Housing answered is one Cedar Valley can ask too: what tools exist, what neighbors are willing, and who is close to losing what they should never have to lose.

If you have been sitting with this — your own bill, your own numbers, your own worry — you are not alone in Cedar Valley. The Facebook group is where the conversation can continue honestly. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Barbara Bailey, Michael Duffy, Westside Housing Organization, and the Westside Chapter 353 Redevelopment Plan are real.

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