Faith groups promote economic justice, civil rights in Kansas City events

Editor’s note: The Thursday event was canceled because of weather after this story was published. The Friday event will take place as scheduled.

TOPEKA — Kansas faith groups say the impacts of historical redlining and discriminatory housing practices are alive in the Kansas City metropolitan area.

They recruited a national civil rights figure, Bishop William Barber II, to remind the public and local officials this week of their duty to poor and vulnerable people.

Barber is a Protestant minister, activist, author, public speaker and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign. He is set to join faith groups Thursday in Kansas City, Kansas, to inspire justice in the community. Those faith groups will initiate a call at a Friday event to local public officials to take housing and homelessness issues more seriously. 

Faith groups in Johnson and Wyandotte counties “have separately identified the growing homelessness and shortage of affordable housing as (a) crisis with historical parallels to the exclusionary practices of redlining and racial covenants in the 1900s,” said a news release from a national network of grassroots organizations called the Direct Action and Research Training, or DART, Center.

The Rev. Bruce Draper, president of Churches United for Justice, a coalition of 17 churches in Wyandotte County, and one of the organizers of the events, said continuing disinvestment in portions of Wyandotte County and a denial of homelessness in Johnson County are the results of historical redlining and ignorance of poverty.

Redlining has an established history in Kansas City, Kansas, and metropolitan areas across the country. The discriminatory practice involved government, loan and insurance agencies withholding services to people — mostly Black people and other ethnic minorities — who lived in certain neighborhoods that were deemed financially risky. 

“White folks would move out to the places where they could get loans,” Draper said. “Redlined areas wouldn’t have any investments.”

People moving into redlined neighborhoods weren’t given loans, families couldn’t build equity and property values declined. A strategic disenfranchisement and discrimination effort snowballed into generational poverty that still permeates areas like Wyandotte County, which has the highest poverty rate among counties in the Kansas City, Kansas, area. 

In Johnson County, which Draper said has benefited from redlining, homelessness has become increasingly apparent.

“The government officials want to deny homelessness and they want to deny there’s a housing issue,” Draper said.

Faith groups are pitching to officials in Johnson and Wyandotte counties the creation of affordable housing trust funds, which would dedicate steady revenue streams toward building new affordable housing or repairing existing housing so people can remain in their communities. 

“We need affordable housing, particularly in historically disadvantaged areas,” Draper said.

In Lawrence, an affordable housing trust fund that was created in 2019 with the help of the DART-affiliated organization Justice Matters, the city has helped build an estimated 810 affordable housing units, according to a city of Lawrence dashboard. The city allocated $1.2 million from the trust fund in 2025 for a variety of projects including repairs for low-income seniors, rental assistance for families experiencing homelessness and new housing developments.