ELLY GRIMM

   • Leader & Times

Housing in Liberal and the Southwest Kansas region continues to be a necessity, and as Liberal City Commissioner Jose Lara tells it, there has been a lot of progress made on that front in recent times.

“When I started on the commission, housing in Liberal was one of the bigger concerns I heard about, and it’s still a concern now. I spent my first campaign season understanding what was needed for Liberal in that regard and why there wasn’t really a lot of growth happening,” Lara said. “The next year, I spent it gathering information, and eventually, there was even a housing study done. That housing study showed by 2040, we would need at least 1,300 more units within the city, and it also revealed nearly 6,000 units would be needed in the Southwest Kansas region to match what’s going on in Dodge City, Garden City and other communities in the area. Other communities were adding 50 to 200 units per year, while we were only putting in three to six new units, which is well below what’s needed. I spent the next year researching what we were doing to help housing, and one of the big things was the city building streets – I was adamantly told cities do not pay for or build streets. After about a year and a half, Eli Svaty and I went to David Toland, who’s our current lieutenant governor and secretary of commerce, and we asked him ‘What do we need to bring in business to Liberal?’ David’s words were rather cryptic, but the message ended up being pretty clear – if you’re not building houses or other similar infrastructure, businesses will not focus on your community because they don’t see the growth necessary to bring in their business venture. Big employers want to know there will be housing for their employees, other retail ventures and other similar infrastructure, that’s what they focus on when making those decisions. We all know artificial intelligence can now tell where you live, where you’ve traveled, etc., and these big companies have access to that information.”

Even with all of that work, Lara said there was still a lot to do.

“Eventually, we were at a meeting with the leadership of Dodge City and talking to them, and they have a hybrid system of what we’re using where they pay for some of the streets, but the developers pay the difference. Here in Liberal, we went in an entirely different direction – we pay 100 percent to the developer of the street. We pay for all of that and then reap the costs during the Rural Housing Incentive District (RHID) process,” Lara said. “The RHID is not a tax abatement – once a newly built house is given the occupancy permit, taxes begin being paid on it, whether it’s by the developer or the new owner. That money then goes to the county, and instead of being disbursed to the other taxing entities, the money returns to the developer who has the RHID, which, in this case, is the City of Liberal. It’s typically 15 to 25 years before a taxing entity sees anything from a development, but with our current project, we can have some of these paying taxes onto the tax rolls within to seven to 10 years. Some of that includes the Chance Addition, the Ortuño Addition, and the Doll Addition – those are all roughly 48 houses, and there could be more. There are probably 150 units in the pipeline, and that’s just to start, because there are some more projects being talked about. I know affordable housing is important, and I don’t know if I would personally consider some of these houses being built within that label, but we’re hoping this development moves the market, and maybe some people will move up to them after putting their homes on the market.”

Lara said one of the major goals is to help Liberal continue growing.

“We’re looking at all possible methods to bring affordable housing and new housing for people, because Liberal needs to grow,” Lara said. “In 2025, we had several houses either built or upgraded through nearly $500,000 in assistance and incentives, and we recently got a few new grants. Something else that has seen a lot of work is the floodplain maps, we’ve been working on making revisions to those, which helps some other aspects. Overall, I truly believe the state of the city is strong.”