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Garden City officials: housing shortfall persists; RHID remains primary tool
Summary
Assistant City Manager Danielle Burke told the Garden City Board of Education the city remains behind its housing goals and that the reinvestment housing district (RHID) tax-increment tool has driven most new housing over the past decade.
Garden City Assistant City Manager Danielle Burke told the Board of Education on Feb. 3 that the city remains behind target on housing supply and that the reinvestment housing district (RHID) tax-increment tool has produced most of the new housing in recent years.
Burke summarized a December 2024 housing needs assessment and said that, using recent growth assumptions, Garden City needs thousands of additional housing units to meet demand. “We are desperately behind where we need to be as it relates to housing,” she said during the annual housing update.
The RHID, a tax-increment financing tool, allows developers to use property-tax increments generated by new development to fund infrastructure such as streets, sewers and sidewalks. Burke said the city and other taxing entities retain the baseline tax revenue while the increment can be applied to eligible infrastructure costs to make projects feasible.
Why it matters: the board is a taxing entity for the city and the availability of housing affects district enrollment, workforce housing for local employers and property-tax revenue. The city commission in 2020 set a goal to add 4,000 housing units by 2035; Burke told the board the city is not on pace to meet that goal and that, depending on the growth-rate assumption used, the shortfall ranged in the presentation from roughly 2,400 to about 4,000 units.
Burke walked the board through permit and occupancy data to illustrate where housing is being built. In recent years single-family permits have ranged from about 32 to 52 per year; multifamily permitting has been more variable, with 2022 showing a spike driven by the Hunters Glen quadplex development (the quadplex projects register as multiple permits when each unit is counted). Certificates of occupancy — the point at which a unit is ready for move-in — have ranged roughly between 47 and 60 in the last three years, Burke said.
Burke also showed maps of permit activity, noting clusters in Chapel Heights and Hunters Glen and that 2024 had multifamily permitting drop to zero while single-family permits continued. She said the city had updated its multi-year tracking spreadsheet to follow RHID projects from approval through build-out and to forecast when RHIDs will “roll off” (when time boundaries expire or eligible expenditures are paid and full tax revenue starts returning to all taxing entities).
Board members asked about overlap with other regional proposals. Board member Nathan Heck asked whether a proposed Star Bond sports complex near the high school would remove land available for housing. Burke said that area is under review for a Sports of the World Star Bond project and, if approved by the state, would be moved forward as a star-bond eligible parcel — in short, that portion would not be available for standard housing development if the star-bond application proceeds.
Burke closed by saying there are many projects in the pipeline but that they are not yet sufficient to reach the board’s adopted goal.
Ending: The presentation concluded with a question-and-answer period and an offer from city staff to provide more detail on particular developments if the board wanted to examine individual RHIDs further.
