It costs a landlord $62 to file an eviction in Jackson County. Researchers found raising that fee by $100 would cut evictions dramatically — and help Black renters most. Kansas City is also where tenants organized and started winning.
In 2023, Eviction Lab researchers published a study in the journal Housing Policy Debate that did something unusual: it identified a specific, cheap, actionable cause of high eviction rates. The team collected filing-fee data from nearly every county in the country and found that where it's cheaper to file, landlords file more — using the courts as a routine rent-collection tool rather than a genuine last resort, because the cost of doing so is trivial.
The finding, in the words of lead researcher Henry Gomory: increasing the filing fee by just $100 reduces the eviction rate by 2.25 percentage points — enough to more than halve the eviction cases in a typical neighborhood. And crucially for a city divided the way Kansas City is, the researchers were explicit about who benefits: "These increases in residential stability would have their largest effects on Black renters, helping to remedy the disproportionate levels of eviction experienced by this group." Gomory called the size of the effect "startling."
Kansas City's $62 fee sits at the bottom end of exactly the range the study says is fueling the crisis. It is, in a sense, the most solvable problem this wave has found — and the fact that it remains unsolved tells you where the power currently sits.
Kansas City's filing rate has run slightly above its pre-pandemic average, and filings are now happening faster than before COVID — a function of Missouri's fast, cheap "forcible detainer" process. The pressure driving them is intensifying: the Kansas City area recently posted the highest year-over-year rent increase among the 50 biggest U.S. cities, with Jackson County renters paying an average around $1,044 a month while wages fail to keep pace. And as Eviction Lab's most recent national report found, Black renters nationally make up 28% of the renter population but 39% of eviction filings — a disparity the Kansas City filing-fee research says is precisely the thing a higher fee would help remedy.
To understand where Kansas City's evictions land, you have to understand Troost Avenue — a street that has functioned as the city's racial dividing line for a century, and that is back in national headlines right now.
Real estate covenants and deed restrictions — many authored by developer J.C. Nichols — prohibit home sales to Black residents west of Troost, confining Black Kansas Citians to the East Side.
"Blockbusting" — agents inducing panic-selling among white homeowners — hardens the line. In 1955, city planners even use Troost as a school-boundary line, perpetuating segregation after Brown v. Board.
A sitting Kansas City mayor likens Troost Avenue to "the demarcation line in a war zone." Neighborhoods west of Troost remain white; those east remain Black.
A new Trump-backed congressional map uses Troost as the dividing line between two districts — splitting the historic Black East Side off from downtown's resources. Residents call it a reopening of "old wounds."
The Black Archives of Mid-America's executive director put it plainly: Troost is "a serious dividing line racially in this city." The eviction data maps almost perfectly onto it — the filings cluster east of Troost, in the neighborhoods a century of redlining, covenants, and blockbusting built. Kansas City's eviction crisis isn't spread evenly across the city. It runs along a line drawn on purpose, a hundred years ago, and reinforced on a congressional map last year.
Here is what sets Kansas City apart from every other city in this wave. Faced with the same fast, cheap, racially concentrated eviction machine, Kansas City's tenants organized — and started winning.
This matters for how the rest of this wave should be read. In city after city, we've documented the machinery of displacement — the highways, the corporate landlords, the $62 filings. Kansas City is the proof that the machinery isn't a law of nature. Right-to-counsel didn't exist here five years ago; tenants built it. The rent strike didn't have precedent; they set it. The filing-fee research sitting on the shelf is, in that light, not a lament but a to-do list.
None of this means Kansas City has solved its eviction crisis — it hasn't. The $62 fee is still $62. Rents are still rising faster than almost anywhere in the country. The right-to-counsel program, while real, depends on funding and political will that can shift. And the Troost line just got redrawn onto a federal map, threatening to divert resources away from the exact neighborhoods carrying the most filings. Organizing wins are real, but they're defended year by year, not banked permanently.
That gap — between what's been won and what a family needs on the first of the month when rent is short — is exactly where a tool that works one household at a time earns its place.
Perfect Tenant Innovation isn't a substitute for KC Tenants, right-to-counsel, or a higher filing fee — those are the structural fights, and Kansas City is winning some of them. What PTI does is work the individual side of the same problem: rewarding on-time payment, building a tenant's credit through rent, and giving a landlord a documented reason to accept a payment plan instead of reaching for a $62 filing. When the filing is that cheap and that routine, giving both sides a better option before the courthouse is precisely the intervention that keeps a case from being filed at all.
Kansas City proved tenants can organize and win. PTI is one more tool for the households east of Troost — a way to hold the line on the first of the month, while the bigger fights over the $62 and the map play out.
See how Perfect Tenant Innovation helps tenants build toward stability and helps landlords keep good tenants housed instead of filing against them.
Join the Tenant WaitlistIt costs $62 to file. It costs a family everything to be filed on. Kansas City is fighting to change that math — PTI is one more tool for winning it, one household at a time.