Mac Properties plans four-corner food startup village at Armour and Troost

Mac Properties’ Kansas City arm wants to turn a “sleepy intersection” on Troost into a four-corner incubator for thriving residential and restaurant activity.

The vision is to create a “food startup village” as the foundation of the development, which would bring 400 new market rate apartments to Armour Boulevard and Troost, said Peter Cassel, director of community development at Mac Properties.

“For us, the most critical, transformative component is the opportunity to build approximately 20,000 to 30,000 square feet of retail at the ground floor, which is really about creating a new place where Kansas City could come to eat and play,” he said.

Set to open in summer 2019, the project is still in the schematic design phase, but Mac Properties is planning for a series of small-shop retail sites where the developer could build out the spaces to lower the costs of entry for food, beverage and other startups, Cassel said. The idea is to get new businesses started by reducing upfront costs, he said.

“This could be an area where people from east and west of Troost come to gather together,” he said. “Troost has been such a dividing line that we’d like to see it as a gathering place — not only getting local neighborhood people to come, but also thinking of it as a citywide destination, like some of the bars and restaurants in the Crossroads or Martini Corner have been.”

Ideally, the development would feature eight to 10 startup restaurants that could use the space to test and prove out their concepts before potentially growing large enough to move to full-sized restaurant spaces elsewhere, Cassel said.

“As young people come to the city, we think this node at Armour and Troost could be a really important starting place for many of them,” he said.

The project is an extension of Mac Properties’ existing efforts along Armour, which already have seen the development 2,000 apartments in about 30 buildings between Broadway and Troost, Cassel said.

Knowing the intersection of Armour and Troost is a vital node for development along the corridor, members of the Troost Coalition — which crafted a zoning overlay for the area and has some regulatory oversight for development — were thrilled when they learned Mac Properties planned to develop all four corners, said founding member Cathryn Simmons.

“You could’ve knocked most of us over with a feather,” Simmons said. “But we had to say, ‘Because we love it doesn’t mean we’re going to give them an inch of ground.'”

Simmons is proud to see a developer with an established Kansas City footprint punching through Troost with an ongoing push east toward the Paseo, she said.

“If you look at what Mac Properties has already done on Armour, they’re on top of it,” she said. “They don’t let anything go to chance, so that makes us feel good.”

Check out the rest of Startland’s six-part series on new development on Troost Avenue, a historic racial and economic barrier in Kansas City.

Part I: Transforming Troost
Part II: Troost Coalition
Part III: Wonder lofts
Part IV: Back to Troost
Part VI: Troost Collective