Goodbye Costco. Hello Innovation.
Kansas City should stop mourning the possible loss of yesterday’s retail model and start designing what comes next.
Costco has been an important Midtown institution. Its history deserves scrutiny because taxpayers helped create the site, residents supported it for 25 years, and its changing format will reduce jobs and eliminate valued services. Accountability belongs in this conversation. So does economic reality. Businesses are not charities, markets change, and no city should build its future around forcing one corporation to maintain the same format forever.
The better response is not resentment.
It is ambition.
Kansas City should begin treating the Midtown Marketplace site as one of the most strategically positioned innovation opportunities in the region. It sits between downtown and the Country Club Plaza, beside Home Depot, near established neighborhoods, accessible from major roads and transit, and positioned within a city core undergoing enormous change.
Hallmark HQ at The Makers District
Hallmark has always been more than a greeting card company. It is one of Kansas City’s most important creative institutions, built on illustration, storytelling, packaging, product design, retail, licensing, media, and emotion. Yet much of that creative power remains invisible to the public. A Hallmark headquarters presence inside The Makers District could change that.
The campus could become part corporate headquarters, part innovation center, and part civic institution. Employees would still have focused workspaces, studios, and executive offices, but the building would also open outward through a design museum, rotating exhibitions, public workshops, artist residencies, and creative entrepreneurship programs.
This would allow Hallmark to tell a much larger story about itself. Instead of being remembered primarily as a legacy card company, Hallmark could position itself as a modern design and innovation company helping shape the next generation of Kansas City creators.
Could IKEA work beside Home Depot?
Home Depot helps people repair, construct and improve physical space. IKEA helps them furnish, organize and experience that space. One sells the bones of the home. The other sells the life inside it.
Customers renovating kitchens, building apartments, furnishing offices, opening restaurants or preparing short-term rentals often need both ecosystems. Home Depot serves contractors, property owners and do-it-yourself builders. An IKEA urban-format store could serve renters, homeowners, designers, hospitality operators and small businesses without requiring the scale of a traditional suburban IKEA warehouse.
The ideal concept would likely not be a full IKEA blue box. It could be an urban planning and order center with curated merchandise, room displays, design consultations, pickup lockers, delivery coordination and a smaller Swedish food market. Larger products could be ordered digitally and delivered from a regional logistics facility.
Grocery must remain central
Innovation cannot become an excuse for eliminating practical neighborhood needs. Midtown still requires affordable groceries, pharmacy access and everyday services.
The solution could be a smaller but strong grocery anchor surrounded by specialized food businesses. Rather than depending on one warehouse club, the district might combine a value grocer with a fresh-food market, local meat and produce vendors, prepared-food operators, a pharmacy, community health services and shared commercial kitchens.
What City Council could do differently
City Council should begin by recognizing that the site’s future is not merely a zoning matter. It is an economic-development design challenge.
The city could convene Home Depot, Costco, IKEA, grocery operators, local developers, universities, architecture schools, makers, neighborhood leaders and financial institutions around one table.
Kansas City is the anchor. Retailers are participants.
Costco may change. IKEA may or may not come. The final tenant mix could look very different from anything imagined today. The power of the idea is not dependent on one brand.
The opportunity is to build a platform where many brands, local businesses and public institutions can succeed together.
So perhaps the appropriate response to this moment is neither outrage nor resignation.
It is an invitation.
Thank you, Costco, for helping anchor Midtown for 25 years. We will hold the public and private decisions surrounding the site accountable. We will learn from what worked and what did not.
THE SUBSIDY
& THE EXIT
The Midtown Costco: built with public money, leaving on its own terms.
In 1993, Kansas City razed 33 acres of Midtown homes and small businesses to make room for suburban-style retail in the urban core. In 2001, a taxpayer-subsidized Costco opened at 241 E. Linwood Blvd. and became a neighborhood anchor for 25 years. In 2026, the company moved toward conversion into a business-focused distribution center.
The ground beneath it was a neighborhood first
The 33-acre superblock at Linwood and Gillham was a fabric of homes, apartments, and small businesses. By the 1980s, the area was struggling with disinvestment, crime, and drug abuse. The city’s answer was urban renewal: condemn the properties, raze the area in 1993, and leave a clearing waiting for redevelopment.
The sledgehammer, not the scalpel.
Houses · apartments · corner storefronts · a walkable street grid
What replaced it
Two big boxes, parking fields, and a single point of failure: one tenant’s business model.
A 1990s TIF deal: public risk for a private anchor
The site was redeveloped under a Midtown tax increment financing plan designed to bring suburban-style retail into the urban core and help fund housing rehabilitation. Midtown Marketplace opened its Costco doors in 2001.
Residents testifying against the conversion put the public cost of building the site at nearly $65 million. The bargain, as the community understood it, was public dollars and a demolished neighborhood in exchange for a permanent, full-service retail anchor.
A TIF is a bet that a private anchor will deliver public value for decades. When the anchor rewrites its role 25 years later, the question becomes what the public was actually owed.
What the Linwood store actually did for Midtown
For a quarter century the store operated as a full warehouse and did far more than sell bulk groceries. It served as a pharmacy, optician, tire shop, and affordable food source for households across Midtown and the East Side.
Kansas City homicides by year
2025 is an estimate cited in the report.
What Costco filed in May 2026
Zoning documents describe a $20 million-plus remodel converting the warehouse into a Costco Business Center. The rezoning also adds a fenced outdoor storage yard with 25 truck stalls.
What goes
- Pharmacy
- Food court and bakery
- Optical and hearing centers
- Tire shop
- Apparel and electronics
- Books, toys, furniture, plants
- Liquor
What stays
- Gas station
- Bulk groceries
- Access for all members
- The building and the subsidy that built it
Timeline: close fall 2026 · remodel · reopen early 2027.
More than 70% of Business Center items differ
Wholesale cart today
- Fresh bakery
- Rotisserie chicken
- Prepared foods
- Household pack sizes
- Food court
- Free samples
Business Center cart
- Commercial meat room
- Cases of produce
- Restaurant dairy
- 50-lb flour
- 5-gallon condiments
- Frozen bakery items
The calories survive; the convenience does not.
Jobs cut by nearly two-thirds. Services gone entirely.
Costco told the community the Linwood workforce would fall from roughly 250 employees to about 90 after conversion.
Workforce at Linwood
Approximate 64% reduction
From roughly 250 workers today to about 90 after conversion.
City Hall pushed with everything short of power
The corporate playbook, move by move
The city negotiated with a rumor.
The conversation moved into zoning.
Approve the changes or risk closure.
Suburban stores open as Linwood changes.
Physical conditions, not service requirements.
What the public paid, and what the land returns
The big-box format yields a fraction of the taxable value per acre produced by finer-grained neighborhood development.
Taxable value per acre
Approximate values from the report
Public vs. private dollars around Linwood
Capital investment across Troost, 1997–2026
The past 25 years and the next 25
What the neighborhood keeps under each outcome
| Community value | Stays as-is | Business Center | Goes entirely |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bulk groceries & produce | ● | ◐ Expanded food | × |
| Pharmacy | ● | × | × |
| Optical & hearing centers | ● | × | × |
| Food court & bakery | ● | × | × |
| Tire shop | ● | × | × |
| Apparel, electronics, merch | ● | × | × |
| Gas station | ● | ● | × |
| Jobs at Linwood | ~250 | ~90 | 0 |
| Open to all members | ● | ● | × |
| Wholesale supply for small business | ◐ Limited | ● Core purpose | × |
| Sales & property tax to KCMO | ● | ◐ Reduced retail sales | × |
| Walkable affordable food access | ● | ◐ Groceries only | × |
In fairness: Costco’s case
- The business center may keep the lights on.
- A $20M remodel is reinvestment.
- Food variety may expand.
- Workers may be offered transfers.
- The format can serve small businesses.
The empty-box scenario
- Zero jobs
- No food
- No gas station
- A dark 33-acre superblock
- Lost tax revenue
- A deeper food-access problem
The council’s last card and the series thesis
Approval ratifies a conversion the city spent months opposing. Rejection risks an outright closure. The larger lesson is that future public incentives should carry enforceable public value.
If council approves
Business Center opens in 2027. Pharmacy, optical services, and roughly 160 jobs leave Midtown.
If council rejects
Costco has signaled the store would likely close entirely.
The accountability play
Community benefits agreements, clawbacks, and service covenants.
