Walk through enough Midwestern neighborhoods and a pattern emerges. Storefronts are occupied. Streets have foot traffic. Local businesses are open. But the numbers that real estate analysts track — vacancy rates, absorption figures, price-per-square-foot — sometimes tell a different story, or no story at all about what’s actually happening on the ground.
Parker Webb has seen this disconnect play out across Kansas City for years. As principal at FTW Investments and a longtime advocate for community-aligned development, he’s grown skeptical of the metrics that dominate investment conversations.
“Vacancy rate tells you a property is leased. It doesn’t tell you if the tenant is serving the people who live there, or if it’s just filling space,” Webb said. “Those are very different outcomes, and only one of them builds a neighborhood.”
The distinction matters more than it might seem. A block of occupied storefronts housing check-cashing services, dollar stores, and short-term pop-up concepts may post strong occupancy numbers while offering almost nothing that strengthens community life. Meanwhile, a mixed-use block with a community health clinic, a locally-owned grocer, and a small-format childcare facility might carry a slightly lower occupancy at any given quarter, but deliver outsized value to the residents who rely on it.
What the Numbers Miss
The limitations of vacancy-focused analysis have been visible in real estate markets for decades, but they’ve become harder to ignore as urban development accelerates. In markets like Kansas City, where growth has been consistent and demand has pushed occupancy to record highs, the gap between a full building and a functioning community is widening.
According to a 2025 Newmark Zimmer report, retail leasing in the Kansas City metro outpaced new supply by a ratio of six to one last year, pushing overall occupancy above 95 percent. On paper, that’s a healthy market. In practice, the picture is more complicated.
“High occupancy doesn’t mean the right tenants are in the right places,” Webb said. “It means space is filled. That’s the baseline. The question is what that space is doing for the people around it.”
Webb points to what he calls “community essentials” — businesses that provide services residents genuinely need and cannot easily access elsewhere. Grocery stores, pharmacies, healthcare providers, workforce training centers, and childcare operators all fall into this category. So do locally-owned restaurants and service businesses that keep dollars circulating within the neighborhood rather than extracting them.
When those tenants anchor a development, Webb argues, the downstream effects on the broader property portfolio are measurable. Tenant retention improves. Neighboring properties see increased foot traffic. Public safety outcomes tend to improve as well, a factor that influences everything from insurance costs to lender appetite.
A Different Framework
Rather than defaulting to occupancy and yield as the primary measures of success, Webb advocates for a more layered assessment that factors in tenant type, community benefit, and long-term stability.
“I ask three questions about every asset,” he said. “Who does this serve? What happens to the neighborhood if this tenant leaves? And would the community fight to keep this business here?”
That last question is more than rhetorical. Webb has seen developments that had genuine community backing navigate permitting delays, economic downturns, and tenant transitions with significantly less friction than projects that were built without neighborhood input. The social capital built through transparent, community-facing development, he argues, functions as a form of risk mitigation that rarely appears in a pro forma.
The approach also changes how Webb thinks about lease terms and tenant selection. A tenant offering below-market rent but providing a genuinely needed service may be a stronger long-term hold than a credit tenant whose business model extracts value rather than creating it.
“Investors talk about anchor tenants all the time,” he said. “I want anchor tenants for the community, not just for the rent roll.”
Rebuilding the Scorecard
The shift Webb is describing isn’t purely philosophical. Institutional investors, community development financial institutions, and public agencies are beginning to develop frameworks that attempt to quantify community impact alongside financial returns. Community benefit agreements, impact investing mandates, and opportunity zone compliance requirements are all pushing in the same direction.
But Webb believes the change also has to come from within the investor class, not just from regulatory pressure or philanthropic capital.
“The best developers I know are already doing this,” he said. “They’re not waiting for a mandate. They’ve figured out that a project the community supports is a better investment. The numbers back it up over time, even if they don’t always show up in the first-year yield.”
As the debate over affordability and displacement intensifies in cities across the country, Kansas City’s development community is quietly assembling a model that takes both seriously. The vacancy rate may still be the headline number. But for investors paying attention, it’s increasingly the least interesting one.