Permits, Reviews and Approvals Across the Kansas City Metro

In the Kansas City metro, a residential building permit is rarely one approval. Most custom home projects clear two or three separate reviews, in a required order, and that order changes depending on which side of the state line you are on and whether a homes association has design authority over your lot. Getting the sequence wrong is the most common reason a project starts late.

How many approvals does a Kansas City home project actually need?

The city building permit is the one everyone expects. It is often not the first one, and it is rarely the only one.

Depending on the address, a project may also need architectural review by a homes association, a separate drainage permit, a demolition permit, historic review, a tree or right-of-way permit, and a contractor license specific to that jurisdiction. Each has its own submittal requirements and its own calendar.

Here is what that looks like across the fifteen jurisdictions we have documented. In Mission Hills, plans go to an Architectural Review Board before the city issues anything, and new construction requires a five-week submission window ahead of the meeting. In Prairie Village, Public Works issues a drainage permit applied for separately from the building permit. At Lake Quivira, the city issues the permit but contracts plan review, construction inspections and the final inspection out to the City of Shawnee. In Hallbrook, a project clears the association’s Design Review Committee first, then a Leawood permit that may sit on a twenty-five day notification hold.

Does the city or the homes association go first?

Where a homes association holds design review, it almost always goes first, and for a practical reason: the city will issue against approved drawings, but the association can require changes to those drawings. Submitting to the city first means paying to draw the project twice.

Associations that review plans before the city will issue include Hallbrook, Lake Winnebago and Lakewood in Lee’s Summit. Mission Hills works the same way in practice, except that its Architectural Review Board is a city board rather than an association. At Lake Lotawana the Association owns the lake and the Parkway strip along the shore, so anything at the water runs on a second approval track entirely: two permits, two organizations, two calendars.

Lakewood is the outlier. It is twenty officially recognized parcels, each with its own supplemental declaration of covenants on top of the association-wide documents, so the first question is not what the rules are but which of the twenty rulebooks governs your lot.

What varies most from city to city?

More than most people expect. Four examples, all of which change what can be built on a given lot:

• Setbacks. In Overland Park, the minimum front yard in R-1 is twenty feet, or thirty feet if the property was preliminary platted before January 2010. Your setback depends on when your lot was drawn, not on the zoning district alone.
• House size. Leawood publishes no maximum lot coverage percentage for the house itself. It caps square footage with a formula instead, which produces very different answers than neighboring cities.
• Adopted codes. Westwood is on the 2024 I-Codes. Shawnee runs 2024 codes for most things but holds residential at the 2018 IRC with its own R328 amendment, and wants sealed plans for an ordinary house.
• Trees. Fairway charges one hundred dollars per diameter inch to its tree fund for a right-of-way removal. That is a budget line, not a surprise invoice, if you know about it early.

What changes when the house is old?

A great deal. In Kansas City, Missouri, any building over fifty years old is evaluated for historical significance before it can come down, designated or not, and in a neighborhood like Brookside that is nearly every house. In Brookside itself, Nichols-era restrictive covenants run with the land, and the platted building line frequently governs the setback instead of the zoning table. Near the Country Club Plaza, Southmoreland has been a certified local historic district since 1985, where demolition of a primary building requires full Commission review regardless of age.

None of this makes a project impossible. It makes it a different project from the one someone would draw without knowing any of it.

How long does approval take?

City review times are usually the predictable part. Association calendars are not, and they are fixed by other people. Leawood allows a participating homes association a twenty-five day hold on a permit. Lakewood’s Alterations Review Committee works to a published cycle: submittals on the first and third Mondays, meetings on the second and fourth Tuesdays. Mission Hills wants five weeks before an ARB meeting, and a demolition application at least forty-five days before a demolition permit can issue.

A schedule built only around city review will therefore be wrong. We build the review calendar for the specific address into the preconstruction schedule, which is the only way a start date means anything.

How we handle approvals

Before drawings are finalized, we identify every body with authority over the address, what each one requires, when each one meets, and what order they have to happen in. It is unglamorous work, and it is the difference between a project that starts when it said it would and one that does not.

We have written this up jurisdiction by jurisdiction. Start with the build guide for your city, or read about how we run a project.