Highwoods isn’t bowled over by the Kansas City Plan Commission’s vision for the future for the Country Club Plaza

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Ever since it acquired the Country Club Plaza from the J.C. Nichols Co. in 1999, real estate firm Highwoods Properties has had a precarious relationship with a Kansas City public suspicious of an out-of-town owner and its plans for the iconic retail-and-entertainment district. Things have been mostly calm between Highwoods and Plaza enthusiasts over the past five years, but a long process to codify how the Plaza might evolve threatens to disrupt an uneasy truce.

The City Plan Commission last week voted to approve what’s known as the Midtown/Plaza Area Plan, a long document that spells out recommendations for future development patterns in key areas of Kansas City, Missouri. The plan covers a broad swath of Kansas City — bounded by 31st Street to the north, 55th Street to the south, State Line Road to the west and the Paseo to the east — but so far, its designs for the Plaza have attracted the most attention.

Two committees worked with city staffers for more than a year to compose the Midtown/Plaza Area Plan, which updates a generation-old vision for the Plaza. An intensely complicated document, that 1989 plan set standards for development on the Plaza that, its authors believed, would not disrupt the district’s unique local character. Proponents of the new Midtown/Plaza plan see it as a mere update to the 1989 plan, especially its restrictions on building heights within the “bowl” of the Plaza created by its main retail strips. There also remains a clause forbidding certain types of businesses from signing leases there.

“There’s far more continuity here than there is departure,” says Greg Allen, president of the Historic Kansas City Foundation and a member of both committees that had a hand in drafting the Midtown/Plaza plan.

But Highwoods, the North Carolina commercial real estate firm that owns more than 800,000 square feet in the heart of the Plaza, sees the plan as more than just an update. It has objected to the plan on the grounds that it could create obstacles for current and prospective tenants. The company also suspects that passage of the plan as it is today could mean the implementation of more stringent historical standards tomorrow, a designation that would mean the company and its tenants would have to go to City Hall to seek approval for even minor changes to its buildings.

“Traditionally, you don’t think of an area plan or a master plan or a comprehensive plan as being implemented,” says Mike White, a well-known real estate lawyer representing Highwoods. “They’re supposed to be guides — the City Council is free to go along with them or not. People who have a more Procrustean view of these plans, what they’re really saying is, they don’t want a master plan. They want a rezoning.”

With the City Plan Commission’s unanimous blessing of the plan on September 15, the matter is about to take on much higher visibility when the City Council takes it up in the coming weeks.

Highwoods’ name is on the deed for the most popular areas of what people consider the Country Club Plaza, but Kansas Citians tend to feel that the district belongs to them. In recent years, the most striking illustration of that attitude was the shellacking that Highwoods took when renderings of a proposed new headquarters for the Polsinelli law firm went public, in 2011. The mooted structure’s mimicry of bland, suburban trends drew furious outcry on both sides of the state line. This kind of architecture, went the social-media chorus, belonged in Overland Park’s Corporate Woods, not on the low-slung, Spanish-themed Plaza.

Polsinelli eventually backed away from the proposal and instead leased what was once the failed West Edge project (now Plaza Vista) for its new headquarters. But the public remained leery of Highwoods, and the City Council at the time — which had signaled its openness to rezoning a portion of the Plaza in contravention of the 1989 Plaza Plan — couldn’t fail to notice.

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Rezoning is a profound step in city planning. Properties all around a given municipality are zoned for certain uses (commercial, residential, manufacturing and so on), but the needs of the residents who surround those properties are fluid, making changes to zoning inevitable. The proposed Midtown/Plaza plan does not call for any rezoning, but it contemplates something that can have a similar impact: overlay districts, which can add stipulations limiting how land or property may be used or designed.

One element of the proposed overlay district on the Plaza is a height restriction: Buildings at the base of what’s referred to as the “bowl” of the Plaza — the retail corridor that’s bounded largely by 47th Street and Brush Creek and by J.C Nichols Parkway and Jefferson — could be no taller than 45 feet. The idea is to protect the district’s original design while allowing structures to increase in height the farther they are from the bowl.

Another element is a set of restrictions controlling the types of businesses that can operate on the Plaza.

The way Allen sees it, the restrictions keep out retailers that some see as unsavory. His prime examples are tattoo parlors and payday lenders. The plan also cites adult movie houses, animal shelters and storage facilities as verboten.

“We need a higher level of protection, and people in Kansas City have been calling for it for many years,” Allen says. “And it’s time they did it.”

But White says the document would forbid some businesses that are already on the Plaza and don’t cause problems. Case in point: automobile showrooms, also disallowed by the new plan. White says it’s a de facto prohibition against Tesla Motors, the electric-vehicle manufacturer that has announced plans to put in a showroom on the Plaza.

White says his client isn’t worried solely about what’s in the proposed plan. There is also, he says, what’s not in it. He says he believes that the next step after the Midtown/Plaza plan would be a move to add the entire Plaza to the city’s register of historic places.

His belief isn’t merely guesswork; the Midtown/Plaza plan includes several passages that support putting areas of the Plaza within historic designations.

A vision statement in the document says, “Many significant historic buildings exist that are not formally designated…. They should be listed on the national and/or local register of historic places overlay district.”

For preservationists, such a designation ensures that a beloved building or area doesn’t get torn down. For a property owner, however, it can mean hoop-jumping at City Hall before any modification can be made. The Plaza is already seeing some of that friction.

Price Brothers Management Co. bought three apartment buildings on the Plaza along Summit Street last year that were designed by famed Kansas City architect Nelle Peters. Price Brothers quietly pulled pre-demolition permits to rid the land of what it called blighted apartments. The Historic Kansas City Foundation noticed the permits and applied to City Hall to apply a special designation to the buildings. As that process makes its way through City Hall, Price Brothers’ investment sits in limbo.

“The plan is replete with references of how great it would be to designate the Plaza as a historic district,” White says. “I know from talking to various city staff, the next thing that’s coming down the pike is the city application to put this overlay district in place. I got a call a year ago from a member of the KC historical society who said, ‘I want you to help us put a historic designation on the Plaza.’ I know what’s coming.”

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Allen, a preservationist, says he would consider backing a historic designation, but he tells The Pitch that’s not what’s being discussed today. “It may well be that’s what should be done. I could argue that’s what should be done,” Allen says. “What’s being proposed is a great deal less than that.”

Anyone with a hunger for drama in municipal government should look no further than the development of an area plan.

Across the state line, a similar conflict has unfolded as property developer Lane4’s bid to reshape the old Metcalf South Mall as a big-box-centered retail complex ran up against Overland Park’s adopted guide for development along the Metcalf corridor. With its abundance of surface parking and the potential to add redundant retail monoliths to the suburban landscape, Lane4’s plan didn’t conform to the guide, known as Vision Metcalf. The Overland Park Planning Commission recommended that Lane4’s proposal be denied; rather than rewrite it, the company halted the project altogether, complaining to the Kansas City Business Journal that Vision Metcalf had overtightened restrictions on development.

Scuffles between property owners and city governments over what the owner can do with an asset are nothing new. But a Kansas City public ringed by anonymous malls and offices is increasingly interested in how those tiffs play out. As Allen points out, the Midtown/Plaza plan isn’t a punishment targeted at Highwoods; it’s indemnification against any subsequent owner burying the bowl under charmless, ahistorical retail and architecture.

Highwoods isn’t the only private interest that’s unhappy with the Midtown/Plaza plan. Kansas City Life, a substantial property owner on the north end of the territory covered by the plan, has registered its displeasure.

“We believe it’s restrictive and limits the future possibilities of redevelopment in the midtown area,” KC Life director of real estate Kurt Schoeb told the City Plan Commission this month. His argument sounded familiar.

“This is a shopping center, first and foremost,” Mark Bryant, another attorney representing Highwoods, told the Plan Commission. “It is not a museum. It is not an art gallery. It is a shopping district. It is a shopping district that has been in existence and prospered for now a period of 93 years without this plan and without a historic overlay district.” (Bryant’s argument to the City Plan Commission presumed that the proposal included a historic designation; he was corrected by others who attended the meeting and were familiar with the document’s contents.)

For Allen, Highwoods’ treatment of the Plaza as a mere shopping district is cause for concern.

“When it suits their purpose, they always want to downplay the scenic and historic aspects of the Plaza,” he says. “They say it’s for shopping. That’s nonsense. It’s a place.”