Ask Tara Raghuveer, the passionate and Harvard-educated founder of the renters’ union KC Tenants, about Parker Webb, and her opinion is unsparing.
“I will say whatever needs to be said about Parker Webb on the record,” she said recently, calling the 33-year-old Kansas City real estate investor and Blue Springs native a “rare breed of slumlord.” “I mean, I’ve seen up close the lives that he’s ruined through his horrible and callous business practices. …
“Parker Webb and his business associates are morally bankrupt. They have gone on a rampage to make themselves money at the expense of poor and working class people across the city. There’s no other way I can describe their business practices except as violent and greedy.”
Talk to a property manager who, for several months in 2022, was hired to lease and care for just a fraction, about 170, of the 1,200 to 1,500 apartments that Webb and his partners came to control across the Kansas City area over the last four years, and the criticism is nearly as sharp.
“He’s a slumlord,” Terrell Jolly, a principal partner in Integrity Capital Management, said. His small firm was hired to oversee seven low-income apartment buildings, all in need of major repairs, controlled by Webb’s company. They found the condition of many of the apartments to be nearly unlivable with mold, leaks, filth, bad plumbing, bad electricity and vermin.
“They don’t give a damn,” Jolly said. “They don’t give a damn about people. They’re terrible.”
Webb — a father, husband, a 6-foot-3 former athlete and “courtwarming king” at Blue Springs High School who, in college, traveled to Africa to help open clinics — said he is not how he has been cast.
“I still see myself as a pretty good guy,” he said in an interview, given albeit reluctantly, to The Star. “Do I wish that I never would have bought some of these properties? Yeah, because it’s been very painful. It certainly hasn’t been profitable.
“If we were slumlords, would we be loaning seven figures to properties that needed it to make sure they had their lights on, to make sure that their water bills were paid? That doesn’t sound like the activity of a slumlord.
“But if just owning those properties makes us a slumlord — even though we are trying to do the right thing — then I can’t change that definition.”
Roaches, mice, a child’s death
Over the last two years few landlords in the Kansas City area have been cast in as negative of a light as Webb, the CEO of FTW Investments, a local company whose name bears his last initial and those of his partners, Logan Freeman of Kansas City and Cory Tuck of Prairie Village.
Since 2020, FTW has used investors’ money and, according to the Jackson County Recorder of Deeds, nearly $70 million in loans to purchase at least 12 low-income apartment complexes (registered in Missouri as limited liability companies or LLCs) in mostly struggling neighborhoods around Kansas City and Independence.
FTW’s long-term goal: fix them up, raise rents (from 30% to as much 100%, depending on the property) to increase revenue and then, after several years, sell at a profit to as FTW says on its LinkedIn page “help investors build generational wealth and passive income to leave a legacy.”
Except on a snowy weekend in January 2023, the nature of FTW’s legacy, and Webb’s, was challenged.
In northeast Kansas City, KC Tenants called attention to immigrant residents, families from Burma, in an FTW complex on North Lawn Avenue who were there shivering in their apartments. Bundled in hats and coats for close to three days, they had no heat or electricity following a fire set by squatters who had broken into the building.
It was hardly the first incident at the brick complex. In the months prior, a teacher at nearby Gladstone Elementary School had repeatedly been emailing and complaining to the property management company about break-ins and fires lit by squatters, and trespassers openly masturbating in view of residents, some of them schoolchildren, and urging the company to act.
“We have many immigrant families in your properties. We fear their safety on a daily basis,” she wrote.
When the fire in January forced emergency workers to turn off the heat, “there were multiple, multiple attempts to reach management,” a Kansas City Fire Department spokesman said at the time. “No success.”
Webb, for his part, maintains that as soon as he discovered the loss of power, he quickly paid to relocate his tenants to a hotel. Most tenants went, he said. Some chose to remain in their cold apartments, a fact that he believed was used by KC Tenants to paint him as uncaring and neglectful.
Then this May, FTW and Webb were again in the news when residents, organized by KC Tenants, picketed the deplorable conditions at Independence Towers, a 10-story, low-income apartment building that Webb and his partners had purchased in 2021 at 728 N. Jennings Road near U.S. Highway 24. They’d also bought the Stoneybrook East apartment complex next door.
Hoisting signs depicting Independence Towers as a toilet, residents protested the lack of heat and air conditioning. They described filthy carpets, mildew-encrusted bathrooms, roaches, mice, bed bugs, gaping ceiling holes from water damage. One resident, Joshua Jamison, talked of raw sewage spewing out of his tub and sink.
Hanging over it all, residents said, was the fear that if they complained too much they would face retribution: leases not renewed, getting booted from one of the few buildings — with studio to two-bedroom rents ranging from $415 to around $850 — they could afford.
Two former tenants — one from Independence Towers, the other from Stoneybrook — are currently suing FTW and its partners in Jackson County Circuit Court, citing not only the horrid conditions they endured but also, for one of the tenants, Randall Carver, being “kicked out” after he complained.
“If tenants complain they are threatened that they will receive a non-renewal notice,” the suit claims. “(W)hen Plaintiff Carver complained about the filthy and uninhabitable conditions Defendants forced upon him and his family, they sent a non-renewal notice and told the owners of the apartment building that he was applying to that he had a negative rental history. This was not true; he always paid his rent on time. …
“Defendants want their tenants to believe that homelessness is their only alternative so they will, out of fear and lack of choice, put up with unsafe, dangerous, and illegal living conditions, pay their rent, and suffer in silence.”
Their attorney, Jonathan Soper of Humphrey, Farrington & McClain, noted in his filing that in Missouri, every rental agreement contains an “implied warranty of habitability” that requires landlords “to deliver and/or maintain the premises that are free from dangerous or unsanitary conditions that can materially affect the life, health and safety of the tenant.”
But Webb and his partners, he claimed, instead placed their own profits above “vulnerable tenants.”
“Defendants’ decision to maximize their investor’s profits rather than fulfill their obligation to their tenants,” he wrote, “has led to the widespread presence of cockroaches, bed bugs, filth, vermin, rodents, water intrusion, flooding, mold, inadequate and/or no air conditioning and heat, inadequate or no running water, lack of security, unsecured doors and windows, unsafe and damaged parking garage, ineffective maintenance, inadequate repairs, and dangerous conditions in the common areas.”
Independence Towers had already been in such an unsafe and unhealthy condition that Fannie Mae — the federal mortgage agency that lent Webb and his partners $5.5 million on condition that they improve the tower — filed a petition in January asking for the building to go into emergency receivership.
Their concern was clear:
“Borrower’s failure to undertake and complete the Required Repairs,” Fannie Mae’s petition said, “has put the health and safety of all residents and guests at risk.”
In May, control was taken away from Webb. A new property manager was put in place.
Then, in July, a fatal tragedy struck:
A 3-year-old boy, Tidus L. Bass, tumbled eight stories from a window of his family’s Independence Towers apartment. Tidus’ father, Moses Lee Bass and his partner, Destiny Leeann Randle, were each charged and have pleaded not guilty. They are accused of felony endangerment of a child, having left the child with no adult supervision in a room with a window with a broken lock and ripped screen.
Found naked next to his diaper, unconscious, but still breathing on the lawn where he fell, Tidus died a short time later at Children’s Mercy hospital.
Independence Police Detective Kurt Jarnagin’s report on the incident noted that Randle had “attempted several times to get building management to fix the window,” which had been that way since they moved in more than a year before.
There has been no implication that Webb or FTW bear any legal responsibility in Tidus’ death. Webb called any such suggestion “absolutely ridiculous.”
“This is an absolute tragedy,” he said of Tidus’ death. “I have a 3-year-old boy.”
He and his spouse also have a 19-month-old daughter. Tidus, he said, died on the day of their son’s 3rd birthday.
“I was in tears as soon as that happened,” Webb continued. Then he spoke of the building. “The windows open. The windows open. That’s how the windows are and have been for 60 years.
“There’s hundreds of buildings all across the city that are that way. It is a terrible, terrible tragedy. In no way, shape or form is it my fault or is it the building’s fault. It is a terrible freak accident. That’s exactly what it is.”
Poster boy for hatred?
In a 90-minute coffee shop interview, Webb, speaking in a calm and steady baritone, said he has watched the news media paint a portrait of him as a ravenous real estate investor seeking to profit off of poor tenants. That image, he maintained, not only is false, but also is the opposite of his and his partners’ intentions.
Webb did not specifically name KC Tenants, but he was clear that he feels that the organization — seizing on problems at FTW’s properties — has purposefully targeted him as their nemesis, portraying him as an evil landlord in order to advance KC Tenants’ own social and political agenda.
“One hundred percent, that’s exactly what I think,” Webb said. “I’m young. I’m white. And they presume that I’m affluent, although I’m not nearly as much as they think. And they think that I am the perfect target for what they are trying to do. I am the perfect poster boy for their hatred.
“Again, I think if they would have had a conversation with me at the beginning, they could have found that I could have been a true ally for them.”
Instead, following the North Lawn Avenue incident, with residents shivering in their apartments, KC Tenants lambasted Webb and his partner, Freeman, in a letter to the leaders of reStart Inc., the Kansas City area nonprofit dedicated to fighting homelessness. Webb and Freeman had been on the board of directors.
Webb and Freeman, the letter declared, “contradict the mission and vision of reStart.” KC Tenants called for their “immediate removal” for “the sake of our city and the sake of the people you serve.” Webb and Freeman are no longer on the board, a turn of events that Webb suggested was cruelly ironic.
When he and his partners began FTW in 2020, he said, yes, they absolutely did so to make money for themselves and their investors. But, he said, they also thought they could do well by doing good — providing better housing for lower-income and middle-class renters.
“Every single property that we acquired, we improved,” Webb said. “If you want to talk about the condition of Independence Towers today, you should have seen it when we bought it, because we put over a million dollars into that building. …
“Part of the vision was, ‘Could we find a way to improve housing for working people while simultaneously making a reasonable profit for the investor?’”
Raised in Blue Springs “relatively working-class,” Webb said service to others was a foundational value in his home.
He described his grandparents as pastors and grocers. They owned Richards’ IGA in Independence, later to be purchased as Richards’ Sun Fresh before becoming Cosentino’s Sun Fresh.
The Star reached out to members of Webb’s family, but none responded to calls, texts or emails.
“I mean there were days when the only reason there was food in my cabinet was because my grandparents owned a grocery store,” he claimed, “and they brought food home for us.”
‘Crying my eyes out’
Webb recounted what he called a “core memory” from when he was around 10 years old, visiting relatives in Oregon, driving in or around Portland and coming to an intersection.
“There’s a man, a homeless man on the corner with a sign,” Webb said, “and the sign read, ‘Can you help me eat today?’ I remember sitting there, pulling money out of my pocket and asking my family to stop so that I could give this guy money.”
The car failed to stop. He recalled, “me, just bawling, just crying my eyes out as we went.” The moment, he said, solidified for him that reality of want and need, the divide between who takes for granted something as fundamental as food and those who can’t.
As Webb tells it, his father worked in IT; his mother worked in education, first in the Kansas City, Missouri, public schools and now in Grandview. His older sister, Jane Webb, is a licensed clinical social worker at Operation Breakthrough. His wife, Tawar Khalandi, is a program manager for The Educator Academy, a nonprofit that coaches and certifies teachers, many of whom are African American, throughout the Kansas City area.
Webb’s 2010 high school yearbook portrays him as a popular student — a track athlete and football player who, by his senior year, sang in multiple choirs and became the lead in the school musical, “The Wedding Singer.”
In college, at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, he studied political science, minored in economics, and during two summer sessions, traveled to Uganda with GlobeMed, an international organization working to improve health in developing countries.
“When I first met Parker,” Mona Lyne, a sociology professor and Webb’s college mentor, said in a UMKC interview published in 2016, “he was very commendably idealistic, and had a desire to make a big difference in the world. He walked the talk early on. … I believe he ultimately will find a rewarding career in public service.”
The Star attempted to contact Lyne to talk about Webb. She also did not return calls or emails. Also contacted were Webb’s former colleagues Danny Jonas, FTW’s director of operations who is now at KC-based Project Advocate, and Krystal Heimsoth, FTW’s former managing director of operations who now, according to LinkedIn, is the strategic chief operating officer for ReVera Capital. They, too, did not return calls or emails.
“My whole thing is I wanted to make my influence on the world positive,” Webb said. He just wasn’t sure how. Nor, when he returned from Uganda, did he know what he wanted to do.
“So I came back and talked to a friend of mine. He said, ‘Well, you were thinking about international development, but you also raised money to build a hospital. That’s real estate development.’ He goes, ‘I run the real estate group here at UMKC. Why don’t you come to one of our meetings?’”
Webb said he went. He was intrigued. He also said he had serious concerns.
He knew, from his studies of Kansas City developer J.C. Nichols, the good and bad that real estate development could create. On one hand, there was the Country Club Plaza and wonderful neighborhoods like Brookside, Fairway, Prairie Village and Mission Hills. On the other hand there was Nichols’ use of redlining and racial and ethnic covenants to keep Black and Jewish people out of his homes.
“So,” Webb said, “it was something where I went into it saying, ‘OK, I think this has the ability to do things that are good, and it has the ability to do things that are bad. … How can I go into this to do good?’
“That’s where this all started.”
‘They don’t do nothing’
Where it stands now also matters.
The Star identified and visited more than a dozen complexes in Kansas City and Independence that, since 2020, were purchased for investors by Webb and FTW and structured as what are known as manager-managed LLCs. (Investors own the properties, while Webb and partners put together the deals, manage the business and get a financial stake.)
In Independence, The Star visited among others: Independence Towers on North Jennings Road, incorporated as 728 N. Jennings Road Partners LLC; The Winner Place Apartments incorporated as Winner Partners LLC; The Meadowbrook Apartments on South Swope Drive, incorporated as Swope Partners LLC; The Hudson Apartments on South Cunningham Street, incorporated as Cunningham Partners LLC.
In Kansas City, there was the sprawling Legacy Apartments off Wornall Road incorporated as 1200 E. 89th Partners LLC, three multistory apartment buildings on West 33rd Street off Broadway incorporated as 410 E. 33rd St. Partners LLC, as well as apartments on Benton Boulevard, Charlotte Street, North Lawn Avenue and Roberts Street.
It is important to note that, as of publication, at least seven of the 12 complexes no longer belonged to Webb’s group, having been sold over the years. Four — including the Meadowbrook Apartments, Winner Place Apartments and properties on North Lawn Avenue — were sold this year to owners who, tenants said, seem to be making initial improvements.
The Star interviewed residents who live in apartments currently operated by FTW as well as those who lived in them when FTW held them previously. Most did not want their names used for fear of possible retaliation.
Virtually none who agreed to speak had a positive word.
“I’ve got a lot to say,” said Darla Burns, 51, who, along with her adult daughter who has autism, has lived for five years at the Hudson Apartments, still part of FTW. When she first moved in, the rent for her two-bedroom unit was $699 a month. Now, it’s $1,175.
“I’ve got a leak here,”she said, pointing to her cracked ceiling. Rain pours through the apartment above, she said. “I’ve had leaks since day one, June 2019.”
Mold has spread above her shower. “I’ve got a roach problem bad.”
An apartment nearby is being renovated, Burns said. “That’s because it caught on fire.”
Squatters several times have broken into the apartment beneath hers.
“They don’t do nothing about it,” she said of the management. “I wouldn’t recommend this to anybody.”
In late summer, a swimming pool on the grounds remained closed. Residents said it had been all summer. Weeds sprouted from the pool’s cracked concrete deck. Blackened rainwater stagnated near the clogged drain at the bottom of the pool’s deep end.
Public Yelp reviews are consistently terrible.
“I cannot say enough bad things about this apartment,” read one. “If you want to keep your family healthy and not breathe in mold do not move here. If you want a functional apartment and hot water or heat. Do not move here.”
Calls by The Star to the property management company hired by FTW were not returned. No one was in the management office when The Star visited.
At the Winner Place Apartments in Independence, across from Van Horn High School, one resident, when asked about the living conditions, walked to his unit and returned holding a dead mouse from his threshold. The complex was sold by FTW in April. Several units were actively being renovated when The Star visited.
Longtime residents who were there during FTW’s tenure talked of dealing with “a plague” of cockroaches over numerous years, poor security and repeated car thefts from the parking lot.
On West 33rd Street, just north of the VFW headquarters on Broadway in Kansas City, James Alan Waters, 72, opened the door to his studio. He’s lived in the complex for a decade. A Chiefs blanket is the curtain on his front window.
A back window blew out in a storm last winter and, by late summer, had yet to be fixed. He put plywood over it himself. Nor has anyone repaired the cabinets, which are dangling from the soffit above a sink that is buckling. The vinyl on his countertops is peeling away.
“It was flooded in here for a couple of days,” Waters said of his place. “Nobody cleaned up afterwards. … All the buildings are the same. They’re falling apart.”
The Meadowbrook Apartments in Independence were sold by FTW in April. Amanda French, 42, is glad they’re being redone. She’d lived there for two years, during the time FTW controlled the property.
“There are so many problems with these apartments, it’s unreal,” she said. “I’ve been battling cockroaches from the day I moved in. It took them almost six months to fix my garbage disposal.”
At the Legacy Apartments, at Troost Avenue and 89th Street, several people said they were generally satisfied with their apartments, but others echoed the complaints heard at other FTW properties.
“I had cockroach problems right when I moved in,” said one young woman of the $750-per-month studio she rented a year ago. Management didn’t call an exterminator.
“They gave me bug spray,” she said, adding that she then relied on her cat to catch and kill the insects.
When her heat broke in the winter, she later transferred into a one-bedroom, but was paying the studio rent.
“They say they have an emergency hotline. None of them did anything,” she said.
Her apartment turned cold. “I stayed in the unit for four days before they said, ‘OK, I’d get a hotel.’”
Seven days passed in the hotel before management moved her into her one-bedroom. She has no intention of staying. A bartender, she feels unsafe walking to her apartment after work at night. The complex has security gates.
“They’re supposed to work, but they don’t,” she said. “They haven’t worked since I’ve been here.”
Webb said he thought that such a preponderance of negative comments reflects a selection bias, not the truth.
“I think you have a sampling data error,” he said. “No one’s going to talk to you if they’re super excited. I mean that’s the way that works. Like people who do Google reviews are never going to be the people who are like super excited about stuff.”
The Star offered to speak to any tenants Webb might contact who were willing to vouch for their experience at FTW’s properties. Webb said he would reach out to some, but then later opted not to. He did send The Star a screenshot of a note written by a tenant at Independence Towers asking for “KC Tenants and associates” to leave her alone, along with a screenshot of an undated Instagram post in which she defends Webb.
“Before everyone sharpens their pitch forks for tomorrows rally,” it reads, “a big thank you to parker for continuing to work on restoring the hot water at independence towers my family was able to take hot showers tonight!!”
It says that loss of hot water was not his fault, adding, “lets not get on here and act like he just doesn’t give a (expletive) about the building … I lived here before COVID during COVID and after I will say this is the most (expletive) given for this building I have seen.”
Headwinds
Whatever problems their properties have had, Webb insisted, they weren’t a matter of FTW not caring.
“A lot of the reasons these buildings go away or don’t do well,” he said, “is a lot of times when people acquire them they do what we call the ‘lipstick on a pig’ strategy. They put some paint on it. They put some carpet on it and call it a day.
“Our strategy was — and sometimes it doesn’t reflect immediately in what you can see — but it was, ‘Let’s go in and fix the plumbing. Let’s go in and fix the electrical. Let’s go in and fix the roof.’ Now, you’ve just bought this building 25 to 50 more (usable) years. Let’s handle paint over some time. Let’s handle the flooring over some time. Let’s improve the units over some time.
“We’re not flipping anything. This is a five-to-10-year strategy to make sure this building is secure. Then let’s improve it over time. That’s what we’ve been trying to do every single time.”
Except Webb conceded, “I will say there have been some real headwinds these last couple of years that have made this very difficult.”
For one, the buildings — known as “Class-C,” distressed real estate — were burdened with bad plumbing and electricity, structural problems and vermin when they were purchased, although FTW was fully aware of that.
Each property, Webb said, was bought as a separate investment — owned by the investors and not, he said, by him or his partners. He maintained that they’re not getting rich, as they only hold a tiny percentage stake in each property, claiming, for example, that his own personal ownership stake in Independence Towers is 1.1%.
“We only get a return if it is profitable,” Webb said.
After FTW acquired properties, Webb said, they had two basic choices on how to improve them. One, they could evict all the tenants, renovate the empty buildings over time and reopen at around double the rents. Or the path they chose, Webb said, which was to renovate while tenants still occupied the buildings.
“We didn’t want to displace people,” he said. “What we wanted to do was go in there and address issues as we can.”
The idea was that as units were rehabbed, they would move tenants from old to newer ones.
“We wanted to push up revenues as slowly as possible, so that it wasn’t too onerous on the people that lived there,” Webb said.
That rents would go up was inevitable and a necessary part of the business model, he said, as the rents at the properties FTW acquired were often staggeringly low, averaging $450 to $550 a month overall. The amount was hardly enough, Webb said, to maintain a building, let alone renovate it while paying a mortgage or making a profit.
“It would be a beautiful and wonderful thing if we could all go pay $450 and live off that,” Webb said. “But it’s not going to work. It doesn’t pay for things.”
Rents at a number of his buildings were slated to rise to $1,000 or more.
“When you think about it,” he said, “we have to raise revenue over time. It’s not good for those buildings to have revenues that low. These buildings are valued based off of the revenue streams, and if those revenue streams don’t come up, those buildings are going to get torn down.”
Webb claims FTW’s investors collectively poured “seven figures,” meaning millions of dollars of capital, into the properties.
What they did not count on, he said, were “headwinds” in the form of crime and consistent break-ins — thieves stealing copper, squatters starting fires as they did at the North Lawn property, other squatters threatening tenants to give them access.
“We continuously interviewed the residents,” Webb said. “They said, ‘They will hold guns to our faces and say if we don’t let them in, they’re going to shoot us.’ We had a situation on Lawn (Avenue) where a homeless person broke in. Our property manager called the police. The police go there. The person tells the police, ‘I lease this space.’ The police say, ‘He says he has a lease. You guys have to go through eviction.’ The police didn’t remove him.
“He burned down the building that day. Two working moms lost their housing that night because the guy broke in. When that stuff is continuously happening, what are you supposed to do?”
Tenants, Webb said, sometimes present their own difficult issues: drug dealing from apartments, prostitution, disturbances including ones involving mental illness. Missouri court records show that since 2020, the LLCs connected to FTW have sued more than 300 tenants for eviction or for — a major problem — unpaid rent.
“Rent collection is a huge issue,” Webb said. He said that during the COVID-19 pandemic, many residents grew accustomed to having the state and federal government assist in paying their rent through the CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security) Act and other programs. As the pandemic subsided, so did the funds.
“A lot of people just never started paying their rent again,” Webb said, leaving less money to put toward improvements. “Since we have owned these properties, seven figures worth of rent has not been paid to us. It would be a whole lot easier to do a lot of these things if people are paying their rent.”
Webb cited other issues, such as hiring ineffective property management companies that led, in at least one case, to an apartment complex going from 90% occupied to 60% occupied. He said the financial break-even point for most multifamily properties is between 75% and 85% occupied.
Webb balked at the suggestion that perhaps he and his partners were not fully prepared and did not have enough capital to make necessary improvements. He conceded that what they envisioned, and what has transpired, are not exactly the same.
“If I was to sit here and tell you that, you know, every single one of these things is an absolute success, I’d be lying to your face,” Webb said. “We set out with a goal of making incredible improvements to these.
“The landscape of affordable housing in today’s day and age is incredibly difficult, and there are areas where we came up short. It would be untruthful for me to tell you anything differently.
“But we worked diligently. And I personally have been up to my knees in feces trying to fix issues. I’ve personally been painting apartments to help. I’ve personally been crawling through soot and doing whatever I can to help get things done.
“So I can’t tell you that everything went right, but I can tell you that we have busted our tails to try to get the absolute best result. We set out with the absolute best of intentions.”
Now, Webb said, FTW’s intention — as the sale this year of at least four complexes shows — is to back away from the distressed, Class-C, residential multifamily market.
“We have been selling quite a few of our properties and moving on,” he said. “There are folks who want to engage in the space. We are going to let them take a swing at it.
“My hope is that they can be better stewards of those assets.”
Reporter Noelle Alviz-Gransee contributed.
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