Your first 90 days

03 · Weeks one to four · License, plates, and the car tax

Both states will tax you for owning a car. This is the item that blindsides everybody.

Get the driver's license and the registration done together, at the office of whichever state you now live in — they are separate systems, they do not talk to each other, and moving across the metro later means doing all of it again. Bring the deed or the lease, the title, proof of insurance, and your old license.

Then there is the part that arrives later, in an envelope, and ruins a perfectly good December.

Missouri's bill also has teeth attached: you generally need a paid personal property tax receipt to renew your plates the following year. File the receipt somewhere you will find it. Everyone learns this once.

04 · Weeks one to four · Register to vote

You have changed states, so you have changed everything: a new secretary of state, a new county election board, new deadlines, and — the part that actually matters here — a completely different set of local ballot questions. The school levy, the library levy, the county assessment fight, the stadium: those are decided by the few thousand people in your county who bother, and you are now one of them.

Register with the election board of the county you now live in — Jackson, Clay, Platte, Johnson, or Wyandotte. We are deliberately not printing deadlines here, because they move and a stale date on a relocation page is how people miss an election. Your county board publishes the current one.

05 · Before August · Enroll the kids

Enroll by street address, not by city name. This is where the six-figure mistakes happen.

An Overland Park address can be Shawnee Mission, Blue Valley, Olathe or Spring Hill. A Leawood address can be Blue Valley or Shawnee Mission — with a different tax levy attached. Do not let anyone, including a listing agent, tell you the city name is enough. Look up the actual street address, and do it before the first day of school, not on it.

And one door most people never hear about: Kansas has statewide open enrollment. You may be able to apply for a seat in a district you do not live in. It is a right to apply, not a right to attend — the sought-after districts post very few open seats — but you should know the door exists before you spend a quarter of a million dollars nailing it shut behind you. Missouri has no equivalent: on that side, your address decides, full stop.

Schools & the state line — the districts, the boundaries, the sources →

And the list we are not giving you yet

No roofer. No mover. No lender. Not until Nataliya has actually watched them work.

Every relocation site in this metro has a “trusted partners” page, and most of them are advertising. We have the names — real companies, phone numbers verified against their own websites — and we are still not printing them as recommendations, because a recommendation is a reputational vouch and Nataliya has not personally vouched for these yet. The utilities above are different: there is exactly one Evergy, and you have to call it.

• movers

  —

  Real companies, verified phone numbers, no endorsement yet. Call and ask for the list — she will give you names on the phone before she will print them on a website.

• inspectors

  —

  Real companies, verified phone numbers, no endorsement yet. Call and ask for the list — she will give you names on the phone before she will print them on a website.

• lenders

  —

  Real companies, verified phone numbers, no endorsement yet. Call and ask for the list — she will give you names on the phone before she will print them on a website.

• contractors

  —

  Deliberately empty. A contractor referral sends a stranger into your house. That name has to come from someone who has seen the work.

No vendor on this list pays to be here. We take no referral fees, no kickbacks, and no advertising from anyone listed. If that ever changes, this line changes first.

While you unpack

What is actually happening in this city — including the things that already happened.

Half the value of this list is negative. If another site is still promising you a World Cup, or a “coming soon” airport terminal, you now know exactly how old that page is. Every item carries its status, its source, and the date we last checked it — so that this page can be caught being stale too.

• under construction

  2028 to 2030 (target)

  Roy Blunt Luminary Park (the South Loop park capping I-670)

  The 5.5-acre park decking over four blocks of I-670 to stitch the Crossroads back to downtown. Officially renamed Roy Blunt Luminary Park in April 2025. The original goal of opening two blocks in time for the June 2026 World Cup was NOT met — environmental review pushed it back. The plan became: finish the structural deck before the tournament, pause during it, resume after. Full completion is targeted for 2030, or 2028 if fundraising closes early.

  Still moving — we are re-checking this one. Primary source is the project site (kcsouthloopproject.org), which was not read directly this pass. The 2028/2030 window and the exact current construction stage should be re-verified there before publishing.

  Wikipedia / KCUR / kcsouthloopproject.org · 2026-07-14

• announced

  2026-04-22

  New Kansas City Royals ballpark at Crown Center

  On April 22, 2026 the Royals and Hallmark announced the new downtown ballpark will go at Crown Center — on the site of Hallmark's current corporate HQ. Groundbreaking is slated for 2027. This ends years of speculation: the Crossroads site and the Overland Park / Aspiria site are both OFF. A week earlier the City Council had passed a ~$600M financing framework for an adjacent Washington Square Park site.

  Still moving — we are re-checking this one. 'Announced' is not 'financed'. The $600M council plan was tied to Washington Square Park, and how it maps onto the Crown Center site is unsettled. Re-check the financing and the groundbreaking date quarterly — this is the single most likely item on this list to change.

  KCUR · 2026-04-22

• operating

  2025-07

  Panasonic Energy EV battery plant, De Soto, KS

  Opened July 2025 on 300 acres in De Soto, southwest of the metro. As of February 2026 it was nearing 50% of production capacity with a second wing under construction, employing about 1,800 with up to 4,000 projected at full capacity. In June 2026 Panasonic said it will shift some lines to make AI data-center batteries, with the first of those expected between mid-2028 and early 2029.

  Kansas Reflector / KCUR · 2026-06-17

• complete

  2026-06-16 to 2026-07-11

  FIFA World Cup 26 — Kansas City matches at GEHA Field at Arrowhead

  KC's World Cup is OVER. Arrowhead hosted six matches — four group games, a Round of 32, and a quarterfinal. The last one, on July 11, 2026, was Argentina 3–1 Switzerland in front of 69,045 people. Any site still telling you the World Cup is 'coming to Kansas City' has not been updated since spring.

  KCUR / FIFA · 2026-07-11

• complete

  2026-05-18

  KC Streetcar — Riverfront Extension

  Opened May 18, 2026. Adds 0.7 miles of track north from the River Market to Berkley Riverfront Park. Still free to ride.

  KCUR · 2026-05-18

• complete

  2025-10-24

  KC Streetcar — Main Street Extension

  Opened October 24, 2025 after construction began April 2022. Added 3.5 miles, taking the line to about 5.7 miles from the River Market to UMKC. With the Riverfront extension the system now runs roughly 6.4 miles. Free to ride.

  KCUR · 2025-10-24

• complete

  2023-02-28

  KCI new single terminal

  NOT a 2026 project — it opened February 28, 2023 and has been in service for three years. The 40-gate, ~1-million-sq-ft single terminal replaced the old three-terminal horseshoe. It is listed here only because several competing relocation sites still describe it as 'coming' or 'under construction'. It isn't.

  Kansas City International Airport (flykc.com) / KCUR · 2023-02-28