photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Sen. Marci Francisco speaks at "A Better Debate" on housing and homelessness on Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025, at the Lawrence school district offices.

It was called a debate, but there were no panelists or winners or losers – just a big circle of citizens at the school district offices, taking turns with the mic and answering this question:

Is Lawrence doing enough to be a place where there is housing for all?

For Trina Tinsley, the answer was personal: “For my family, they have been.”

Tinsley was the first speaker to give her view at Thursday’s event, which was associated with the city-county “A Place for Everyone” housing and homelessness plan in partnership with the Kansas Leadership Center. Tinsley said she was a homeowner in 2013, married and pregnant with her son.

But her housing situation became unstable after she had to flee from domestic violence, and a few years after her son was born, things got even worse: she got a felony on her record.

“In 2018, I was presented with a decision to keep my son and I safe,” she said. That decision involved them fleeing to Mexico for a time, and that eventually led to her conviction for interference with custody.

“That exempted me from rental applications,” Tinsley said. “It exempted me from a lot of things.”

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Trina Tinsley speaks at “A Better Debate” on housing and homelessness on Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025, at the Lawrence school district offices.

It was thanks to the resources in Lawrence – through agencies like the Lawrence-Douglas County Housing Authority, Tenants to Homeowners and Family Promise, that she was able to stabilize her living situation. Now her conviction has been expunged, “so I don’t have that hanging over my head anymore,” and she’s grateful for the community organizations that were able to look past it and help her and her son.

“For the first time since he was born, over the last couple of years I’ve been able to have stable housing,” Tinsley said.

The debate – more of a discussion – was based on a new style that the Kansas Leadership Center is trying out, called “Braver Angels.” People could stand up along the circle, give their view on the question about whether Lawrence was doing enough on housing, and then answer a few follow-up questions from the other participants.

Some people, like Holly Krebs, thought there should be some changes. She said there was a “national problem of not having enough single-family homes,” and mentioned new City Commissioner Mike Courtney’s idea for building modular homes as a potential remedy.

Another participant asked Krebs about the assumption that owning a single-family home was right for everyone. “It’s an excellent question,” Krebs replied. She said building up equity is important, but that there are many paths to homeownership that don’t look like a traditional starter home: “condos and row houses and tiny homes.” She ended her turn with a call for more of the latter.

“I’m a really huge fan of tiny homes,” she said. “I think we need 500-square-foot homes so people can get their foot in the door.”

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Holly Krebs speaks at “A Better Debate” on housing and homelessness on Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025, at the Lawrence school district offices.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Monte Soukup speaks at “A Better Debate” on housing and homelessness on Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025, at the Lawrence school district offices.

Monte Soukup of the city’s Affordable Housing Advisory Board thought there was a gap in the center of Lawrence’s housing market.

“I believe our city needs to aggressively incentivize the development of housing products in the middle and lower half of the market,” Soukup said. He defined that as more houses at $200,000 to $300,000 or below – “Unfortunately, that is the middle of the market today,” he said.

He suggested looking at other cities as models, such as Kerrville, Texas, which opened 40 acres for developers to use for affordable housing, streamlined their approval process and “required the developers to build over 150 homes under $300,000.”

“Our city leadership has demonstrated that they’re willing to take bold action,” he said. “When we came out of the pandemic and had a houselessness problem, the city and the county took some amazing action to really impact that. It’s time to take bold action on middle- and working-class people’s housing.”

But affordability isn’t just about housing costs, Sen. Marci Francisco noted – it’s also about how much people earn.

“I’m not sure that the issue is housing affordability as much as having more equality between incomes and distribution of wealth,” said Francisco, D-Lawrence.

“It’s not easy to maintain housing,” she continued. “There’s a lot of work, in terms of repairing the roof, repairing appliances, keeping up with the squirrels that like to attack your roof.” And all of those things cost money.

So do utility bills, as Krebs noted. And so do property taxes.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Tim Hamilton speaks at “A Better Debate” on housing and homelessness on Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025, at the Lawrence school district offices.

Tim Hamilton, a professor of economics at Johnson County Community College, seized on the latter. He said the real question might have been whether the city was doing too much, not whether it was doing enough. The city had taken on “astronomical” debt, he said, and the consequence was tax hikes that made it difficult for people to stay in their homes.

“Property taxes have been ratcheting up, about a thousand dollars per household per year for the last five years,” Hamilton said.

And landlord Sofiana Olivera said the impacts from property taxes fall on renters, too, not just on homeowners. She said costs that landlords can’t control drive up rents, and that can drive tenants out of their homes.

“Renters say property taxes don’t affect them,” Olivera said. “They do affect them.”

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Participants sit in a circle at “A Better Debate” on housing and homelessness on Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025, at the Lawrence school district offices.