High on the bluffs of Kansas City’s West Side, Monique Ortiz stepped out onto the porch of her 120-year-old home and, with a mixture of uncertainty and sad acceptance, looked across the street at the future. In the next few months on her block, 12 new and expensive homes will rise. And that doesn’t include the $800,000 towering house with an elevator that went up in 2019. Or the three empty lots soon to be developed by a high-end firm whose multiple West Side properties include $1.2 million homes. “These houses don’t look like anything in the neighborhood,” said Ortiz, 40, a third-generation West Side resident. “It’s like one world is here and, across the street, is another. It changes the culture.” It’s precisely that cultural change that has many longtime West Side residents worried. Their concern is existential. They fear that given the pace of gentrification — with ever more magazine-worthy homes raising property taxes — the West Side’s Hispanic population will gradually vanish...