J. C. Nichols was a major real estate developer and city planner responsible for the development of over 50 residential neighborhoods and real estate ventures in the Kansas City area from the early 1900s into the 1940s, including the Country Club residential district and the Country Club Plaza.

Nichols is also often credited with having influenced many other neighborhood developments across the United States through his company's popularization of the use of restrictive covenants and homeowners associations to control residential development and maintain property values. Restrictive covenants, also known as deed restrictions, were used to stipulate neighborhood development and aesthetical requirements such as building materials, cost of home construction, land usage, housing design, and property maintenance, as well as deny residential ownership or occupancy on the basis of race. This legacy of utilizing practices of racial redlining and segregation has had immeasurable effects on the racial and ethnic distribution of surburan and metropolitan-area residents even after the Supreme Court ruling Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948 made restrictive covenants on the basis of race unenforceable.

With the J. C. Nichols Investment Company's advocation of restrictive covenants, Nichols also advocated for green spaces, tree-lined curved streets, and other landscape architecture techniques to increase and maintain property values and create a picturesque ideal that many still associate with suburbia in present day.