A new, energy-efficient house in Strawberry Hill proves downtown views don’t have to cost a fortune

Every third Saturday in August, the smells of sizzling Polish sausage and pilsner permeate Strawberry Hill. Thousands of parishioners pile onto the grounds and amble up and down the hallways of the gothic, red-brick St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Kansas City, Kansas. Everyone in this polygenerational mass knows the sound of the tamburicas and the clacking of the giant roulette wheel, and that when the wheel stops, people cheer and a baby-sized salami is hefted to a new winner.

Courtney Marlin has been going to St. John’s Croatian Festival pretty much her whole life. The jet-black-haired 31-year-old spent her early years near 85th Street and State Avenue, and her family immigrated to KCK from Zagreb, Croatia, in 1912. Her grandmother spent her final years in a house at 445 Armstrong Avenue, a cabbage roll’s toss from St. John’s. As a little girl, Marlin loved going to, as she calls it, “the social.”

“It was so fun — the carnival games were all a quarter or 50 cents, and you’d get your face painted,” she says.

Things cost more than a quarter now, but today’s Strawberry Hill has become a desirable location for homebuyers looking for old-world charm near the urban core. Here is one of the best — and cheapest — views of downtown Kansas City, Missouri, a five-minute highway jaunt from the City Market’s produce, the Crossroads’ art openings, the West Bottoms’ rummage mecca. And you don’t have to drive at all to drink at a hip bar or eat ethnic cuisine. It’s reminiscent of what the trendy Westside neighborhood was like a decade or two ago, before the arrival of million-dollar architectural curios and the rich empty-nesters who love them.

When Marlin and her boyfriend of four years, David Gfeller, 29, began their search to buy a home, they figured they were looking for a loft. They had been living together in a Plaza apartment, and they were ready for an open floor plan and a modern aesthetic: a place with concrete, close to the Crossroads or downtown. But they realized there was one major drawback to this idea: parking.

“I carry a lot of tools around for work,” says Gfeller, a home remodeler who does tours of duty on his family’s cattle ranch in Russell, Kansas. “I either have to drag them in every night or take my chances leaving them in my truck or at the job. It sucks.”

So they expanded their search to houses on the Westside and Beacon Hill, and they found a few fixer-uppers. Like Gfeller, Marlin isn’t making six figures; she’s a social worker with KC Care Clinic. Price was important, and these were within the couple’s budget, but they determined that even 1,500 square feet — ample for Gfeller to work on projects with his tools and for Marlin to plant a garden outside — was more room than they wanted.

“We don’t want to heat and cool that much space,” Gfeller says. “We don’t want to clean that much space. We don’t want to furnish that much space.”

“We are pretty nontraditional when it comes to looking for places to live,” Marlin says.

Modern, affordable, energy-efficient — but where? Most of the houses that met all three requirements and were within lassoing distance of downtown were high-end Westside structures.

Then, at the Croatian social last August, a high school friend, Jay Matlack, told the couple that Community Housing of Wyandotte County owned a number of lots and homes in Strawberry Hill. Even better, CHWC specialized in getting people into affordable homes. Marlin and Gfeller asked the agency about buying a lot on which to build a 1,000-square-foot, energy-efficient, traditional-yet-modern dream home.

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What they wanted already existed — and it was for sale a few doors down from where Marlin’s grandmother once lived.

Daniel Umscheid parks his dusty gray Saab in front of the new retaining wall that keeps the front yard of 423 Armstrong Avenue from sluicing down Strawberry Hill toward the river. The slender 37-year-old architect’s creation looms above: a small, slate-colored one-story with a utilitarian facade embellished by log-cabin-nouveau exposed wood.

Umscheid’s design for 423 Armstrong is undoubtedly modern. Yet, with its traditional sloped roof and wood siding, it fits neatly into the historic fabric of Armstrong Avenue, a savvy Saucony amid worn Air Jordans. “It’s a sleeper,” he says. “You might drive by it, but once you get inside, it reveals itself.”

Umscheid is the design director at Clockwork Architecture, an 11-year-old Kansas City firm that is beginning to make a name for itself in the unsexy but vital practice of designing energy-efficient, affordable housing for working people.

Clockwork recently provided interior and exterior design for 2nd & Delaware, a $62 million, 276-unit River Market apartment building that will employ “passive house” building methods such as 16-inch-thick airtight walls and a rooftop garden. Led by local developer Jonathan Arnold, who has studied affordable-housing projects in the developing world, the project will contain market-rate rental spaces aimed at young, low- to moderate-income urban dwellers. When it’s done, it will be the largest Passive House Institute–certified building in the world, and it will cost less than what has recently become downtown’s average rent.

Clockwork is also designing about half of the 106-unit 4th and Charlotte apartments, in Columbus Park, another project aimed at moderate-income millennials shopping for cheap, efficient space within walking distance of downtown.

Though the architects at Clockwork have done their share of high-profile commercial projects (including the art-deco interior of Tom’s Town Distillery and the sleek Lead Bank building in the Crossroads), designing urban homes and apartments that middle-class people can afford is something of a mission for the company. Founder Christian Arnold (no relation to Jonathan Arnold), who works from a standing desk in a hallway outside the restrooms at Clockwork’s chic River Market office, has a soft spot for working stiffs.

“I get really excited about creating affordable products for people who want to support themselves,” Arnold says. “I want to get the creative class back into downtown neighborhoods. People who are busting their ass to try to make ends meet, whether it’s a freelancer or someone trying to start a business down the street, someone who works in a restaurant or someone who just graduated and wants to live in a neighborhood. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be creating solutions for those kinds of people.”

About a year ago, CHWC approached Clockwork about designing a partially subsidized, eco-friendly home that could be built anywhere. The group had received funding from NeighborWorks America, to explore building smaller, greener homes in urban Wyandotte County. Arnold and Umscheid were gung-ho. They also saw an opportunity to address a problem with such projects — the fact that they aren’t, as Arnold puts it, “just for the elite.”

“There’s a lot of sustainable housing that has been built, and there’s a lot of modular housing, student projects and habitat houses that end up being very expensive.” he says. “They don’t comp out for the neighborhood, become difficult to finance and then you end up with a white elephant.”

In 2010, one such well-intentioned white elephant was built by University of Kansas architecture students near 18th Street and Central, in Kansas City, Kansas. Under the guidance of Professor Dan Rockhill, students in the hands-on Studio 804 program designed and built the Prescott Passive Home, a gorgeous and ambitious, 1,700-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bathroom house. It met LEED-Platinum and Passive Home guidelines — and, after completion, it sat empty for months (as The Pitch reported in “Buy Our House,” May 13, 2010). Rockhill complained to USA Today during the home’s dormancy that the house was worth twice its listing price of $190,000, and that its failure to sell was jeopardizing the future of Studio 804. The house eventually did sell, and 804 lived to build another day, but Zillow — echoing Arnold’s assessment of what the market in a given zip code bears — estimates its value at $90,000.

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Another example is the design-geek magnet at 740 Troup in KCK. Brought about by a partnership between Heartland Habitat for Humanity and Public Architecture, a San Francisco nonprofit that encourages architecture firms to dedicate 1 percent of their time to pro bono public-good projects, the house, which was designed by El Dorado, is a Royals-blue bungalow with a butterfly roof that looks like it wandered over from the Westside. Despite its price tag, affordable to a family that meets Habitat requirements, it has stood empty since completion in the fall of 2014.

With grant money in hand, Clockwork set out to build the prototype that NeighborWorks had in mind. Umscheid, who had lived in lofts and, for 11 years, in a row house in a historic part of Baltimore, envisioned, he says, a home for “a young couple, just married, double income.” The Clockwork House would “suit their initial need to grow, put down roots in the community and strengthen the neighborhood.”

And not just one couple. The idea was to take advantage of the latest in energy-
efficient homebuilding and work fast, affordably and tastefully — and then for others to do it again and again. “Our challenge was to make something real and replicable,” Arnold says. “What’s the point of doing it if can’t be repeated?”

The result, on Armstrong, looks more than cool enough to do again.

Atop two flights of stone steps and in through the glass-paned front door, the house opens to a loftlike space: a combined kitchen-living-dining area with polished-concrete floors, under a vaulted ceiling. LED lights, perched in the upper corners, cast a sacramental glow. White tile covers the kitchen walls in lieu of cabinets. An 8-foot island, made from IKEA butcher-block board, defines the kitchen’s boundary.

The living area funnels into house-ier features: a hallway medallioned with a black Nest thermostat, two modest bedrooms, two white bathrooms (with low-flow, dual-flush toilets), a garage with a storm cellar dug into the basementless slab foundation, a spacious attic with a laptop-sized water heater, and a rocky backyard with a kingly view of downtown KCMO.

The attic can be converted into a third bedroom or a loft, allowing the house to grow with its owners, Umscheid says, and its owners to stay in the neighborhood rather than move to a bigger house elsewhere. “There’s lots of room to adapt it to your needs and put your own mark on it,” he says.

Though the Armstrong House has no formal energy-efficiency rating or score, it has a rare advantage in that it is built using structural insulated panels: pairs of rigid panels sandwiching dense foam insulation. The panels, as walls, roofs or floors, allow close control of interior temperature. (The only exterior of the Armstrong House that isn’t fashioned from SIPs is the roof, which, to Umscheid’s chagrin, ended up being a stick-frame construction with blown-in insulation.) SIPs are crucial to the speed of such a project; whereas stick-frame houses take six to eight months to build, standing open to the elements during construction, SIP homes are precut, loaded onto flatbed trucks, taken to the site and erected in a few weeks.

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The Armstrong house took about 12 weeks to build, at a cost of $150,000 — which is what Marlin and Gfeller paid for it when they closed on February 12.

Since Marlin and Gfeller made their offer on the Armstrong house, Umscheid and Arnold have begun working on a similar, NeighborWorks-funded project in Columbus, Ohio. They have also fielded half a dozen calls from local builders seeking similar SIP homes. But not necessarily SIP homes of similar scale.

“We’ve gotten calls from people saying, ‘We love that, it’s what we want, but could we make it a little bigger, add a bedroom here, a bathroom there,'” Arnold says. “But then the cost is going to come up, and it’ll take longer to build.”

And once cost and size increase, the vision of filling vacant urban lots with sustainable, affordable homes, like the one in Strawberry Hill, begins to fade.

At least one builder in KCK doesn’t want that to happen.

Brennan Crawford enters Cup on the Hill as he does most places — talking on the phone. Clad in a bookish corduroy blazer, the associate executive director of CHWC concludes his call and orders his fancy coffee.

There was a time when anything beyond drip was unheard of in downtown KCK. When it opened, in March 2015, Cup on the Hill became the only place to get a shot of espresso between downtown KCMO and the Legends. And today, it’s probably the only place in the metro where you can order some KCK-civic-pride gear to go with your cappuccino: cards emblazoned with “Made in KCK” and dish towels cross-stitched with bundles of wheat sit in an Instagram-ready display across from the cashier.

The two-room shop takes up most of the first floor of the renovated Katz building, near Seventh and Minnesota, in a row of storefronts shared by a couple of banks, the KCK Chamber of Commerce, and not much else. Not your typical mom-and-pop, Cup on the Hill was established through fiscal sponsorship by CHWC as a community-development initiative.

Crawford settles at a table by the store window near a man and a woman in their 60s, discussing the presidential election in leftist tones. “There haven’t been market-rate buyers in Wyandotte for a long time,” he says.

A native of Raytown, Crawford has been with CHWC since May 2014. Like its counterparts on the Missouri side such as Westside Housing and Neighborhood Housing Services, CHWC is a community-development corporation (CDC) that helps low-income persons buy homes in Wyandotte County and equips them with the know-how to stay in them. It finances most of its builds using subsidies from local government or grants from nonprofits like NeighborWorks or the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC). Most of the buyers CHWC serves earn less than 80 percent of the median household income for KCK. For a family of two, like Gfeller and Marlin, that number is around $58,000 a year.

During his tenure at CHWC, Crawford has overseen the building of nearly 40 new homes all over the county. Within the past year, CHWC built 23 new lease-to-purchase homes for low-income families in the Meadowlark and Riverview neighborhoods, 15 of which were in a partially built subdivision CHWC rescued from bankruptcy after the original developer walked away. CHWC also built five new homes in Douglass Sumner, a historically black neighborhood of KCK with high rates of vacancy but, according to Crawford, strong neighborhood leadership.

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“They were the first new homes built there in the last half century,” he says. “All of them are now home to working families new to the neighborhood, most of them first-generation homeowners from refugee communities.”

Despite an impressive track record of building and community development in other parts of KCK, CHWC hasn’t seen as much demand for its services in Strawberry Hill. According to Crawford, today’s immigrants, unlike the Croations of yore, aren’t much interested in Strawberry Hill. It’s still cheap to buy there, but the lots are too small to accommodate multi-generational housing. “Most of our buyers are Burmese, Bhutanese or Nepalese refugees who have been in the country for 10 years,” he says. “They have low incomes but are really good savers, and they have large families.”

Though placing low-income families in homes will remain CHWC’s main focus, Crawford says the Armstrong House could represent a new model for urban development in KCK — affordable, efficient, built-to-last modern homes that will increase property values and serve as comps for other projects.

“The problem with developing in Wyandotte County is, the cost of construction is higher than market value but the property values are low, so it’s harder to build high-quality homes without subsidizing,” Crawford explains. “Banks look around the neighborhood and they won’t finance them because there are few comparables.”

Crawford was able to build Clockwork’s Armstrong house using a combination of funding from NeighborWorks and traditional bank financing. The house went on the market October 18. By January 10, Marlin and Gfeller were under contract. (Chief Properties of Kansas City, Kansas, brokered the deal.)

“This project is really different for us,” Crawford says. “The reason we’re moving that direction is, it helps us build in all neighborhoods, so we can get our comps up to justify better construction lending.”

For Marlin and Gfeller’s home to attract more modern, high-performance homes to the neighborhood, Crawford says, he must educate appraisers and financers about the value of investing more upfront cost into energy-sustainable construction features. He must teach them about new stuff — SIPs and tankless water heaters — while countering an old hesitation: building in blighted areas. All without eventually pricing out owners who never left Strawberry Hill.

“We need capital investment here to break the subsidy cycle, but we also want to make sure that neighborhoods remain affordable for the people who already live there,” Crawford says.

He’s quick to add that Strawberry Hill is in no immediate danger of astronomical gentrification, but there’s a balance to achieve. “What happens in gentrifying markets are the things affordable-housing advocates rage about,” he explains. “You got a neighborhood full of homes that are old and are worth, say $50,000 to 60,000, and you get an influx of new capital investment. Then, as the whole neighborhood gets reassessed, taxes go up. That’s one aspect of high-demand markets, and it can happen really fast.”

If that happens, Crawford says there is an arsenal of tools to turn to. These might include establishing community land trusts (nonprofits that own land and lease to builders, thereby controlling pricing), preferential tax treatment for low-income families, or limiting appraisals by the city or the state.

But it’s a big if.

“Preserving affordable housing or keeping property values low are not part of the conversation,” he says. “Our problem is the opposite.”

On the Wednesday before Valentine’s Day, for the walk-through just prior to closing on their house, Marlin and Gfeller arrive in separate cars. She parks her white sedan out front, and he rolls up in his F-150 farther down the hill. She’s wearing neat, business-casual clothes — a tattoo is visible on the top of her foot. He’s in a paint-spattered sweatshirt, shorts and work boots, his hair tousled but showing a fleck of white paint.

Marlin has brought their realtor, Aaron Donner, a loaf of Strawberry Hill povitica as a thank-you gift. A pair of CHWC workers are inside, adding a few final touches.

Also present: Daniel Umscheid of Clockwork, who is meeting Marlin and Gfeller for the first time.

“Whatcha been doing?” Umscheid asks Gfeller.

“Painting … mostly,” Gfeller replies. He laughs.

The couple inspect a few of the changes the CHWC workers have made: a new kitchen sink, modifications to some of the windows, an alarm system, a refrigerator. As Marlin settles into a spot near the butcher-block island, Gfeller buzzes with the anxiety of a remodeler turning his gaze to his own home. His and the workers’ voices fill the open space with robust talk about appliances and caulk. Umscheid offers Marlin tips on foodsafe oils to use on the island.

Outside, down the hill a bit, Tracey Robertson walks her dog in the fading afternoon. She’s in her early 40s and has lived in Strawberry Hill for a year. Like Marlin, she is also of Croatian descent.

“I got to see inside that house,” she says. “I loved it, but the price they were asking seemed a little high for this neighborhood. But it’s nice to see people coming in and updating the homes. Even the newer homes, they’re not ostentatious. They don’t stick out like a sore thumb.”

Umscheid, after a last few minutes inside the Clockwork house, says goodbye to Marlin and Gfeller. Out front, he pauses. “They’re pretty much exactly like I pictured them,” he says.