Code Warriors

In August 1999, Dawn and Bob Lindsey fell in love with a historic home, a massive, three-story Queen Anne that apparently first belonged to a Kansas City dentist who around 1900 loaded it with amenities as extravagant as a billiards room, servants’ stairwell and bathroom dumbwaiter.

The house, located off 37th and Wyandotte, had sat vacant and abused for nearly fifteen years. Its exterior had sagged, deteriorated and dulled. Its interior, divided into thirteen apartments, was a museum of dead rodents, pigeons and droppings. Neighbors considered it the worst property in the area. None of this mattered to the Lindseys.

The self-described “hopeless romantics” welcomed the challenge of restoring a historic treasure. And with professional remodeling experience, they knew how to proceed with a project of such enormity. “Most people wouldn’t be into doing it themselves,” says Dawn Lindsey. “But we were.”

The Lindseys expected a long haul. They figured that completing the entire job would take three to five years. Even at that rate, they assumed, their self-financed repairs to a long-neglected property would bring encouragement from neighbors and city hall. They were half right.

From the moment they bought the house two years ago, the Lindseys say, they’ve been besieged by Kansas City Neighborhood Preservation inspectors who have demanded that major repairs be done to the long-derelict building under seemingly impossible deadlines.

Three days after the Lindseys bought their house in August 1999, they received a letter notifying them that the property was in violation. Rob Lindsey met the inspector the following day.

Almost immediately, the meeting turned antagonistic as the confrontational inspector demanded that several jobs be done within thirty days. His tone took the Lindseys by surprise, but, figuring that inspectors hear insincere promises all the time, they set out to prove their worth. “We figured if we showed him the intent to cooperate, then he would lighten up,” Dawn says. “That was not the case.”

During the next several months, the Lindseys butted heads with that inspector and others who followed. Just when they would think they were making progress, a new letter would arrive from the city notifying them of violations and deadlines. “I like doing the work,” Rob says, “but I don’t like being pressured.”

By spring 2000, the Lindseys were ready to give up on the house. “It didn’t seem fair for us to want to bring a house back and have them run us out,” Rob says. “But that’s what they were doing.”

The Neighborhood Preservation Division’s computer system for documenting inspections shows sixteen inspections of the Lindseys’ home from September 1999 to February 2001. The list reads like the report card for a woeful underachiever. Eleven inspections are marked “fail.” Only two are designated as partially passing.

But neighbors who lived near the house when it sat vacant and deteriorating give the Lindseys better than passing grades for the improvements they’ve brought to the area. “It’s been so extraordinary,” says Old Hyde Park president John Gladeau. “We’ve been so pleased with the change in that property.”

This spring the Lindseys met another new inspector, a man named J. B. Smith, who they say surveyed the house and, for the first time, inspected it both inside and out. Smith gave the couple encouragement and pledged to work with them as they restored the new home. For the first time since they bought the house, the Lindseys were pleased about their relationship with a Neighborhood Preservation inspector. “He knew what he was talking about,” Rob says. “He had done the work before. And he was professional.”

J. B. Smith didn’t last long.

Chuck Digby also liked J. B. Smith as an inspector, although his situation differed from that of the Lindseys’. As a new real-estate investor in the Union Hill area near Linwood Avenue, Digby says he had been riding city officials for months about absentee landlords’ letting properties fall to blight. Those efforts left him with little faith in a system intended to correct that very problem. This summer, he says, Smith became the exception. “If he said he was going to do something and follow up on it, he did it,” Digby says.

Smith would press owners who dragged their feet on violations, and he would cooperate with owners who restored their properties in good faith. “There were some people who would string him along, but he knew it,” Digby says. “The thing was, these people just hoped he would go away. And unfortunately, eventually he did.”

Iris Archer, division manager of Neighborhood Preservation, declined to comment specifically about Smith’s departure this summer, other than to say the separation was “appropriate and good government.”

The Pitch was unable to reach Smith.

On October 12, Old Hyde Park’s Gladeau sent city council members a letter contrasting the Neighborhood Preservation Division’s failure to improve a problematic apartment complex with the way it has pestered well-intentioned property owners with violations. “Homeowners and conscientious landlords who are meticulously renovating their properties receive priority code inspection,” he wrote, “while our out-of-town or unresponsive slum landlords are placed on the back burner or dismissed entirely.”

Archer insists that couldn’t be further from the truth. She says Neighborhood Preservation has neither the inclination nor the resources to arbitrarily hassle certain property owners. “Our whole thrust is to get abatement of code violations,” she says, adding that both city ordinances and her division’s standards require inspectors to approach every case in a fair and consistent manner.

But to some citizens, that position, detailed in a performance report issued by Archer in August, indicates that current laws may push inspectors toward easy targets. The division values high quantities of abatements — or “closed” cases — resulting from inspections.

Out-of-town landlords who avoid or deceive inspectors pose a challenge to that goal. But property owners such as the Lindseys who intend to restore their home without city prodding say they can be leaned on to pad statistics. “Our house had been in violation for many years,” Dawn Lindsey says. “They were rarely able to produce any abatement on it until we got here.”

Two years into their project, the couple has completed exterior work on the house, including a new driveway, porch, roof and bay window. The Lindseys have also finished renovating two floors inside. After struggling with Neighborhood Preservation along the way, they now believe that nothing short of a change in codes ordinance is needed if the city wants to encourage others to take on similar, privately financed urban-renewal projects. That change, they say, needs to allow realistic timelines for large-scale renovations. “I’m very much for code enforcement,” Dawn says. “I’m just not into being harassed needlessly.”