Crossroads Cruelty

I went to the Dolphin Gallery a couple of weeks ago. The work of an artist named Matt Wycoff was on display. The exhibition featured a series of small sketches that Wycoff had done of various folks and a much larger sketch of the artist himself. On another wall was a series of abstract paintings — just colors, really. The note on the price tag said the color field was “loosely inspired by color I see during orgasm.”

Something’s wrong in the Crossroads, but it has nothing to do with self-indulgent art.

The artists and shop owners who made the place a vibrant, vital neighborhood are getting pounded by higher taxes. Jackson County recently sent out notices of big increases in their property values.

The creative people who transformed the neighborhood from borderline slum into a thriving arts community have been through all of this before. In 2003, taxes doubled on some buildings owned by gallery and studio owner Jim Leedy. Stephanie Leedy, Jim’s daughter, tells me that she expects their taxes will more than double again after the most recent assessment.

Urban pioneers becoming victims of their own success is not a new story. Whenever neighborhoods accumulate enough cachet, the BMWs start pushing out the old beaters. Gentrification is a fact of life and not a totally unwelcome one. What’s the alternative — places where no one wants to live?

The situation in the Crossroads is nonetheless infuriating. Why? Condo developers received every imaginable break, while the galleries and small businesses were left to fend for themselves until it was too late.

Jim Leedy, a sculptor who has taught at the Kansas City Art Institute, bought his first building in the Crossroads in 1985. In the years since, he has offered countless artists a cheap place to live, work and display their stuff. He’s as responsible as anyone for the popularity of First Friday gallery hops and the city’s reputation as an artsy cowtown.

Today, Leedy and his daughter are wondering where they’re going to find the $100,000 they’ll need to pay the tax collector at the end of the year. Meanwhile, St. Louis developers, who purchased a neighboring warehouse 20 years after Leedy’s arrival, are getting $14.4 million in public subsidies for a condo conversion.

It’s great that so many old buildings in Kansas City have found second lives as wine shops and lofts. But the lack of thought and discipline that went into making it happen is sickening. City officials let developers and their lawyers pile their plates at the incentive buffet, and now somebody has to pay the bill. That somebody is turning out to be the people who did the real work in the Crossroads. The people who built the neighborhood — one art installation, one bowl of chili and one carnival supply at a time — are getting killed while the investors who can afford lawyers fluent in tax-break acronyms (TIF, PILOTs, EATs) cash in.

The details are almost too painful to describe.

Consider the H.D. Lee Building at the corner of 20th Street and Wyandotte. The nine-story building, which was once a factory that produced Lee jeans, shares a block with the Leedys’ property. Michael Rainen, an office-furniture dealer turned developer, bought the building in 1995. It sat idle for a lot of the time that Rainen owned it. In 2005, he sold it to St. Louis developers Kevin McGowan and Nathanial Walsh for $7.25 million.

The sale price confirmed what anyone could see: The Crossroads was a hot market. Yet McGowan and Walsh — with help from lawyer Jerry Riffel, a former city councilman — convinced two Kansas City agencies that the project needed public money. The Planned Industrial Expansion Authority approved a property-tax break worth $9.4 million over 25 years. The Tax-Increment Financing Commission came up with $5 million for a parking garage.

McGowan and Walsh are charging as much as $399,000 for two-bedroom condos in what’s been renamed Piper Lofts. It’ll be fancy, with a swimming pool on the roof, but it’ll produce just a trickle of new taxes. Meantime, artistic trailblazers and longtime neighborhood merchants are getting assessed into oblivion. Harry Bosley, an owner of Bob Jones Shoes, a Crossroads business since 1960, tells me that the value of one of his properties increased by 802 percent.

Bosley is appealing the new appraisal. (Property owners have until June 18 to appeal.) If he loses, the property’s new tax burden means that he’ll have to move a lot more footwear. “I don’t know what else I can do, other than sell the place,” he says.

Same goes for Paul Hilpman. He and his wife, Carol Crater, own the building at 18th Street and Wyandotte that’s home to YJ’s Snack Bar, Spool boutique and other funky shops. Hilpman says the assessments on his parcels have risen 300 percent and 400 percent. Yet the W Lofts across the street, which went up after Hilpman’s merchants made the block cool, are the ones with the tax abatement. “It almost sounds like why we had the Boston Tea Party,” he says.

The city knew for years that the Crossroads’ rising taxes were a problem. But heels dragged. The problem was easy to ignore. The lawyers and developers who benefited from the city’s inability to grasp the big picture kept telling then-Mayor Kay Barnes and her merry band of dunces what a super job they were doing.

Earlier this year, the city finally approved a plan for arts-related businesses in the Crossroads to get their own tax breaks. But the abatements last only 10 years (most condo developers got 25 years) and do nothing for the businesses that fall outside the definition of a cultural activity. Stephanie Leedy wonders how many hamburgers Town Topic will have to sell to remain in the neighborhood. “It’s something, but it’s still not fair,” she says.

I share Leedy’s skepticism. The arts plan was driven by the Crossroads Community Association, an outfit that isn’t as grassroots as its name suggests. The current president of the organization, Shaul Jolles, developed W Lofts. Past president Suzie Aron cultivates the image of an arts activist while working as a real-estate agent for Brad Nicholson, a major urban developer who’s been getting tax breaks from the PIEA since 2003. (Nicholson is the Pitch‘s landlord.)

I took a stroll through the Crossroads last week to admire the old buildings and colorful redos. Walking up one alley, I noticed that Piper Lofts stood only about 20 feet from Jim and Stephanie Leedy’s buildings.

Parked on 20th Street was a Popcycle scooter that Piper Lofts managers are raffling off. As I thought about the Leedys reeling from their county tax bills, I fought the urge to kick something.