In federally fueled Leavenworth, rumbles of revitalization — and some anxiety about Trump
Two years ago, Mountain and Andrew Kimley were living in midtown Kansas City but mulling a move to somewhere more remote. Mountain was employed as a midwife. Andrew, her husband, worked as a chef at the West Side vegan mainstay Füd and, later, a south Kansas City spot called Pita Mediterranean Grill. One day, Mountain got a call: Was she interested in buying her grandfather’s house in Leavenworth, Kansas, 45 minutes northwest of downtown Kansas City?
“Leavenworth wasn’t as totally off the grid as we’d been imagining, but it seemed like a step in the direction we wanted to go,” Mountain told me. She’s 43, with grayish hair, a septum piercing, and tattoos on her right arm all the way to her fingernails. “I don’t think we knew whether we’d stay, or if we’d like it here.”
But they have, and they do. I met Mountain and Andrew in early April inside Meriwether’s, a café and market on the western edge of downtown Leavenworth. They were sitting at a table with Christina Carter, the owner of Meriwether’s, catching their breath after the Friday lunch rush. The three are business partners in Meriwether’s, and business is good. Since opening as a small grab-and-go espresso bar in late 2015, it has expanded twice: first into the room next door, to accommodate breakfast and lunch service, and more recently into a space upstairs, where it books events and offers local consignment goods.
Today, it’s a burgeoning hub in downtown Leavenworth. Local art adorns the walls, and on the menu are fancy doughnuts (try the strawberry basil), coffee roasted in Kansas City, and sandwiches made with organic ingredients. Andrew — 27, burly, gingery beard, cheflike — makes the food, and Mountain, a former barista, oversees coffee and front-of-house duties. (Carter now lives in Fort Leonard Wood, where her husband, a Marine Corps major, is stationed; she handles back-end business logistics from afar and visits frequently.)
“We definitely get a lot of people who drop in and are surprised something like this exists in Leavenworth,” Carter said. “We love our little corner here. I think we all believe that in 10 years we’ll be really glad that we started this business here when we did.”
Is Leavenworth underrated? Could this 35,000-person city — the oldest in the state — be the next Crossroads, a neo-Lawrence?
That would require a lot more people like the Kimleys relocating there. But squint and you can see seeds of promise. The downtown has lovely, well-preserved architectural bones, and spaces are cheap and plentiful at the moment. A couple of old downtown factories have been converted into lofts. There’s a farmers market. Two hotels are coming. So is a brewery.
In small ways, it’s starting to remind Mountain of her childhood visits, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, to her grandfather’s house in Leavenworth.
“We’d go downtown — he actually owned the building located across the street from us [Meriwether’s] — and there were people everywhere,” she says. “Restaurants, corner pharmacies, five-and-dimes, Ward’s department store, a packed movie theater on the weekends.”
She goes on: “Then, at some point, everything moved out of downtown and they started building out on the corporate strip south of town: Kmart and Price Chopper and a little mall that’s gone now. But now that’s all dying and downtown is kind of coming back. So for me it feels like I’m returning to my roots in a way — and that Leavenworth is, too.”
Renewed interest in living and working in walkable downtowns — a national trend — is a factor here. Wendy Scheidt, executive director of a downtown advocacy group called Leavenworth Main Street, points to $71 million in renovations and new construction in the 28-block downtown since 1995.
“We’re not one of these new developments that’s built to look like an old downtown,” Scheidt says. “We’re the real deal: the first city in Kansas. And we have a tremendous amount of independent businesses — hardly any franchises at all. I think those are really strong selling points for people and for businesses.”
Economic development incentives have also played a role. A small-business grant program, administered by the city of Leavenworth, will match up to $5,000 for repairs to façades, windows, doors, signage and other nonmaintenance upgrades. (Meriwether’s is one local business that took advantage of the program.) When Kansas City–based historic preservation development firm Foutch Brothers wanted to convert an old downtown stove factory into upscale lofts, Leavenworth drew from its economic development fund to build Foutch a parking lot as an incentive. (Foutch has also developed senior and low-income housing in Leavenworth.) The $20 million project began leasing units, 186 in all, in early 2015.
“It’s kind of a big small town, or a small big town,” says Steve Foutch, CEO of Foutch Brothers. “City Hall makes it pretty easy politically and financially to get your project through.”
That a large studio or a one-bedroom at the Stove Factory Lofts leases in the $900 range — not terribly far from Kansas City prices — raises the question of who is willing to pay that amount to live in a slowly gentrifying downtown in a distant suburb of Kansas City. The answer has to do with the federal government — specifically, Fort Leavenworth, a major economic driver in the city.
“People think of Leavenworth as a prison town, but that’s not really the case anymore,” says Melissa Bowers, a spokeswoman for the city. “The federal prison isn’t maximum security anymore, and there’s no long-term inmates. The military presence here has far more of an impact on the city.”
The university located at Fort Leavenworth is the intellectual center of the Army, and it brings 1,300 new residents into the community every year to enroll in one- and two-year programs. In 2016, roughly 14,000 people lived “on post,” meaning on the military grounds. They contribute to the local economy — the fort was estimated to have an economic impact of $2.3 billion to Leavenworth last year — but thousands more military members (and their families) live “off post,” and this more transient population is part of why Foutch sees promise in Leavenworth. Because they’re only in Leavenworth for a month or three months, or a year or two years, they’re likely to be renters.
What’s more, the federal employees and military members who come to Leavenworth come with guaranteed money to spend on housing in the form of a federal per diem. Until recently, the per diem in Leavenworth was significantly lower than it was across the river in Missouri. This was an incentive for federal employees to stay in Missouri when visiting Leavenworth. But the city lobbied Washington to raise the per diem, and succeeded in 2010. That has inspired confidence not only among residential developers like Foutch, but also among hotel developers, who can now confidently command higher room rates. A Hampton Inn debuted downtown in 2015, and a 107-room extended-stay Hilton (built with the assistance of tax-increment financing) is scheduled to open later this year.
The federal government, in other words, has been very good to Leavenworth. That Donald Trump received 63 percent of the vote in Leavenworth County last November is perhaps not surprising, given his campaign promises to build up the military. It’s good for Foutch’s business, for example.
“If Trump is going to increase military presence, that starts with training,” Foutch says, “and that goes through Leavenworth. So we think we’ll have strong demand and probably increasing demand [for leasing units] under Trump.”
Elsewhere in Leavenworth, though, unease has set in. One of Trump’s first acts was to institute a federal hiring freeze. In early April, Leavenworth city representatives traveled to Washington to lobby federal legislators for wiggle room on the freeze. According to documents adopted by the city commission, Fort Leavenworth would face “significant pressure” from a hiring freeze, particularly at the university, because such a freeze would prohibit the Army from hiring contractors to fill in gaps created by professors who move on to other positions. The documents indicate that the school would operate at only 82 percent teacher capacity under a freeze, resulting in decreased student loads. The documents also express concern about not being able to hire maintenance contractors to repair and renovate buildings at the fort.
Jeffrey Wingo, a spokesman for Fort Leavenworth, downplays the impact: “Fort Leavenworth has less than 50 positions that are on hold, pending the lifting of the hiring freeze,” Wingo says.
In mid-April, Trump announced that he was lifting the freeze, but his decisions have been erratic, offering little reassurance about the future.
Meanwhile, Leavenworth is in the running for a second federal prison, and city officials have expressed concern about federal funds tied to the project drying up. Ditto a proposed public-private partnership to build a new hospital on the grounds of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
Developers remain bullish about downtown, though. In March, the ribbon was cut on Carnegie 601, a mixed-use residential project with 11 units and space for an art gallery. The building, constructed in 1902, was one of numerous Carnegie properties across the country a century ago. (The project availed itself of historic tax credits and a 10-year freeze on property taxes.) It housed the Leavenworth Public Library until 1987, when it became the Carnegie Arts Center, which closed in 2012. Today, studios start at $450, two-bedrooms at $800.
“It’s a piece of old Midwestern America,” Caleb Buland, whose Kansas City firm, Exact Architects, designed the Carnegie 601 renovation, says of Leavenworth. “It’s one of the last pieces of what you could maybe call the KC metro that hasn’t really filled in yet. I think you’re going to see over the next 15 years a lot more activity in these storefronts downtown. The fabric is already there, just waiting for it.”
The crew at Meriwether’s certainly hopes so — when they have time to ponder such things.
“Honestly, we’ve been so busy over the last six months that I haven’t had time to read the news or think much about anything outside of this place [Meriwether’s],” Andrew says. “Our business is just exploding right now.”
