KCMO Council expected to take up resolution of the Armour Boulevard apartment affair

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A fair housing complaint filed last week by the owner of project-based Section 8 apartments on Armour Boulevard may prod the City Council into resolving the matter.

On Monday afternoon, a resolution that speaks to settling differences between the city and Eagle Point Companies appeared on the docket for Wednesday’s meeting of the Kansas City Neighborhoods, Housing and Healthy Communities Committee.

The resolution would set some parameters for future cooperation between the two parties, which have been involved in an ongoing stalemate over the presence of concentrated low-income residents in a neighborhood that’s rapidly gentrifying.

Eagle Point, based in Maine, owns the Bainbridge, Georgian Court and Linda Vista. It bought the properties in 2006, fixing up the historic buildings and leasing units to low-income residents who qualified for the federal Section 8 program. 

Those apartments, which have historically been magnets for crime, still had problems in the years following Eagle Point’s acquisition. But crime, by various statistical measures, has been on the decline since 2009.

Still, a group of bureaucratic and political figures at City Hall, along with Hyde Park neighborhood leaders and the owner of other nearby apartments, carried out a strategy to get Eagle Point off Armour Boulevard by commissioning a controversial social-blight study.

Since learning that the city considered condemning its properties late in 2013, Eagle Point lawyered up and appears to be largely at a standstill with City Hall. Last week, the company filed a fair housing complaint against the city and others, accusing Kansas City of colluding with MAC Properties (the redeveloper of several Armour Boulevard apartment buildings) to condemn Eagle Point’s buildings.

It remains to be seen if Wednesday’s resolution, should it later pass the entire City Council, means that Eagle Point would withdraw its complaint. 

But before that, it remains to be seen whether the resolution even gets a hearing at Wednesday’s committee. The some resolution appeared before the committee chaired by Melba Curls in August but was held off the docket with little explanation. Jim Glover, a 4th District councilman, is one of five members of that committee. He’s one of the people named in Eagle Point’s housing complaint.