Looks like KCMO and owners of Section 8 Armour Boulevard apartments are resolving their differences

It appears that Kansas City, Missouri, may abandon a dubious effort to condemn three apartment buildings along Armour Boulevard in midtown.

The Kansas City, Missouri, City Council may vote next week to approve a resolution between City Hall and the owners of the Bainbridge, Georgian Courts and Linda Vista apartments along Armour, east of Gillham Road. The three buildings house about 400 residents (95 percent of whom are black) and are all Section 8 housing (apartments where rents are subsidized to make them affordable for low-income residents).

Those apartments were the target of the Planned Industrial Expansion Authority, an obscure development agency with powers of eminent domain. Last year, the PIEA (acting on City Hall’s wishes), commissioned a blight study of the three buildings. Typically blight studies explore the presence of troubling physical characteristics (leaking roofs, fire hazards, code violations, mold problems, shaky foundations) in buildings.

But the PIEA’s study of the three buildings said the apartments constituted “social blight,” an almost unheard-of finding, because of crime that took place in and around the apartments.

It was a fishy designation that reeked of an effort to strong-arm the building’s owners (Maine-based Eagle Point Properties) out of their interest in the apartments. Even the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (which funds and administers Section 8 housing) took issue with the PIEA’s study. The study didn’t find any examples of physical blight and misstated its own crime statistics. The blight study ignored the fact that crime had actually been decreasing at the apartments.

The Eagle Point apartments at the north end of Hyde Park have shared a long and troubled history and have elicited complaints from the nearby neighborhoods. The apartments also stand in contrast to newly redeveloped apartment buildings along Armour Boulevard.

But indications are that Eagle Point Properties has improved conditions there since giving the buildings a $31.5 million makeover in 2008. HUD found that the buildings did at times have crime problems, but the worst was between 1999 and 2005 (before Eagle Point bought the properties).

HUD raised the possibility that any city action against the Eagle Point buildings could amount to a fair housing complaint. Eagle Point also hired a local attorney to fend off any steps toward condemnation of its properties.

Those responses to the blight study seemed to slow any city movement against the apartments. Plans to discuss the blight study before the City Plan Commission were continually delayed.

Now appearing on the City Council docket for next week’s Neighborhoods, Housing & Healthy Communities Committee is an agreement that calls for the city to ditch its blight study while Eagle Point helps the city improve security in and around the Armour Boulevard apartments.