Matt Abbott’s turbocharged gentrification of the East Crossroads

In these boom times of downtown Kansas City — streetcars clanging, cranes in the sky — it is a particular pleasure to hear frontier tales about the gnarly old days when artists were unwittingly laying the groundwork for all the breweries, banks and questionably profitable tech companies that now occupy the Crossroads Arts District. 

“Eighty percent of the buildings were vacant,” Suzie Aron, a real estate agent who’s been around the area for more than 20 years, told me recently. “There was prostitution, drugs, day-labor programs where 200 people would stand outside a building — a building with no bathroom — every morning and wait for somebody from the city to come along and pick them up for a job.” 

“It was a wasteland,” Stretch Rumaner said of the area surrounding his restaurant and music venue, Grinders. “The buildings over here on the east side of the Crossroads were much more dilapidated and boarded-up than on the western side of the Crossroads. All my cars were broken into. Every building was broken into. It happened daily. The police wouldn’t do anything about it.”

Rumaner paused, as though debating how strongly to lean into his urban-pioneer story. He leaned.

“I mean, we had virtually no help from the city. On my block [18th Street, between Oak and Locust], myself and three other artists all bought buildings around the same time and converted them, lived in them, worked in them, occupied them. We did it all by hand. We didn’t have crews. Even people like Suzie and Butch [Rigby, a developer] were swinging hammers and throwing up drywall.” 

Nowadays, considerably less of the renovation taking place in the Crossroads is the DIY handiwork of idealistic artists. Developers run the game. And in Rumaner’s neighborhood — an increasingly busy area that marketers and real-estate agents have taken to calling the East Crossroads, bounded by Grand Boulevard, 71 Highway, 20th Street and Truman Road — no developer has more skin in the game than Matt Abbott. His firm now owns more than 30 properties in the East Crossroads. It would not be difficult to make the argument that the future of the area will be determined largely by his vision. So, what does Abbott think the East Crossroads should be? 

Abbott Properties’ base of operations is at 1837 Grand, in a building not long ago occupied by a business called Cowtown T-Shirts. The space has been renovated — horizontal wood, glass-paned offices, concrete floor — to accommodate Abbott’s employees: construction workers, leasing agents, the management team. Guys in Carhartts come and go clutching Jimmy John’s cups; a sign inside near the door warns, “If you are dirty, don’t sit on the couch.” 

Abbott is 44, with blue eyes that rarely blink and a surfer’s lilt to his voice that partly belies the fact that he has been a millionaire since he was 27 years old. In many ways, Abbott embodies the current aspirations of the city. He cites articles on the internet that call Kansas City a city “on the move,” a place to keep “on your radar,” a spot that is fast becoming “on the map.” He is fond of Richard Florida–style buzzwords. 

“We are working to create an entrepreneurial and creative heartbeat for the city,” Abbott says, gazing out his conference-room windows onto 19th Street. “I see the East Crossroads as a boutique area where entrepreneurs flock in Kansas City.” 

On a summer break from Mizzou in the mid-1990s, Abbott and his brother Luke bought a duplex in their hometown of Quincy, Illinois, learned how to rehab and, within a year, purchased five more properties. He arrived in Kansas City in 2001 looking to invest in downtown real estate. But Abbott’s early projects here didn’t go so hot. 

His mixed-use plan for the Law Building, at 12th Street and Grand, fell through after he missed a renovation deadline. (The structure was on the city’s dangerous-buildings list; it has since been torn down and is now a parking lot for the Sprint Center.) And Abbott’s firm was fined $100,000 in 2007 after he pleaded guilty to violating federal asbestos-removal standards while converting a high-rise at Eighth Street and Charlotte — now called the Manhattan Lofts — into condos. 

Throughout the aughts, Abbott was also pursuing real-estate deals in other parts of the country. He undertook projects in other Midwestern cities (St. Louis, Indianapolis) and in the Southeast (Pensacola, Huntsville), specializing in buying and rehabbing distressed apartment complexes. In 2010, Abbott moved to California; his son was ill, and the family moved there to be near a specific treatment facility. They returned to KC in 2012 and saw the city in a new light. 

“I’ve lived all over Kansas City since 2001 — Soho South lofts, the Manhattan, Leawood, now North Kansas City — but I’ve spent a lot of time out of town,” Abbott says. “When we got back from California, my wife and I were driving around the Crossroads one day, and it just had this great energy, this authenticity, this creativity.”

It occurred to Abbott that there was nowhere for development in the area to go but east, because north, south and west of the Crossroads were all either already developed or running into highways. There was already some natural redevelopment happening in the area at the time, of course. Several art galleries and venue spaces had come and gone (RIP, the Studded Bird); Grinders and the Brick had been serving food for about a decade; the Living Room Theatre started staging plays on McGee in 2010; and the Guild, an events space, opened in 2012. But farther east, dozens of buildings sat vacant along grim, industrial, mostly deserted streets. 

“I sat down with a buddy not long after taking that drive with my wife and said, ‘What if I buy up a bunch of the buildings on the eastern end of the Crossroads and develop them?’ ” Abbott says. 

At that time, Abbott’s KC plans centered on a Holiday Inn Express he was trying to develop at 13th Street and Locust. When a buyer came along who wanted to take it off his hands, Abbott sold it, freeing both his time and cash. The timing coincided with banks loosening up their lending standards for the kinds of projects Abbott wanted to do. Three years earlier, in the midst of the recession, a loan to redevelop a vacant East Crossroads building would have been tough to come by. But now the market was recovering, and he could finance such a project.

Within a few weeks of selling the hotel project, Abbott had eight properties in the East Crossroads under contract. Some were bought as foreclosures, some from families who had inherited the properties and were uninterested in maintaining them. He kept hunting and found that many buildings in the area were nearly a century old and increasingly inefficient for the industrial businesses that inhabited them. 

“They needed bigger loading docks, higher ceilings and other, more modern amenities,” Abbott says. “Their buildings weren’t working for them as well as they once were.” He negotiated with the owners and snapped up properties along the 1600 and 1700 blocks of Cherry and Locust. Abbott also purchased several buildings from Suzie Aron. 

“He came in at a very fast clip and acquired basically many blocks at one time,” Aron says. “It feels like a second phase for the neighborhood to me. We grew it piecemeal over 15 years, one building at a time. He’s come in over the last few years and is doing so many all at once that you can really see and feel the changes.” 

What you see a lot of these days in the East Crossroads are places making and peddling alcohol. In July, the International Tap House (iTap) opened at the southeast corner of 18th and Oak, a property Abbott bought in 2014 after a car crashed into the building, causing much of it to cave in. Lifted Spirits is distilling liquor in an Abbott-owned property on Locust. Elsewhere, local beermakers such as Brewery Emperial, Torn Label, Double Shift and Border are all crafting and selling beer in non-Abbott-owned properties in the neighborhood. 

This month, a new music venue called the Truman will open in an Abbott property at 601 Truman Road, between Cherry and Holmes. The venue is owned and operated by a partnership out of Nashville, which is true of several Abbott properties; iTap and the adjacent Mission Taco Joint are regional chains based in St. Louis, and Josey Records comes from Austin, Texas. The Hotel Indigo that Abbott’s firm is building at 2020 Grand promotes its “distinct local personality” but is nevertheless a member of a global hospitality chain. Abbott’s vision for the East Crossroads isn’t the Power & Light District, exactly — local businesses such as Bread and Butter Concepts, Pathfinder and Opal & Orchid Hair Studio call Abbott properties home — but it isn’t strictly local, either. 

“Matt and I talk a lot — his properties basically surround me at this point — and I think it’s great that he’s not just sitting on buildings he buys over here,” Rumaner says. “But the difference between Matt and most of the rest of us around here is that he’s not an artist; he’s a developer. And developers tend to bring in people from out of town.” 

“We don’t see ourselves as limited to KC [tenants],” Abbott says. “We’re looking to find buildings where we can make the numbers work and where we can transform the neighborhood and create community.” 

Getting the numbers to work has necessitated Abbott’s formulation of the East Crossroads Urban Renewal Plan, a tool designed to solicit tax breaks in exchange for revitalizing property in the area. It was approved by the City Council in 2015. Abbott’s firm regularly avails itself of such abatements. 

“If you look at downtown Kansas City today versus when I came here in 2001, and how we’re on the map, one of the coolest cities in America — that would never have happened without those [tax incentive] programs,” Abbott says. “You need those incentives to make these spaces affordable to entrepreneurs and creatives.” 

But are Abbott’s spaces affordable to the average small-business owner? 

“I think that’s a legit question,” Abbott says. “It’s definitely not the cheapest rent in the city. But on the other hand, we’re building an area that attracts creative minds, and I think that fosters success. Creative businesses want to be located in an area where their team wants to live and work. That’s the thing about entrepreneurial tenants: They’re always growing. So we work to build adaptable spaces to allow for that and keep them here.” 

Because of the East Crossroads’ proximity to the 18th and Vine Jazz District — it’s only about 12 blocks down 18th Street from Grinders to the Negro Leagues Museum, with a corridor of warehouses and manufacturing structures, several of them unused, in between — there’s been much chatter about how the city might engineer a more coherent connection between the long-suffering, historically black cultural area and the newer, whiter, gentrifying East Crossroads. It’s an idea that goes back a long time; Rumaner says he conceived of his early arts space as one that would “connect our jazz history to the visual arts that were happening in the early days of the Crossroads.” 

Mark O’Renick’s digital-marketing agency — formerly Salvy O’Renick, now Will & Grail — has called the East Crossroads home since 2005, and O’Renick is part of East Bridge KC, a group that’s brainstorming possibilities. He has had discussions with property owners, the city, the Economic Development Corporation, bankers, business owners and real-estate agents about how to, in his words, “connect with transportation that provides year round connectivity between the streetcar and Paseo … use the gap area to manufacture and ship … train young folks at Metro Tech High School to work in fabrics, wood, metal, food. To learn trades along with technology and digital economy skills.”

Big, exciting ideas, but Abbott says he isn’t too interested in drawing outside the lines of the East Crossroads. 

“We don’t necessarily want to spread very far outside this area,” he says. “We’d like to make an impact right here, and if we spread ourselves too thin in too many different places, we don’t get as much out of it.” 

Aron says that, regardless of where Abbott draws the line, “Matt is creating a lot of value.” She adds, “His properties have a specific architectural style and personality, but the spirit of the neighborhood is still there. It’s always been makers [in the East Crossroads], whether it’s industrial businesses or artists. His people [the tenants of his properties] seem to be more entertainment-oriented — restaurants and bars — but it’s still a neighborhood of creative-minded makers. Instead of art, now it’s beer. You know — things change over time.”  

This story appears in the August issue of The Pitch. Story tip? Email david.hudnall@pitch.com