On the East Side, a historic building meets its demise, making way for a Family Dollar

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For the past two years, the Historic Kansas City Foundation has included the Downs Building at 18th and Prospect on its annual list of 10 locally important structures in serious jeopardy of demolition or destruction. The 2016 list won’t include the Downs Building. All that remains today of 1801 Prospect, the building named for prominent Kansas City black musician Chauncy Downs, is rubble waiting to be hauled away after three weeks of work by demolition crews.

Downs figured into KC’s music scene in the 1920s and again when he returned to town in the 1940s. Also an associate pastor at First Baptist Church in Kansas City, Kansas, he led the ensemble Chauncey Downs and His Rinky Dinks. Downs helped kickstart African-American musicians’ union Local 627, which helped cement Kansas City as a Prohibition-era jazz hotbed. Local 627 exists today as the Mutual Musicians Foundation.

The building named after Downs housed the Casa Loma Ballroom and was, for a time, a central place of Kansas City’s black political and social scene. But 20 years of abandonment put the Downs Building in the path of a wrecking ball. Its owner, Sheryl Vickers, who bought the structure in 2014, says it couldn’t be saved.

“Oh, my, it was falling-apart rotten,” she tells The Pitch. “The roof was all caved in. It was a sad situation.”

In its place will likely be a Family Dollar, a national chain of discount variety stores. Vickers is also working to lease an adjacent parking lot to Kansas City Water Services, which wants to park its trucks there.

Historic preservationists aren’t happy.

“An historic black building goes down and nobody has anything to say,” says Anita Dixon, executive director of the Mutual Musicians Foundation and a member of the Historic Kansas City Foundation’s board of directors.

“There could have been something done” to save the building, Dixon adds.

Not so, according to Vickers. She tells The Pitch that it would have cost more than $800,000 to complete even a basic rehabilitation of the Downs Building.

Vickers, who works as a senior vice president with Overland Park real estate firm Merrill Companies, says she didn’t have an easy time with some of the preservationists who wanted to find a way to keep the Downs Building intact.

“[They] could call and cuss me out just because I bought it and tried to do something good with it,” Vickers says. “Why didn’t anyone else buy it?”

Rehabbing an old building is a tough job on its own. Tougher still without a potential office tenant or a viable plan to convert it into apartments.

“I’m a real estate broker here locally, and I looked into that building because it’s nice, once in a while, when a national Fortune 500 company wants to develop in an area where no one else will develop and there’s homeless guys building fires on the fire escape,” Vickers says.

Speaking of places no one else wants to develop, let’s turn our attention to the lonely, desolate moonscape that is the west Crossroads.

I kid, of course — the Crossroads, east or west, is a fantastic place. But it’s a place where the value of buildings, the cost of development and the burden of real estate taxes have been the vectors of a renewed debate over incentives for developers.

Central to that discussion is Shirley Helzberg’s decision to seek tax-increment financing for a building she bought 10 years ago, at 1640 Baltimore. TIF takes most of the future taxes that a redevelopment project would ordinarily generate and uses them to lessen the direct costs that a developer pays on a project.

In Helzberg’s case, 38 percent of her $13 million project at 1640 Baltimore (which is meant to become a not-too-far-into-the-future headquarters for architecture firm BNIM) would come from TIF. The Baltimore proposal has sparked a new conversation about the priorities at City Hall and whether development incentives help or hurt other taxing jurisdictions, such as school districts, counties and library systems.

Helzberg used TIF to help build another of her Crossroads properties, the Vitagraph Building. She didn’t use TIF to build a $5.9 million parking garage that serves the Webster House, another of the philanthropist’s holdings in the neighborhood.

But she did this year appeal her tax bill on that garage.

Before it became a garage, the land at 17th and Wyandotte was home to the Orion Pictures Building, part of Kansas City’s Film Row District. At that time, Jackson County valued the building at $879,667.

After Helzberg tore down the Orion Pictures Building and put in its place a new, 180-spot parking garage, in 2014, county assessors took another look and decided the property was worth $3.96 million. At that value, it generated $126,010 in property taxes in 2014, $62,715 of which went to Kansas City Public Schools.

Records with the Jackson County Board of Equalization show that in July, Helzberg’s attorney submitted an appeal of the parking garage’s tax value, saying the garage was worth $1.17 million, not $3.96 million.

Jerry Riffel, Helzberg’s attorney, tells The Pitch that he believed the garage was “grossly overassessed” at nearly $4 million. He adds that the garage loses money “hand over fist.”

The Board of Equalization, which hears tax appeals, compromised, knocking down the value of the Webster House garage to $2.26 million.

Of the BOE’s decision, Riffel says, “I wasn’t exhilarated, but I thought it was a fair compromise.”

That took the tax value down to $74,186. As a result, KCPS was entitled to $35,843 in taxes off the Webster House garage when Helzberg paid her property tax bill on December 21 — $26,872 less than what it got the year before.

At least that’s better than the $13,934 KCPS made in 2013, when the Orion Pictures Building still occupied the land.

On New Year’s Eve, a group of petitioners looking to repeal TIF for Helzberg’s project submitted enough valid signatures to either have the Kansas City, Missouri, City Council repeal the TIF or send it to voters for a decision.

Helzberg has said she will tear down the old warehouse building if the referendum kills her plans to refashion it into a new building for BNIM.

It’s kind of funny to consider that on the East Side, buildings get torn down after decades of neglect. In the Crossroads, one might get torn down because its owner couldn’t get a public subsidy.