St. Luke’s wants to preserve the residential neighborhood between the Plaza and Westport — by building half-million dollar homes there
Recently, the foundation connected to St. Luke’s Health System has announced plans to start construction on 30 new homes in the neighborhood west of its flagship hospital in Kansas City.
The single-family houses, which are expected to sell for around half a million dollars, will “enhance and revitalize” the neighborhood, according to a news release from the St. Luke’s Foundation.
The announcement, though, failed to veer into a widening debate about how much responsibility the foundation bears for the deterioration of the neighborhood it now intends to revitalize.
As jackhammers tear up asphalt and bulldozers turn over dirt on vacant lots in the enclave of homes and small apartments between Westport and the Plaza, it’s worth recounting the difficulties that occur when an institution as large as St. Luke’s casts a shadow over a neighborhood.
Two days before the St. Luke’s Foundation announces its new housing development, Bob Perry slows his red Chevy in front of a freshly bulldozed lot. He looks astounded.
“I didn’t know they tore that down,” Perry says.
“Oh gosh,” says his wife, Judy Perry. “I didn’t either.”
Bob and Judy had been out of town for two weeks. In that stretch, a little bit more of their neighborhood had vanished.
Judy, the retired executive director of Harvesters Community Food Network, purchased a tidy bungalow on Corbin Terrace in 1979. Bob, now retired from an insurance firm, joined her in 1984. They have been fighting ever since to maintain a liveable, affordable neighborhood.
“We haven’t won anything,” Bob says. “The neighborhood is gone.”
Whitney Kerr disagrees — adamantly. One of Kansas City’s most prominent developers, Kerr is chairman of Westport Today, the for-profit subsidiary created by the St. Luke’s Foundation. St. Luke’s got into the real estate business for the sole purpose of saving a neighborhood in a downward spiral, he says.
“The best thing that ever happened was to have St. Luke’s in that neighborhood,” Kerr argues.
Robert Martin, the current president of the Plaza Westport Neighborhood Association, is trying to bridge the differences. A retired United Methodist pastor and professor, Martin lives in one of the newer condo developments close to the Plaza. Since accepting leadership of the neighborhood group, he’s had his hands full.
“One of the main issues we deal with is derelict housing, specifically around St. Luke’s,” he says.
Martin says he thinks St. Luke’s has acquired properties over the years with good intentions for the neighborhood. “But after awhile, keeping up the houses became a burden. It got to the point where the housing was not only ugly, but it increased the element of drama and actual danger.”
The original houses in the neighborhood were built for working families around the turn of the 20th Century. The lots were small, and the homes came without garages or finished basements. As time wore on, homeowners left for larger places and better amenities. They converted many of the houses to rental properties.
By 1998, a charitable foundation in the name of Miller Nichols, then the president of the J.C. Nichols Company, owned close to 100 houses in the neighborhood between the Plaza (to the south) and Westport (to the north), and Madison Avenue (west) and Broadway Boulevard (east). They rented the properties by the month and invested just enough to keep them habitable, neighbors tell me. That year the Nichols foundation approached the St. Luke’s Foundation about taking over the properties.
Kerr, who was on the foundation’s board, says St. Luke’s was reluctant to become property managers. But its leaders realized that shoring up a neighborhood still on the brink was the best way to protect the hospital, the nearby St. Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute, and other hospital-related buildings. The foundation created Westport Today to manage the real estate.
The strategy, Kerr says, has been to stabilize single-family housing in the interior of the neighborhood while increasing density with multi-family housing on the borders. He says St. Luke’s supported a downzoning of the area’s interior from multi-family to single-family housing. And Westport Today has been a willing purchaser for anyone who wants to sell a home in the area. Houses in the neighborhood almost never go on the open market.
Developers connected with St. Luke’s restored about 20 of the original houses, offering attractive homes for reasonable prices in a sought-after neighborhood. Judy Perry points out a few of those as we cruise around the neighborhood.
“This is a snapshot of what could have been,” she says.
But many of the homes met a grimmer fate. St. Luke’s continued Nichols’ pattern of renting by the month. Houses grew dilapidated. Many were replaced by vacant lots. Renters were told they could be ordered to vacate with no more than a month’s notice.
Judy and Bob Perry’s home on Corbin Terrace sits beside plowed ground where a bungalow existed not too long ago. For years, they watched renters move in and out. The landlords did little upkeep, Bob says. He thinks the kitchen retains its original sink — more than a century old.
About five years ago, Westport Today stopped renting the house. The place looked terrible, and the Perrys began noticing an increase in rodents. Squatters broke in a couple of times. The house beside it was also vacant.
“We begged St. Luke’s to either rehab the houses or sell them to owner-occupants, or just sell them to renters who want to fix them up,” Judy says.
In the spring, a property manager knocked on their door to tell them Westport Today was about to tear the properties down. A couple of weeks later, a bulldozer showed up.
“At least the mouse problem is better,” says Judy.
Purchasing homes and allowing them to deteriorate is, of course, a classic blockbusting strategy. But blockbusters usually want to wipe out residential neighborhoods entirely and replace them with commercial developments or expansions for universities or other institutions. St. Luke’s appears to be committed to preserving a residential neighborhood — just a much more upscale one than now exists.
“We are trying to put in today’s version of yesterday’s homes.” says Michael VanDerhoef, Saint Luke’s Health System senior vice president and CEO of the Saint Luke’s Foundation. “We’re trying to make sure that we build a quality product so these homes will last for another 100 years. We don’t want to do inexpensive construction and build homes that aren’t going to last.”
Residents learned about plans for the construction of new, $500,000 houses at a late August meeting of the Plaza Westport Neighborhood Association. The new development, to be called Plaza Heights, will be south of Bishop Spencer Place, a retirement community owned by St. Luke’s Health Systems. Doug Weltner, the project’s developer, said he envisioned “San Francisco-style” homes with garages and back yards. Tenants in the affected area would have to vacate, and the existed houses would be torn down, he said.
Minutes from the meeting reveal a mixed response.
“I am opposed to tear-down,” Bob Perry said.
“I thought there was going to be more rehab,” said Robert Martin, the neighborhood association president. “This is not affordable housing.”
“This is gentrification,” agreed an unidentified person in the audience.
But someone else congratulated the developers for staying within the residential framework sketched out in redevelopment plans for the area.
And Alan Simon, a member of the neighborhood association, is recorded as praising the plan. “I think this is great,” he said, according to the minutes. “This is not multi-family. This is going to raise the neighborhood.”
Martin tells The Pitch he thinks the neighborhood association has developed a good working relationship with the St. Luke’s Foundation and Westport Today. His problem is more with City Hall.
“I don’t think there is a good philosophy on the City Council for protecting neighborhoods,” he says. “If the city is promoting affordable housing, then what tools are they providing for neighborhood associations or just concerned citizens so that we can push back on these developments? We have very little with which to work.”
Councilwoman Katheryn Shields represents the Plaza-Westport neighborhood and gets high marks from residents for trying to help. She agrees the city needs to do better and says that a process is underway to come up with a workable policy for promoting affordable housing.
“We’re losing not just affordable housing — we’re losing the next level up, what I call workforce housing,” Shields says, noting that rising home prices and rents around midtown and the Plaza are pricing out people who work in Plaza businesses, and even nurses and other staffers at St. Luke’s.
Shields says she thinks St. Luke’s intentions for the neighborhood are good: “Big institutions in this city have come to realize that the neighborhoods around them are very important to their missions.”
Count Bob and Judy Perry among the Plaza-Westport residents who are skeptical on that one. Although, not entirely: a few days after our cruise through the neighborhood, Bob tells me has does remember one big win for long-time residents. That would be the fight they waged to prevent the Westport Flea Market up the hill from selling out to a Hooters restaurant.
“It’s not a Hooters,” Bob says, of the new development.
So at least there is that.
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