WINDS OF CHANGE BLOW IN PROSPECT CORRIDOR

"We have a wide array of incentives at our disposal. Can you think of any
place that is more deserving of these tools than the Prospect Corridor?"
Troy Nash, Kansas City council member

On a recent day, a stone church on Prospect Avenue maintained its dignity
in the rain, surrounded by a closely clipped lawn.

But next to the church parking lot an out-of-town trash hauler had
deposited an entire dumpster's contents - piles of wood and old window
frames, tires, a filthy blanket, black garbage bags and fast-food waste.

"That shows you the mentality," lamented Henry Lyons, Prospect Corridor
Initiative president. "You can just dump wherever you want."

While downtown and the Northland finally boom, blight still permeates the
Prospect Corridor.

From 18th to 47th streets, from Brooklyn to Agnes avenues, residents cope
with entrenched poverty, racial isolation, unemployment, population purge
and deteriorated housing.

Nearly a year ago, after the bodies of six women were found, city officials
promised financial help for one of Kansas City's most beleaguered areas.

Although the city has delivered on many of those promises, it was a
monumental assignment and evidence of progress is elusive.

Yet, for the first time in decades, some see glimpses of hope on the horizon.

Indeed, this part of town, two miles southeast of downtown, has one major
resource going for it - tenacious residents and neighborhood advocates,
determined to make conditions better.

"I feel like I have an albatross around my neck," said Margaret May,
executive director of the Ivanhoe Neighborhood Council, a corridor
neighborhood. "What keeps me going is the energy of the residents."

When May sees 14 teenagers taking chain saws and mowers to overgrown vacant
lots, or block captains guarding abandoned houses against drug use, she
thinks to herself, "Okay, I can keep going."

And residents finally have partners in the effort to turn things around.

The city is mowing weeds more regularly, tearing down the worst vacant
structures and cracking down on illegal dumping. In some pockets,
developers are building new housing, restoring historic treasures and
planning commercial anchors. Thousands of volunteers help the needy with
repairs.

"With downtown finally going, we can turn our attention to other parts of
the city," said Stan Counts, senior business development officer with the
Kansas City Economic Development Corp. "There's a lot of work that's going
on behind the scenes."

Councilman Troy Nash, who has focused attention on the Prospect Corridor
for the past five years, said it's about time.

"This is hard stuff," he said. "It's ground zero."

Scraping Bottom

Prospect Corridor has a lot to overcome.

Once, from the 1950s until the 1980s, it was a hub of Kansas City's black
middle class. But while integration allowed those residents to move
elsewhere, it eroded a cohesive sense of black community that kept the
corridor thriving.

People also trace its decline to white flight and the crack cocaine
epidemic of the 1980s.

The 2000 census painted a portrait of those who remain.

The population is about 20,500, down from more than 60,000 in 1950. That's
like losing a city nearly Lenexa's population from a sliver of land only 5
percent Lenexa's size. The 13 percent unemployment rate is more than twice
Kansas City's rate. As much as one-fourth of the population lives on less
than $10,000 per year.

In an area where small businesses once flourished, many storefronts are now
boarded up. Other businesses are struggling to survive. Residents
frequently drive miles to buy groceries.

But the most visible evidence of the corridor's plight is the housing - 45
percent of the houses were built before 1940; 70 percent are worth $50,000
or less.

Some of the homes are fabulous, like the Benton Boulevard mansions or the
historic Midwest Shirtwaist bungalows on Lockridge Avenue in the Santa Fe
Neighborhood.

But as University of Missouri-Kansas City researchers found in 2000 and
2001, more than a third of Prospect Corridor single-family homes were
substandard or worse, meaning several thousand homes needed roof
replacements or had other code violations.

In some cities like Chicago, poverty is symbolized by hulking high-rise
projects, but Kansas City's poorest neighborhoods are characterized by
block after block of houses with sagging porches, broken windows, peeling
paint and rotten roofs.

Many blocks are pocked with vacant lots that have become thickets of weeds,
poison ivy and trash. The corridor and nearby neighborhoods have nearly
3,200 vacant lots mixed among their 6,500 residential structures, UMKC found.

"If you were going to select a corridor along which the conditions are
among the worst and neglected the longest, it would be the Prospect
Corridor," said Peter Eaton, director of UMKC's Center for Economic
Information.

On The Rebound

Against nearly overwhelming odds, many residents refuse to give up.

In the late 1990s, the Ivanhoe Neighborhood in the southern portion of the
corridor had one of the city's highest crime rates, countless vacant lots
and a horrendous dumping problem.

A small band of residents sought philanthropic help, hired a small staff,
mobilized volunteers and churches and started organizing block captains,
who now number 230.

They joined police to shut down more than 500 drug houses, and are clearing
200 vacant lots for development. The association is restoring an abandoned
boxing club as the neighborhood center.

"It's 100 percent better than it was, and we still have 100 percent to go,"
said May, the executive director.

Working with Legal Aid, the neighborhood association obtained a
long-abandoned house in the 4200 block of Prospect.

The fearless next-door neighbor, Juanita Dennis, kept drug addicts and
other vagrants at bay with a message: "Ain't nobody coming in this house."

Dennis, who has lived in the neighborhood 43 years, knew the home's owners
and their nine children. But the owners are long dead and the children have
their own lives elsewhere.

With money from Second Presbyterian Church, Bank of America and the Ewing
Marion Kauffman Foundation, Ivanhoe gutted and restored the home and it's
now on the market for $72,900. Ivanhoe hopes to use the proceeds to fix up
several other abandoned houses.

In fact, many Ivanhoe residents wouldn't live anywhere else.

Flora Washington, a resident of the 3300 block of Brooklyn since 1961, says
the drug houses are gone now. She was able to help a blind neighbor get new
paint and major repairs through Christmas in October volunteers.

Washington tends a colorful flower garden in both her own yard and the
vacant lot next door. Most of her neighbors are longtime residents, but a
few young families also have moved in.

"I've never thought of moving," she said. "I like my house. I'm not going
to let anything run me from something that my husband and I worked so hard
for."

Some other Prospect Corridor residents are frankly jealous of Ivanhoe and
its paid staff, and say they deserve the city's help, too.

Santa Fe representatives worked for months with the Housing and Economic
Development Financial Corp. to find a master developer for new
single-family residences that would compliment the neighborhood's historic
housing. But that has all stalled since the city put the housing agency out
of business because of management problems.

Also stalled for more than six months is an ordinance the neighborhood is
seeking to lower zoning density. Karmello Coleman, a Santa Fe member, says
home ownership is the key to stabilizing the area, which she believes
already has enough multifamily rental housing. But the council has yet to
adopt Santa Fe's proposal.

"The key to success in this neighborhood, like all neighborhoods, is not
only people caring, but also the support of City Hall," Coleman said.

Fighting Obstacles

Kansas City's new housing director, Stacia Johnson, agreed.

"People expect cities to step up to the plate," said Johnson, who arrived
in February from Texas. "Which is what we're going to do."

So far, much of the city's funding has only been a Band-Aid.

In recent years, the city has provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in
federal block grant money for the corridor, although much of that has been
for planning rather than actual development.

Neighborhood leaders have clamored for years for housing repair help. This
year the city has budgeted $1.6 million, but that will only take care of
about 240 houses, 63 in the Prospect Corridor. The city isn't taking any
more applications until the backlog is erased.

Councilman Nash lists the Prospect Corridor's obstacles to erasing decades
of decline.

"Institutionalized racism is the most notable of these obstacles," he said.
"Why was the area neglected for so long?"

Other obstacles include chronic unemployment, low educational achievement
(only a tenth of the population has a college degree), inferior public
schools, lack of job training and employment opportunities.

The city will never have enough resources to tackle all those problems,
said Donovan Mouton, director of urban affairs for Mayor Kay Barnes, but it
can do more to broker partnerships with private and philanthropic groups.
He said the city also should more aggressively pursue grants for home
repairs and vacant home restoration, as other cities have done.

Kansas City also could use tax-increment financing to spur more development
in the corridor, just as it provides tens of millions of dollars in tax
incentives to developers in the Country Club Plaza, downtown and the Northland.

"We have a wide array of incentives at our disposal, many of which are
supposed to be used for blighted areas," Nash said. "Can you think of any
place that is more deserving of these tools than the Prospect Corridor?"

Lyons, of the Prospect Corridor Initiative, sees positive momentum but
realizes that the corridor has to change negative perceptions that
influence prospective homeowners and investors.

Lyons and Mouton believe change is possible, because for the first time in
a long time, neighborhood leaders, residents, politicians, churches and
businesses are cooperating on the corridor's future. "We have more and more
people on the same page," Mouton said.

Moving Back

James and Charlene Freeman are among those moving back to the Prospect
Corridor who remember a better time for the area and want to share in its
resurgence.

They raised eight children in a house near Research Medical Center but in
the late 1990s learned about a new housing development at 20th and Olive
streets. Charlene grew up in that neighborhood and James had proposed to
her just down the street.

The Freemans found a suburban-style neighborhood, with manicured lawns,
homes priced below $140,000, with 10-year tax abatements from the city.

"It's nice and quiet," James Freeman said. "We've got nice neighbors."

The developer, Gary Gabel, has built about 30 single-family homes in the
area in the last six years. His work is a rare example of private
developers and banks investing in the inner city.

Gabel believes the area has major potential, especially as downtown
rebounds and suburban housing prices soar.

He is now working on a $3.7 million project that will feature 29 town homes
in five buildings between Brooklyn and Park avenues.

One of Kansas City's most respected community development corporations,
Swope Community Builders, also is working on a plan for the intersection of
39th Street and Prospect Avenue. It would include a $2.5 million Aldi's
grocery store, car wash and convenience/gas station. The group will seek
tax-increment financing soon.

Swope Community Builders also is poised to rescue the 80-unit Ivanhoe
Gardens apartment complex, a HUD foreclosure project at 38th Street and
Euclid Avenue, and renovate it.

Another consultant wants to use a tax-increment financing approach to raise
significant money for housing restoration in Ivanhoe. It's a similar
strategy to one used in Chicago, in which the city borrowed money up front
and used the incremental increase in property values to pay back the bonds.

Jim White, formerly with the Local Initiatives Support Corp., says it could
make as much as $1 million available initially for minor home repairs and
renovation.

But while outside help is crucial, the key to turning the corridor around
will be the Juanita Dennises and the Flora Washingtons who call it home,
May said.

"You can't send people in to do this," she said. "The people who live here
have to be the ones to take it back."