On a stiflingly hot day in July Elizabeth Schultz, Community Builders of Kansas City director of strategic initiatives and community outreach, was at the monthly Town Fork Creek neighborhood meeting at Covenant Presbyterian Church. Legal Aid of Western Missouri was speaking to the group about how to deal with decaying and abandoned houses. Residents of Town Fork Creek, who work diligently to keep the neighborhood clean and safe, expressed concerns about the high number of problem houses in their area but didn’t have a formally compiled list to be reported for potential code violations.
Legal Aid was working from an outdated list of more than 200 addresses so Schultz stepped in to help, and out of that meeting CBKC’s Neighborhood Improvement Initiative was born. Schultz and the CBKC team developed a strategy to methodically deal with the problem houses, advocate for the neighborhoods and serve as their liaison with City of Kansas City, Missouri Code Enforcement, Legal Aid and rehabbers.
First, Schultz tours the neighborhood to identify problem houses and catalog them as needing short-term help (such as lawn care assistance), long-term rehabilitation or demolition. She then prioritizes a short list of the most urgent problems and presents it at monthly neighborhood meetings to get feedback from the community. After the final short list is confirmed, Schultz attends ride-alongs with the neighborhood president, Legal Aid, and a potential rehabilitation agent to identify which houses are possible rehabs and which need to be demolished. She works with the neighborhood president to form a housing committee and educate its members on how to address the problem houses with either Legal Aid or Code Enforcement.
So far, four neighborhood meetings have occurred and as a result, 30 blocks have been evaluated finding 55 houses in extreme need of improvement, 18 properties eligible for legal action under the Affordable Housing Act and three homes intended for demolition. With a plan to identify and prioritize 10 blocks in the neighborhood each month, the goal is to complete an analysis of all 120 blocks for Town Fork Creek in 12 months and to begin assisting the neighborhood with applications for funding single-family housing improvement projects.
Feedback on the program has been overwhelmingly positive. “It’s great that CBKC has started this initiative and, with the neighborhoods and the City doing their part and all of us working together, we can make a huge improvement in our community,” said Becky Forrest, Town Fork Creek neighborhood president.
The Neighborhood Improvement Initiative is in conjunction with Adopt-a-Neighborhood, a collaborative project between Legal Aid of Western Missouri, private law firms and east side neighborhoods in Kansas City. It will be an ongoing service CBKC provides for the neighborhoods it serves.