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Over on the West Side, luxury condos are going up alongside rehabbed Victorians and humble bungalows. Down on busy Southwest Boulevard, Jared Allen’s new sports bar is the latest addition to a thriving business area of established restaurants and ethnic groceries.
“Everywhere you look, there’s nice development in the neighborhood,” Alfredo Parra said of the largely Latino enclave.
Everywhere, it seems, but across from Parra’s house. There, at the corner of 20th and Summit streets, stands a graffiti-stained brick hulk occupying most of a city block.
Doesn’t it seem to you that there’s always one derelict property in every old neighborhood? Broken glass and peeling paint. The ugly mess owned by someone who seemingly could care less what the neighbors think.
In this case, the absentee owner is not an out-of-state slumlord. It’s the Kansas City School District.
“We take care of our buildings,” district spokesman Andre Riley told me when I called to inquire about the district’s plan for the Summit Street complex that at various times housed a grade school, junior high and high school.
“We try to be a good neighbor,” he said.
Don’t we all? But the district’s neighborliness isn’t exactly inspiring at the site of vacant West Junior High School. I paid a visit Thursday and quit counting broken windows at 75.
Rusty “no trespassing” signs were almost unreadable. Razorwire drooped so low from a chain-link fence that I could have lost an ear had I tripped on the broken sidewalk.
The classrooms were last filled with school kids in the early 1990s. A sign on the locked front door says the last tenant, a social service agency, moved out more than 16 months ago.
“Right now, the school on Summit remains a blighted entity,” said Kathryn M. Walker, executive director of Westside Housing, which aims to provide affordable housing in the area. “The school district is letting it sit there abandoned, boarded up.”
It isn’t alone. At least 34 district schools have closed since the 1970s.
More than a dozen of those properties have been sold over the years, but at least 19 were on the district’s books when my colleague Joe Robertson took a look back in December.
Why so many on the surplus property list? School officials complain that it’s difficult finding buyers for old schools in the more hard-luck, inner-city neighborhoods.
But that’s not the only reason. There’s also the matter of priorities. What with so many other challenges, such as the revolving door in the superintendent’s office, getting rid of old buildings is apparently not high on the district’s list.
Or so it seems to Walker, whose agency has expressed interest in reusing the school property on the West Side for affordable housing.
Her board sent offers to both of the past two “permanent” superintendents, Bernard Taylor Jr. and Anthony Amato, and guess what?
“It’s been two years, and we’ve heard nothing back from them,” she said.
Given that, I didn’t feel snubbed when no one from the district got back to me, either. Riley referred my questions on this matter to his superior, Cynthia Wheeler-Linden, who neither called me back nor replied to the e-mail Riley suggested I send her.
They’re busy, I guess.
So let’s do it this way. Should someone at the district find time to consider this matter, Walker and Parra have a proposition:
Rather than let the building crumble for another couple of decades, they’d like the district to work with them to find a new use for the eyesore in their neighborhood.
“Do something positive with it,” Parra said.
Hey, now there’s a concept.
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