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Lack of private money cited in Jazz District redevelopment lag
By STEVE PENNThe Kansas City Star
One of them is Peter Yelorda, co-chairman of the Jazz District Redevelopment Corp. Yelorda has shouldered his share of the criticism for the pace of redevelopment.
And so as the Rhythm & Ribs festival was under way last weekend, I gave Yelorda the opportunity to address his critics and speak to the challenges the district faces.
At the outset, he pointed to the success of the two-day festival and the diversity of the crowd it drew.
“I feel so good about this,” Yelorda said. “It’s not as good as it could be. But it’s not like we have a private investor who can hand us a half-million and say, ‘Go buy your entertainment.’ The quality of your entertainment directly determines the turnout.”
From an economic standpoint, the event is a costly gamble. The weather is always a question mark. Yet Yelorda hopes that spending money to showcase the jazz district through an annual festival will ultimately help draw more businesses to the district.
“A lot of people criticize and say, ‘What’s taking so long?’ ” Yelorda said. “Everything down here has been done on public money. ... There’s no private money down here.”
He noted quite accurately that the commitment to the district from City Hall changes as each mayor and City Council have changed.
“You have to start over again,” Yelorda said. “How can you expect this area in the ’hood, so to speak, to be vibrant when for many years, downtown was boarded up? If the private money isn’t building up downtown, how do you expect there to be something over here?”
The lack of funding for minority entrepreneurs doesn’t help.
“We don’t have any black capital funds,” Yelorda said. “It doesn’t exist. You go to Atlanta and Detroit. There is black private capital there to fund this stuff. There’s a big void in Kansas City of minority wealth.”
As for the Peachtree Restaurant’s departure from the district, Yelorda has come to accept it as just a business decision.
“When the Peachtree came here, they had one place,” Yelorda said. “Now they have three. Now tell me the district wasn’t good for their business. If I was Ms. (Vera) Willis and I had the opportunity to go where there was that kind of foot traffic, I would move, too. But being on 18th and Vine helped showcase her product. But she did the right thing.”
Looking forward, not backward, the redevelopment corporation is now working in partnership with Kansas City’s Downtown Council to find businesses willing to locate in the vacant spaces.
On another front, corporation officials are exploring whether the district’s historic designation allows the corporation to legally tear down a piece of property at 1505 E. 18th St., a building already deemed a dangerous structure. The building next to it at 1513 E. 18th St. is being assessed to determine whether the interior can be gutted and its facade salvaged. Tearing them down would create almost an entire block of vacant land.
“Then that block would be much more appealing to a developer,” Yelorda said.
Preservationists aren’t going to be too pleased with the idea of tearing down those old buildings. But I say let the preservationists try the corporation’s job for a while. Let them go on an endless search for someone who is crazy enough to sink millions of dollars into property that now has debris flinging off it when storms strike.
There’s a movie named after that task. It’s called “Mission: Impossible.”