A three-story, stone-trimmed house just sold on the Paseo in Kansas City&#8217;s urban core. On the outside, the siding is white. On the inside, the walls are taupe.</p><p>And on paper, the color of this house is gold.</p><p>This four-bedroom home in the 2900 block sold late last year in a foreclosure for $26,500. The new owner cleaned it up and remodeled it, adding new windows, new bathrooms, even a new furnace. Then it sold this fall for close to its $90,000 asking price.</p><p>"We&#8217;re all going to wish we had bought some of these homes -- they keep going up in value," said Bart Clark, the Prudential real estate agent who marketed the house. "The neighborhood is coming back."</p><p>Actually, that applies to just about all the neighborhoods in a cluster The Kansas City Star calls the Ivanhoe-Paseo Corridor. In the entire city, this corridor experienced the highest housing appreciation this decade.</p><p>The average price of an existing home there more than doubled, from $35,328 in 2001 to $73,460 in 2005. That&#8217;s right, the average price doubled -- in an area with the city&#8217;s worst violent crime rate, no less.</p><p>This resurgence helped the Ivanhoe-Paseo Corridor stand out among its central-city peers in The Star&#8217;s comparison of neighborhood clusters using almost three dozen measurements.</p><p>The Star&#8217;s series on neighborhoods takes a look at a different section of the city each day. Today&#8217;s focus is the Historic Central City, basically north of Brush Creek and east of Troost Avenue or the Paseo. And in this part of town, Ivanhoe-Paseo emerged as a real poster child of urban renewal.</p><p>This is an area that developed a century ago alongside the jewel of Kansas City&#8217;s new boulevard system, the Paseo. Then, like the rest of the urban core, it suffered decades of decline and abandonment. At the dawn of the millennium, its own residents suggested a slogan for the neighborhood: "Dirty, nasty, trashy."</p><p>Now, the Ivanhoe-Paseo Corridor has been rediscovered -- by the real estate market.</p><p>"This hasn&#8217;t come about accidentally," said Margaret May, director of the Ivanhoe Neighborhood Council.</p><p>Partnerships of philanthropic funders and housing developers filled ugly, vacant gaps on the Paseo. Private rehabbers found a niche in the neighborhoods by buying beat-up but architecturally distinctive homes, fixing them up, then reselling them. And urban professionals realized they could get more house for the money here than on the city&#8217;s outskirts.</p><p>It&#8217;s a transformation that&#8217;s even spilled over into some longtime businesses. The old J.R. Foster Barber and Beauty Shop on 31st Street, for instance, remodeled this year, put in new cabinets and chairs for the first time anyone can remember, and even changed its name to Brooklyn Kutz.</p><p>"Customers have been coming here ever since they were little boys, and never seen this kind of change," said barber Donny Nelson.</p><p>The same could be said of the entire Paseo Corridor.</p><p>Forgotten section</p><p>The Historic Central City section of town includes seven other neighborhood clusters besides Ivanhoe-Paseo. Those are: the Traditional Northeast north of Independence Boulevard, Lower Northeast south of that, plus Blue Valley, 18th and Vine, East Community Team, Vineyard and the Oak Park-Benton Corridor.</p><p>This is a section of town that&#8217;s long felt forgotten and neglected -- by fleeing families, by big retailers, by absentee landlords, by City Hall, even by its own residents.</p><p>The Star&#8217;s analysis of neighborhood trends bears this out. The Historic Central City&#8217;s eight neighborhood clusters were all so dirty that they occupied the bottom eight places in a litter index. And there&#8217;s so much ramshackle rental housing that all the clusters ranked in the bottom 11 citywide in housing conditions.