University plan to replace apartments with parking lot raises protest in KC

To the eyes of preservationists, the five apartment buildings grouped around a courtyard are classic Kansas City, an architectural heritage that must be saved.

To the Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences at Independence Avenue and the Paseo, the vacant 1916-era Colonial Court apartments, which the school owns on the eastern edge of its campus, are an impediment to progress and must be torn down.

The Kansas City Council will have to decide which view is right.

It’s a situation reminiscent of the months-long dispute over another set of apartment buildings on a block just west of the Country Club Plaza. Preservationists lost that fight, and the buildings designed by Nelle Peters, a noted architect, were demolished last year to make way for development.

The Colonial Court apartment buildings, just off Independence Avenue on Maple Avenue, weren’t designed by a famous architect. But they’re the kind of six-plexes, characteristically clad in red brick with white front porches, that pepper the heart of Kansas City. And they’re listed on Kansas City’s register of historic places, which gives them certain protections.

So the medical school’s plan to raze Colonial Court faces challenges — largely because the site is slated to become a parking lot.

The medical school is a clean, well-kept collection of buildings at the gateway to northeast Kansas City neighborhoods. Prompted by increasing enrollment, the school has embarked on a five-year expansion plan.

That plan includes a new $30 million Center for Medical and Surgical Simulation on the west side of the campus that would supplant some current parking space. Other buildings are expected to come later.

First, though, attention is on the campus’s east side, where KCU wants to vacate Woodland Avenue to enlarge the core campus and raze or relocate structures that don’t fit the master plan.

To that end, KCU seeks a Master Planned Development approval from the city, a mechanism to work through multiple rezoning and land-use agreements.

As part of the plan, KCU has acquired six apartment buildings, five of them comprising Colonial Court, and three houses in the Pendleton Heights neighborhood.

A city staff report last week to the City Plan Commission roused public dissent, largely because of Colonial Court’s historic designation. One of the critics summarized the opposition.

“They have a tremendous amount of land banked for parking,” said Matt Staub, who wears several civic activist hats, most notably as chairman of the city’s Parking and Transportation Commission.

“My interest always is in preservation of Kansas City neighborhoods. I’m just very disappointed that they feel they need to demolish a good piece of architecture and push the institution into the neighborhood.”

Development attorney James Bowers, who represents KCU, said some perspective is needed.

 

“Those buildings are in horrible shape,” Bowers said of Colonial Court, which KCU acquired in December after the previous owner vacated its tenants. “We’ve tried to secure them to prevent vandalism, copper thieves and vagrants from squatting. We have 24/7  security patrolling the campus, which has a good halo effect on the surrounding neighborhood.”

Indeed, the medical school generally is considered a good neighbor, a positive influence in the neighborhood. Before the City Plan Commission meeting, KCU had reached a memorandum of understanding with the Pendleton Heights Neighborhood Association — an agreement that calls for demolishing Colonial Court.

The memorandum also calls for moving two of the three single-family houses from their current locations on Brownell Avenue to residential lots on Maple.

It also addresses a stand-alone six-plex apartment building on Brownell. The agreement says Pendleton Heights and KCU will agree on a temporary use for that apartment building until the property is needed for educational use, at which time it will be demolished or moved.

But Brad Wolf, Kansas City’s historic preservation officer, said flatly about Colonial Court: “I want to see the buildings retained.”

Furthermore, Wolf said, he’s generally cautious about institutional expansions into neighborhoods, regardless of the institution.

“It would be nice to take a little more time to consider the plan and to follow the process already established to de-list historic structures,” Wolf said.

Therein lies one of two devil-in-the-details issues hampering KCU’s redevelopment proposal. It requires a complicated dive into the city’s regulations governing historic districts.

City Plan commissioners forwarded the case to the City Council’s Planning, Zoning & Economic Development Committee with the stipulation that KCU file an application with the city to delete Colonial Court and the related properties from previously authorized historic district designation.

But KCU attorney Bowers said the medical school doesn’t want to go that route. It wants the City Council to waive a separate historic review and give permission to demolish Colonial Court under the Master Planned Development process.

The second devil in the details came when the City Plan Commission agreed with city parks and planning staffs about how the planned surgical simulation building should look. That condition throws attention back to the west side of the campus, where the new building is planned.

The architectural rendering of the west side of that building, which will overlook Paseo Boulevard, doesn’t comply with city requirements for “transparency.” In other words, it needs more windows.

“We will argue that vehemently,” Bowers said.

The medical school needs to have educational buildings — especially the surgical simulation center — that have “blackout” rooms when audio visual presentations or other simulations take place, he said.

“We don’t think the transparency standards should apply here,” Bowers said. “We don’t think these standards, designed for pedestrian attractiveness, were written to apply to educational buildings.”

The next step — to get on the planning and zoning committee’s agenda — is expected in early February. Meanwhile, Bowers said, KCU continues to wade through multiple, and sometimes conflicting, regulations affecting its redevelopment.

Whatever it does is subject to regulations established by the Greater Downtown Area Plan, the Truman Plaza Area Plan, the Major Streets Plan, the Bike KC Plan, the Paseo Gateway Plan, a pending Kansas City transit-oriented development policy, and the city’s zoning and development codes, the Independence Avenue Overlay District, the city’s boulevard standards, and the Pendleton Heights Overlay District.

Meshing with the requirements has been a redevelopment nightmare, Bowers said, but the medical school hopes the City Council keeps an eye on long-term benefits.

“We’re about halfway through a $75 million capital improvements project,” Bowers said of KCU. “The piece on the front burner right now is to start construction on the surgical simulation center on a place where we currently have surface parking. We need an alternate location for those cars before we can break ground.”

This story was originally published January 21, 2017 at 1:00 PM with the headline "University plan to replace apartments with parking lot raises protest in KC."