Hopes renewed for Norman School conversion in midtown Kansas City
The historic Norman School building in midtown Kansas City, closed since 2005, may finally have a redevelopment plan that works.
Developer Del Hedgepath, who bought the 109-year-old school building in the Valentine neighborhood for $1.4 million in 2009, this week earned a first-step approval to convert the vacant and vandalized building into apartments.
Future approval by the Kansas City Council partly depends on showing that the urban renewal plan finally has obtained neighborhood backing. The City Planning Commission last year rejected the plan when neighborhood groups objected to the size and layout of Hedgepath’s plans.
Meanwhile, the stately limestone building continued to be vandalized and attract vagrants who occasionally had set fires in it.
Hedgepath and a Valentine Neighborhood Association representative this week told the city’s Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority that the parties now are fine with the project’s proposed size, its access points, parking and landscaping.
LCRA commissioners on Wednesday approved a finding of blight that allows the proposal to move forward. Hedgepath is expected to return to LCRA with a separate property tax abatement request to help with the $13.5 million redevelopment.
For his part, Hedgepath says he now has the financing, the focus and the support to move ahead with redevelopment of the main building. The renovations will be accompanied by construction of two new wings on the north side of the original structure. He said asbestos abatement and interior demolition are done and he wants to begin interior and new construction this summer.
“It’s been on the back burner,” Hedgepath acknowledged Friday. “I had other projects going on. The meeting process drug on. And for a while the economy certainly made it hard to find a lender.”
He said he has about $2.5 million invested in the apartment plan so far. The school building, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, qualifies its redevelopment for historic tax credits. Sale of those credits will cover about 35 percent of the cost, Hedgepath said. He said he also has lined up lender equity.
The school, visible from Southwest Trafficway on a hill between 35th and 36th streets, carries an address of 3514 Jefferson. The building, which faces south and has a crumbling playground area in the front, will gain a two-wing addition on its north side under the plan.
The proposal is for 61 apartments, 39 of them in the historic building and 22 in two four-story additions. The plan now calls for 13 two-bedroom units and 48 one-bedroom units, an increase in two-bedroom units in response to neighborhood concerns, Hedgepath said.
Hedgepath said the renewal plan is viable only with the new additions, which would create enough apartments to provide sufficient return on investment.
The Norman School’s re-use has had several false starts, beginning with Hedgepath’s 2009 acquisition of the property in a Kansas City Public Schools auction. The district chose Hedgepath’s bid, which was $5,000 less than a competiting bid from nearby Kansas City Life Insurance. The insurance company sued, but a Jackson County judge upheld the sale to Hedgepath.
Hedgepath failed to advance his original plan to convert the school into 35 apartments and intended in 2011 to sell the property to Sherman Associates, another Kansas City redeveloper. But Sherman Associates was unable to get Low Income Housing Tax Credits that would have made that proposed $10.5 million renovation feasible, so the property reverted to Hedgepath under a contingency clause.
Publicity in 2013 about the school district’s large “repurposing” program for closed schools caused a resurgence in attention to the Norman School, but since it already was out of the district’s hands, it continued to be a private redevelopment matter.
Diane Stafford: 816-234-4359, @kcstarstafford
This story was originally published January 29, 2016 at 5:04 PM with the headline "Hopes renewed for Norman School conversion in midtown Kansas City."