Public housing project in KCK on verge of closing, leaving residents in limbo
Gaunni LaPorte found a letter at her door in November telling her she would soon have to pack up and move out of her apartment at Juniper Gardens in Kansas City, Kansas.
She feared she would soon be out in the cold in the dead of winter with nowhere to go. At 21 years old, she said, she’s still trying to figure life out.
When she moved into Juniper Gardens in northeast Kansas City, Kansas, three years ago with her brother Camwell Renaud, it seemed like the perfect solution — now she’s worried.
“It’s just like they don’t really care,” LaPorte said. “One day you get a call that you’re gonna be leaving your house, your home, where you stay. What else do you do?
“You’re just stuck outside.”
For decades, the Juniper Gardens public housing project has suffered from a lack of investment. It wasn’t until 2011 that units were outfitted with central air conditioning, for instance, and it’s isolated in an area without shopping and services.
Vacancies have risen and now the federal government is pressuring the Housing Authority of Kansas City, Kansas, to shut down the project and find its residents new homes.
For them and the land on which the project sits, the future is uncertain.
Juniper Gardens is owned by the housing authority, which operates separate from the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and the city itself. But the UG mayor and commissioners maintain indirect control by appointing its 12-member governing board.
There’s money at stake in boarding up Juniper Gardens. The housing authority will take a financial hit since shutting the place down will reduce the subsidy it gets from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
But the upkeep cost for Juniper has already been a strain, and the project is obsolete in more ways than one. Its end is near.
“The writing was on the wall that this was going to happen,” said Matt Watkins, chairman of the KCK Housing Authority board of commissioners. “We’ve always been a pot on the stove, and now it’s boiling.”
What the housing authority ultimately decides to do next will have a profound impact on the more than 100 people who still live there and will have to find new homes.
The past of Juniper Gardens
When it opened in 1962, Juniper Gardens was the first public housing project in the state of Kansas. It remains the largest.
The 95 four-plexes nor the two five-unit buildings were well built, had modern appliances and were a big improvement for the people who first occupied the 390 rent-subsidized units.
Many of those original tenants, before moving into the project, were living in squalor in an area south of where Juniper Gardens stands now. Shacks mostly. Two-thirds or more of the houses were without a flush toilet, according to newspaper articles at the time and a more recent report prepared for the UG.
With the federal government providing two-thirds of the cost, the city’s urban renewal agency began clearing out those slums in the late 1950s. They then found or built better housing for the mostly Black residents.
A large number of those displaced families landed at Juniper Gardens, which an early housing authority head named after a 19th Century settlement founded by freed slaves at the bottom of the nearby river bluffs. After the Civil War, the freed slaves moved upriver from the former Confederacy and disembarked at Kaw’s Point. Many others headed West. Those who stayed behind, settled and called their new home Juniper.
Set off by itself from the rest of the community, the Juniper Gardens housing project’s location was never the best. It was far from stores, and the poor residents depended on intermittent bus service to get them to jobs, shopping and social services.
In the mid 1990s, HUD began pressuring city government and the housing authority to shut Juniper Gardens down. A consultant determined it was no longer attractive to tenants and the federal government suggested that it wasn’t worth investing more money into it.
But local officials resisted, even as more public housing was being built in more desirable locations.
“I have a problem as a taxpayer bulldozing [a] brick building in perfectly good condition,” then housing authority commission chairman Robert L. Serra said in December 1996.
KCK announced a plan in the early 2000s to demolish 125 of the units and upgrade the rest. HUD agreed to continue subsidizing Juniper Gardens and occupancy rates rose.
The area where the demolished 125 units previously stood became gardening plots where refugees learned to grow fruit and vegetables to feed themselves and sell at local farmer’s markets.
But the housing authority felt pressure again from HUD in the spring of 2019 as the department noted a rise in vacancies over a three-year period. This time, the agency was not interested in compromise. Regional HUD officials demanded that the authority begin crafting a plan to close Juniper Gardens for good.
In June 2020, the housing authority notified residents of the possible sale.
“That may have been the linchpin that pulled the whole load down,” said Watkins, who former KCK Mayor Joe Reardon appointed to the housing authority board 10 years ago. “But I would tell you that HUD would have preferred to just bulldoze the whole thing when we knocked down 125 units 15 years ago.”
Watkins said Juniper Gardens’ buildings look something like the housing one might find on a military base, and set off apart from the rest of the community.
“When people were coming back home from the war (WWII) and in need of housing, this was the suitable way to do that. People were willing to live in army-barracks style stuff,” he said. “I think we’re in an 180-degree position today in terms of what creates community and what you need to have for a community to thrive.
“The model for Juniper Gardens is no longer viable.”
Today’s more successful model, he said is when public housing is tucked into regular neighborhoods in the form of duplexes and single-family homes, many if not most of them privately owned and subsidized through the Section 8 program.
Housing authority executive director Tom Scott lays part of the blame for increased vacancies on his predecessor, a man with the same last name but who is not related to him.
Without permission from HUD or the board, Milton Scott forewent rehabbing units at the complex after occupants moved out. The result: no one wanted to rent them. That sent the vacancy rate soaring, Tom Scott said.
Only 140 of the 265 units have people living in them. Milton Scott could not be reached for comment to explain his motives for letting units stay vacant.
But if it was an acknowledgment that it was a waste of money to invest in a public housing project without a future, it was handled improperly, Tom Scott said.
“I was reached out to at the time by a board member, and I said you can’t do that,” Tom Scott said. “That’s inappropriate. You have to have a plan. You can’t just allow the property to deteriorate.”
Where residents will go?
Many residents were under the impression they were being pressured to leave right away.
“They were misinformed,” Tom Scott said. “There’s no way you’re going to find places for 140-plus people in Wyandotte County (quickly).”
Dustin Hare, a co-founder of WyCo Mutual Aid, said there’s been mixed reactions from residents. Some are ready to move on, he said, while others fear they won’t have a place to live.
“It does seem to be an intentional displacement effort in order to get low-income Black people out of there,” Hare said, “and to develop it.”
Hare is also concerned about the lack of an income discrimination law. Kansas and Missouri do not prohibit landlords from discriminating against potential tenants who have vouchers, which help pay for housing. He said he also fears people having to move out of the northeast neighborhood entirely.
The housing authority learned from HUD earlier this year that Juniper Gardens falls under a “required conversion,” and meets a certain size and vacancy requirement, director of contract administration Tony Schulman said.
A HUD spokesperson said in a statement that required conversion means the department has determined the “property is distressed.” Schulman said HUD determines if the development is out of date or obsolete and if the development needs to be removed.
Now the housing authority is waiting for HUD to approve its disposition application. After that is approved — not likely to happen until at least March or April — they will apply for tenant protection vouchers for current Juniper Gardens residents.
Watkins said it will take two years at least to move everyone out of the project.
In August, the housing authority hired a relocation company, CVR Associates, to help the remaining Juniper Gardens residents find places to live in other public housing projects in the metro area, or furnish them with a voucher so they can move into privately owned residences.
In either case, the authority will pay their moving expenses.
CVR senior vice president Mike Eddins said they have held one resident meeting and are still working on meeting with all of the residents. The timeline for the move, Eddins said, is a “moving target.”
Eddins said they will help residents find affordable housing.
“We will make all efforts to ensure that housing is found,” Eddins said. “It’s not a case where anybody is going to end up homeless … in no circumstance am I thinking that anybody is going to be evicted or anything like that.”
Some parts of KCK, particularly areas in and around downtown, have experienced growth in recent years. Over a two-year period ending in 2019, the area saw more than $120 million in investments. And according to the Wyandotte Economic Development Council, business expansion and retention across the county led to $381 million in economic development investments in 2019.
As areas including downtown Kansas City, Missouri, and the Crossroads — a short drive from KCK — deal with high costs, development moves to areas such as downtown KCK.
In 2019, a little more than 20% of people lived below the poverty line in Wyandotte County, according to census data.
Hare called the lack of conversations about what’s happening at Juniper Gardens “baffling and absurd,” especially as people look to the past.
“We look back and we’re shocked and all that we did that to Black people, bulldoze entire neighborhoods to move white people in,” Hare said. “And we’re literally doing it right now as we speak in a democratically-controlled county where Republicans cannot get elected.”
Juniper Gardens is in a census tract that’s made up of 98.5% of people of color. The census tract also has a 58.6% poverty rate.
Ronnie Hill, 21, has lived in Juniper Gardens for two years. Before he moved in, he was experiencing homelessness.
Now, he’s working to create a better life for his three children under age 4. He’s not sad about the move, or worried about where his family will end up.
“My kids don’t need to grow up like, I mean, waking up to gunshots, the sirens ain’t the way I like sleeping,” Hill said. “And they shouldn’t have to.”
Moving on
Once everyone is out, the housing authority will likely put the property up for sale, Schulman said.
Watkins says it is likely to be repurposed for business use, as there is lots of vacant land closer to other residential areas that is more suitable for housing — but no one actually knows what’s going to happen to it.
“I think the ground is probably more valuable to a manufacturer or an industry type of owner than it is to a residential owner,“ Watkins said.
That may be counter to what some members of the community might envision for the land. But while it’s currently zoned for apartments, the Unified Government’s recently completed Northeast Area Master Plan envisions business parks and light industrial as future land uses.
And that area is notably blank on the Historic Northeast Midtown Association’s revitalization map.
An appraisal that HUD required priced the land around $8 million, Tom Scott said — which he found laughable.
“There’s no way,” Tom Scott said. “Nobody’s going to buy that property for that.”
Juniper Garden’s proximity to the Fairfax industrial district, however, could make it attractive to some businesses, Watkins said, but the land’s value to a developer is unknowable and no one is waiting in the wings to swoop in.
Any proceeds from the sale would be plowed back into the housing authority to provide housing for people to live in.
Sitting on her porch on a cold, winter day recently, LaPorte held back tears, comforted by her niece, who was standing in the doorway behind her.
She believes everything happens for a reason. She won’t sit around in disbelief of the pending move. She wants to make a better life for herself and her family. Someday, LaPorte wants to give back.
When she looks at her niece and sees that support, her family around her, LaPorte said she could cry.
The windows of the apartment next door to hers were boarded up with plywood. Down the street, the wind blew over a few trash cans and litter rolled around.
“When they’re taking what you have, that’s hard,” LaPorte said. “We are survivors, and we do not give up.”
Any residents with concerns about relocation can call the hotline number 913-359-8028 or email kckharelocation@cvrassociates.com.
This story was originally published January 16, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
