After five years, Kansas City concrete house remains an empty ‘eyesore.’ Neighbors upset
More than 30,000 drivers headed toward or away from downtown pass by it every day.
There it sits: the empty carcass of a two-story, unfinished, gray concrete house just west of Southwest Trafficway that one neighbor, Jerry Roseburrough, said looks more like a military bunker than a home.
“If I was a veteran of World War II, it would bother me looking at that,” he said.
Gloria Ortiz-Fisher, who runs the low-income Signal Hill Townhomes complex next door for the Westside Housing Organization, called it “a hunka, hunka cement going nowhere, doing nothing.”
On Feb. 1, 2017, Kansas City approved a permit for a single family home to be built at 2922 Summit St., with a second floor deck that, if built, would have had a view of downtown. But five years on, West Side neighbors — including those who have complained to the city’s 311 action line — insist that the only view is theirs: of an abandoned “eyesore.”
Weeds continually overgrow the lot. No new construction has been done for years. City records show that three years’ worth of property taxes — 2019, 2020 and 2021 — have gone unpaid by the owner. The bill, with penalties, amounts to $2,158.
“It makes it a blighted area,” said Anna Roseburrough, Jerry’s wife and secretary of the Sacred Heart Homes Association.
The Sacred Heart neighborhood is part of the city’s historic Hispanic West Side. Like other areas close to downtown, the West Side has been changing rapidly, with the construction of modern homes and townhouses. A development of 48 shipping container apartments is under construction at the top of Signal Hill, a project that the neighborhood association objected to, but failed to stop. The project was advancing this week. Some two dozen containers are stacked. Windows are being installed.
The presence of the boarded “house” — actually just the poured concrete walls of the structure, or what Ortiz-Fisher calls “that big concrete mess” — predates much of that. The neighbors insist that it’s existed far too long.
“Somebody’s got to do something,” Ortiz-Fisher said. “We’ve never known of anything that’s been allowed to go (unattended) this long without something happening. It’s beyond me.
“I get regular communication from the city on weeds, like if they are three feet or taller. But we have this big, cement block thing that’s been sitting there for years ... and nobody does anything. I don’t get it.”
Since 2018, the property has been owned, city records show, by Shannon Maples, the son of the late Billy Lee Maples, who died in October 2020 at age 89. In 1955, the elder Maples founded a family business, Mid State Forms in Smithville, that works, fittingly, in concrete.
His son is now president of the company. Reached by telephone, Maples was kind, although seemingly half-embarrassed to talk about the property that, as he said, “has been sitting so long.”
He said he’d much prefer to talk about successful projects they have poured, including a nearly similar building at 16th and Summit streets, west of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts.
“I mean, I’d much rather you write about that one,” Maples said. “It’s finished and looks nice.”
Indeed, the building has a similar profile, except it’s a completed home.
It’s a two-story, block house of stark concrete, with a sliding glass door, narrow horizontal windows across the top, and metal balcony affixed to the second floor. The home was built in 2013, records show. Maples poured the concrete for the owner, listed as Ocean Front LLC, a company registered in Kansas whose mailing address belongs to Tyler Kopp.
Kopp also owns the house next door. He vouched for Maples’ work and expertise.
“Shannon has second generation concrete knowledge,” Kopp said. “He’s versatile. He’s an incredible tradesman.”
Except the home on Signal Hill has hardly turned out the same — so far. Maples said the story of the house is of a project gone sour. He was supposed to build a concrete house for a client. It didn’t work out for reasons Maples opted not to share.
“I don’t want to get into all that,” he said. “We started for somebody else. It just didn’t work out between the parties. I ended up buying the property and, you know, to take it over and finish it.”
Jackson County records list the previous owner, between 2014 and 2018, as Scott McKenna, who now lives in Florida. McKenna bought what was an empty lot for $4,000, the records show. He said, by phone, that his intention was to build a home similar to the one finished near the Performing Arts Center, which he liked, but that the work did not progress as he had hoped and Maples agreed to purchase the property. Records show that in November 2018, Maples bought the property for $100,000.
Since then there’s been all but zero movement, although Maples insists his intentions are different.
“I just want to get that house finished down there, you know?” he said.
Pressed whether it would be a year or longer, maybe two, Maples was noncommittal, but offered an estimate.
“I would say it will be finished in, you know, a year’s time.”
The city of Kansas City and Jackson County have power to do something, although it’s not wielded casually.
In Kansas City, a city spokeswoman noted that the code of ordinances states the city can void a building or house development if there has been no activity on the project after six months.
“However,” Maggie Green, the media relations manager for Kansas City, shared by email, “the City generally does not void a project unless there is a reason. (T)he goal is always to work with people to finish a project they started.”
Jackson County also has recourse. If property taxes remain unpaid for three years, the county has the right to foreclose on a property and sell it at auction for back taxes at the annual delinquent land sale. The sale is held each August on the steps of the county courthouses in Independence and downtown. In practice, however, if owners make a good faith effort to pay at least some of their taxes, the clock is generally pushed back.
After so long, West Side neighbors are dubious that anything will happen with the structure, although they wish it would.
“The guy owns a concrete company,” Jerry Roseburrough said. “If he can build it, he can tear it down.”
They question whether the structure, having stood exposed and open to heat, rain, snow and ice for years, is even structurally sound, or whether it might have to be torn down and rebuilt.
That is hardly a concern, Maples assured. He said it’s “solid concrete,” as strong as any foundation or driveway.
“Oh, no,” he said, “that thing will last,” and he paused, “forever.”
This story was originally published January 21, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
