This must happen to restore a once-vibrant KC neighborhood. It’s doable | Opinion
At the risk of being an alarmist, I have to say that knowing poisons and hazardous waste are festering underground in neighborhoods around our city makes me uneasy. I know I’m not the only person disturbed by this, nor should I be.
Knowing there’s contaminated soil filling vacant lots all over residential areas of Kansas City should have everyone who can help city leaders, like 3rd District Councilwoman Melissa Patterson Hazley, cleaning up the mess, raising and waving their hand.
The way I see it, there’s a lot at stake here for Kansas City. Hundreds of old, abandoned homes in the East Side and Northeast neighborhoods have been demolished over decades, and reduced to vacant lots where all sorts of harmful nastiness are buried. In the environmental world, they’re aptly called brownfields, the opposite of fields of green.
Patterson Hazley told me recently that one of the worst cases in her district is a street with two houses on it and seven vacant lots. Is that even a residential street anymore?
Disinvestment in neighborhoods spreads like a virus and eventually infects all of us. We see the population decline in these neighborhoods — nobody wants to live next to a vacant lot or abandoned home.
Abandoned areas are havens for crime. When families are gone, the schools suffer. When no one lives in a residential area, it diminishes the voting block to elect leaders who best support the interests of the surrounding community.
One thing just feeds on the other, while the empty, trash and-poison-filled lots breed more contaminated lots.
Poison in the dirt
The contamination — asbestos, lead, metals dumped into the soil — is caused by the dangerously irresponsible way houses have been allowed to be demolished in these neighborhoods.
Patterson Hazley, in a recent guest column outlining the problem in The Star, talked about how contaminated lots impact the lives of those living in these neighborhoods of mostly Black and brown people. She wrote: “Imagine standing at the bus stop as a kindergartener, then as a middle schooler and again when you turn 17 — and that same vacant parcel is still there. This kind of blight takes a psychological toll in addition to being a hazard to health and safety.”
The 3rd District contains nearly one-fourth of the 17,000 vacant lots in the city.
The Washington-Wheatley neighborhood — which is between 18th and 27th streets, west of Interstate 70 — and the Blue Valley neighborhood — which is between 12th Street and U.S. 40 Highway, east of Van Brunt Boulevard — have some of the largest concentrations of vacant lots in all of Kansas City.
I drove through the area and was taken aback by the sight. On street after street, modest homes are surrounded by empty lots where there used to be houses. Washington-Wheatley was once a vibrant Black community with stores, community centers and some historic structures. The founder of The Call newspaper, Chester Franklin, lived there. So did the paper’s renowned editor, Lucile Bluford, and Reuben and Ella Street, who from the 1920s to the 1950s ran the Blue Room cocktail lounge.
Patterson Hazley said that in parts of her district where much of the housing was built long before the ban of lead-based paints and asbestos in home construction, when a house is deemed a problem parcel — burned out, vandalized, abandoned, neglected or a haven for squatters — “The city’s response is to take it down.” Because that’s a dangerous building.
She said these houses come down with all their innards, including all types of chemical pollutants. Basically, she said, the house just gets dropped into its basement and buried there, as is.
I saw the evidence myself: portions of house foundations peeking out from the dirt and places where nothing is left but the concrete steps, completely intact.
“I’ve heard stories where whole cars were buried in the ground with the house,” the councilwoman said. “The way Kansas City has taken buildings down, they didn’t think about the future. It’s like they didn’t expect anyone to ever come back.”
Patterson Hazley’s executive aide, DJ Yearwood, said during a recent interview: “When people ask why no one is building affordable housing on the East Side of this city, the answer is, because we literally can’t. We can’t build on contaminated soil.”
Millions needed to clear lots
It’s been a barrier for decades, preventing Kansas City leaders from developing the East Side. If developers want to build, they first have to clean up the site. It’s expensive, making what could be affordable housing unacceptably unaffordable.
So to spark development, Patterson Hazley started where she had to: with the dirt.
She secured $6 million in Environmental Protection Agency funding, plus some additional city money to begin cleaning up around 80 contaminated lots in Washington-Wheatley that are part of the city’s land bank. The land bank was started in 2012 to return blighted, vacant or neglected properties into community assets.
But the way houses were being demolished, and the contamination of the soil in the process, doomed any real possibility of these structures ever contributing to the land bank’s intended purpose, because no one could construct affordable homes on those contaminated lots, at least until the infected dirt was mitigated.
Now she’s seeking another $4 million in EPA funding to clear another 115 contaminated lots recently identified in the same neighborhood.
Another 384 lots that have been identified in the Blue Valley neighborhood need testing. Chances are they’re contaminated too, since they were made in the same knock-’em-down-and-leave way as the ones in Washington-Wheatley. Patterson Hazley has also snatched about 30 houses in Kansas City’s Northeast area off the city’s dangerous homes list for renovation and saved from demolition .
The decay of these neighborhoods has been allowed for decades, said Jacob Wagner, a professor of urban planning at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. It’s happened, he said, for several reasons including a lack of political will, a lack of awareness and a misunderstanding of how to solve it.
“What complicates the condition is the politics of race,” Wagner said. We know, because it’s been documented, that Black neighborhoods in the U.S. have historically experienced significant, systematic disinvestment due to discriminatory policies.
A 2008 neighborhood improvement plan, done by UMKC, surveyed every parcel in Washington-Wheatley and found that over five years, Kansas City demolished an average of 115 homes per year within the city limits — part of the KCMO Dangerous Buildings program — and 36% of the demolitions, 42 homes per year or 332 structures in all, occurred in Washington-Wheatley.
At the time, that neighborhood consisted of 95 acres of vacant lots. Those numbers have only increased in the last decade.
We can’t wait another 20 years. By then, those whole neighborhoods could be underground in a stew of hazardous waste.
I am 100% in favor of Patterson Hazley’s vision: Clean up the ground, start building affordable homes and restore rather than destroy abandoned homes that can be saved.
But she needs help, financial and labor — more workers with the skills to remove the hazardous waste for soil remediation. There’s no money to be made in this effort. Just reach out to Patterson Hazley to find out how you can help.
It’s about love of community, love of city and, as Patterson Hazley said: “It’s about restoring human dignity.” And that’s priceless.
