Protesters Catherine Hayes and Rick Fisher hold signs outside the Kansas City Life Insurance Co. headquarters at a twice-weekly protest (Josh Merchant/The Beacon).
Dozens of homes and businesses on four blocks of the Valentine neighborhood have been razed over the past 120 years, demolished one by one from 80 at its peak in 1909 to 30 at the beginning of this year.
As 2024 comes to a close, only eight still stand in the area bordered by 33rd and 35th streets, Southwest Trafficway and Pennsylvania Avenue.
“It’s like a wasteland,” said Catherine Hayes, a Valentine resident for the past 40 years.
Her daughter, Sarah Hayes, was born in the neighborhood and finds it surreal to see the four blocks of her neighborhood nearly emptied.
“I walk down there every single day in the summer,” she said. “Those people are gone. Those places are gone. There’s no getting them back.”
After Kansas City Life Insurance Co. announced in September that it would demolish two dozen homes in the Valentine neighborhood, neighbors have gathered twice a week for the past month in small groups ranging from two to 10 people in front of the KC Life headquarters.
They hold signs saying, “KC Life Insurance kills homes” and “Honk if you hate the demo.”
“They board (the houses) up and let them sit there and fall apart,” said Chris Jordan, the development chair for the Valentine Neighborhood Association. “And then they decide that they’re going to tear them down because they’re in bad shape.”
The company, meanwhile, contends it’s determined to improve the neighborhood.
“By removing these vacant structures,” it said in an emailed statement, “we are laying the groundwork to redevelop this property in a manner that meets the needs of our City.”
A KC Life spokesperson said in the statement that the company plans to develop the vacant lots with a mixed-use and residential project. But it declined to share additional details about the scope, timing or financing for anything on the empty lots.
In that vacuum of detail, neighbors of KC Life have become increasingly frustrated about demolitions on the lots around them and how little they know, or can influence, the transformation of the neighborhood that some of them have called home for decades.
“We don’t want to see any more houses torn down without a plan in place,” Jordan said.
Valentine’s strained relationship with Kansas City Life Insurance
Resentment towards Kansas City Life Insurance is in the Valentine Neighborhood Association’s DNA.
The insurance company began buying properties behind its headquarters at 3520 Broadway in the 1960s. KC Life was one of six corporate sponsors of the Penn Valley Redevelopment Project in 1971, which would have cleared eight blocks of existing homes and businesses for an office park and higher-density housing. The plan included a 23-story headquarters for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, another corporate sponsor of the project.
“That is when the neighborhood association came together and said, ‘You’re not forcing us out. We want to stay in our homes,’” Jordan said.
In 1997, a segment of 36th Street, one block from KC Life’s headquarters, was designated Joe Cigas Drive after the man who founded the neighborhood association in opposition to the redevelopment project and unsuccessfully sued KC Life in 1972.
Tensions flared up again in 2020, when KC Life demolished the Knickerbocker Apartments, a century-old apartment building that was on the National Register of Historic Places.
It had been held vacant for 18 years when KC Life determined that a fire had made the building unsalvageable.
What’s next for the Valentine neighborhood?
The Valentine Neighborhood Association was verbally told by Kansas City Life Insurance in September that all but two of the company’s properties north of 35th Street would be demolished, Jordan said. That leaves two small apartment buildings and a single-family rental up for possible demolition in the future. All three buildings are occupied.
Kansas City Life Insurance would not confirm the number of properties that it plans to demolish and redevelop, nor any of the addresses that will be demolished in the future.
“While the plans and the timing of what’s ahead are not ready to be shared publicly,” said a spokesperson for KC Life in an email statement, “we can share that any development plans will be timely and complimentary to the needs of the neighborhood, including residential and mixed-use.”
KC Life has not started moving its plans through the city development process, according to Councilman Crispin Rea, who represents Kansas City’s 4th District at-large.
After being notified on Sept. 11 that KC Life would be demolishing 23 lots, the neighborhood association sent the company a letter two weeks later asking them not to demolish anything until they could present a plan.
“They sent a reply (a month later) saying, ‘We don’t have a plan (to show you), and we’re tearing them all down,’” Jordan said. “That was the communication. And I’m not sure that they’ve communicated with us since, as a board.”
KC Life has owned many of these properties for decades since the original development plan was shot down in 1971. And in the years since then, the company’s neighbors have grown anxious watching homes disappear without anything being built in their place.
“We’ve heard that before,” Jordan said. “‘We can’t really show it to you, but we have a plan.’ But nothing happens, and in the meantime, you lose housing.”
The neighborhood association is exploring turning Valentine into a historic district, like Old Hyde Park or Roanoke, to slow down the KC Life demolitions.
Today, a property can be demolished within a couple of days. But even starting the process for creating a historic district would create a temporary stay on demolitions until a decision is made on the application.
If the historic district is approved by City Council, demolitions will require the review of the Historic Preservation Office.
The trouble with vacant lots
Valentine isn’t the only neighborhood that’s struggling to deal with vacant lots.
In Kansas City, almost one in 10 properties sits vacant. In the city’s 3rd District, it’s nearly one in four.
Property owners can save money on property tax bills by leaving lots empty — if they’re willing to skip the possible profits by building something on the land. If a developer ultimately purchases the empty lots, they can stand to turn a profit.
But city leaders, including Mayor Quinton Lucas, don’t think that property owners across the city should be rewarded for keeping their land undeveloped.
“What that waiting means is often a generation of people, of kids, of families, are dealing with this substantial blight in their community,” he said.
The mayor said the Valentine neighborhood has suffered from having so many vacant lots.
“We don’t need more dead blocks in Kansas City,” Lucas said, “whether that’s in Midtown or whether that’s on Prospect.”
Rea grew up in a different neighborhood, but his home was the only occupied house among seven on one side of the street.
“It’s scary to live in a neighborhood with a lot of vacant property,” he said. “It makes the neighborhood less safe, it makes the neighborhood less clean.”
The cost of vacant lots
Kansas City is exploring a few different options to encourage property owners to develop their vacant lots across the city.
Rea said the city should distinguish between someone who might have inherited land and someone who is more clearly hoarding property as a speculative investment.
One possibility is to start levying fees on property owners whose vacant properties cost the city money to maintain.
A 2014 report found that, over five years, Kansas City spent $6.8 million mowing lawns and cleaning trash on vacant lots. (Jordan said Kansas City Life Insurance has kept its properties clean and the grass mowed.)
Those fees could be scaled based on how much money a vacant lot is costing the city to maintain.
A more likely option is taxing vacant land at higher rates than its assessed value. That rate could increase the longer a property is vacant.
To implement a vacant-land tax, Kansas City voters would have to approve it at the ballot box.
In its research on vacant-land policy, Kansas City Hall considered directing that potential revenue to the city’s Brownfields program to help pay for environmental decontamination — which in some cases may be the reason a property isn’t being developed.
Lucas said he’s been dealing with vacant-property owners who have left their neighbors dealing with illegal dumping, rats and fires for years. Usually the owner pays a fine, then does nothing to fix the problem.
“We should be aggressive,” he said. “We should be as aggressive as possible. … We have tolerated it in Kansas City for far too long.”
Demolition delay ordinance to be discussed by City Council
Kansas City Council is considering an ordinance that would add further delays to certain demolition permits.
The ordinance, which was recommended for approval by the Neighborhood Planning and Development committee, would give the Historic Preservation Commission 45 days to review a demolition proposal before it can move forward.
The new restrictions carve out an exception for buildings that are newer than 50 years old and for buildings that the city has deemed dangerous.
This article first appeared on Beacon: Kansas City and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.