Some of My Best Friends Are Black

by Tanner Colby

  In 2009, Kansas City snagged a big chunk of federal stimulus funds for the Green Impact Zone, an urban planning initiative to rehabilitate east of Troost with energy-efficient, green technology. The first thing produced by the study was a block-level survey of every lot in the scorched-earth path created by blockbusting and redlining. The report shows huge swaths of foreclosures and abandoned houses, tear-downs with rotted roofs and cracked foundations. On some blocks, two-thirds of the houses are gone. That’s what was left of Walt Disney’s America after J. C. Nichols and Bob Wood were done with it.

  Michael Duffy, managing attorney at Legal Aid of Western Missouri, has been working on Kansas City housing issues since the late seventies. “Redlining caused a lot of homes to go into complete inhabitability,” Duffy explains. “There are some neighborhoods where 50 to 60 percent of the original homes have been torn down as being uninhabitable. The people who left are the people who could leave, leaving the people who stayed in the crappiest housing. They play musical chairs to stay in the viable houses, and the houses that need credit the most are the ones that get torn down.

  “We spent a lot of time going after banks who literally said that the black area of town was not where they wanted to make loans. ‘We’re not going to do business there, period.’ You look at the lending maps and they made loans all in Johnson County, of course, and in the southwest quarter of Kansas City right up to Troost—just thick with loans—and then at Troost it just fell off to zero.”

  And, once again, the racist embargo on fair lending just sped the growth of predatory lending. In 1993, along came the subprime mortgage industry. “The subprime lenders saw a real opportunity,” Duffy says. “They came in and said, ‘Well, these inner-city black neighborhoods are not being given access to credit. There’s a demand for credit. We’ll supply that demand.’ They started pouring money into the inner city, taking what had been depressed values and inflating them beyond their real value, which led to people getting into debt way over their heads—crappy debt with huge fees, penalties for early payment, kickbacks to brokers, and, of course, these exploding interest rates that would go up, guaranteeing defaults. The fact that we had these redlined neighborhoods deprived of credit for so long left them wide open. The whole subprime lending thing was the final coup de grâce.”

  In the Green Impact Zone’s grim report, only one area stands out. The southwest corner of the zone overlaps with the northeast corner of 49/63: Susan Kurtenbach’s Troostwood. It’s the only area in the report where redlining and blockbusting were stopped, and by every measure nearly all of the homes in Troostwood are top-notch. Solid roofs, good foundations, almost no foreclosures. Whatever else 49/63 did, they saved the houses. With that, the work of rebuilding the neighborhood could begin.

  Cue the lesbians.

  “Troostwood made it through the lesbian pipeline and they jumped all over it and the word spread fast,” says neighborhood resident Calvin Williford. “A lot of lesbians moved in—so many that they could host an Ellen coming-out episode party in 1997, which was very unusual for Kansas City, east of Troost.”

  In addition to being a Troostwood resident, Calvin Williford works in the Kansas City government as chief of Intergovernmental Operations and Communications. Formerly a closeted gay, alcoholic black Republican, today he’s an openly gay, sober black Independent. “Coming from California,” he says, “I had landed in Olathe, Kansas, where my sister and my mother were. After a while I looked around and realized that I lived in the Wonder Bread factory. Everybody was white. Wonderful people, but I wanted to see some people with purple hair and earrings. Give me something, you know?”

  Williford found that something the first time he visited Troostwood—for an Ellen coming-out episode party in 1997. Taken with the area’s diversity and its affordable housing, he decided to buy in and adjust to the hardships of living east of Troost. “Still to this day,” he says, “I call for pizza and they won’t deliver.”

  Around that same time, architect Josh Hamm and his partner, David Meinhold, moved here from Atlanta and bought a six-bedroom, 4,000-square-foot Victorian, one of the larger homes in the area, for just $128,000. “It would have gone in the mid-two’s across the street,” Meinhold says, meaning across Troost.

  “Real estate agents wouldn’t even show us anything east of Troost,” Hamm adds. “We saw the listing and had to ask to see the house. We went and looked at it and thought, Well, there’s nothing wrong with this neighborhood.” Being from out of town, Hamm and Meinhold had no idea what Troost Avenue was; they learned the history of it only after the fact. “It’s amazing that that idea still persists fifty years later,” Hamm says, “but it does.”

  Now living in a bungalow in Troost Plateau, Hamm and Meinhold have bought, renovated, and sold ten houses in the area. One of those homes was sold to Jason Peters and his partner, Eric, a younger couple who’d moved up from St. Louis in the mid-2000s. “The same day we came to look at the house,” Peters tells me, “one of the neighbors that lived down the street came up and we talked for the better part of an hour, and I’m thinking, Here’s a man that we’ve never even met and we haven’t even been in the neighborhood for a day and they’re already approaching us and talking to us. We just got a good vibe.”

  Today, Jason Peters, David Meinhold, and Josh Hamm are all on the board of 49/63. Peters is the president of the Troostwood Association; Meinhold is president of Troost Plateau Association. Hamm runs the 49/63 newsletter and, as of very recently, the new 49/63 Facebook group.

  From the lesbians came the gays. From the gays came beautifully renovated homes. And with homes came renewal. Baby strollers, not seen in the neighborhood for years, now roll up and down the sidewalks once again. Black and white, young families with children have returned.

  Today, Troostwood and Troost Plateau are drawing those families in spite of the two biggest obstacles any neighborhood can have: dismal schools and the fear of crime. And while no one can argue about the state of the schools, the fact is that crime in these neighborhoods is almost indistinguishable from neighborhoods to the west. Statistically, you’re just as likely to get mugged at the Country Club Plaza as you are here. People just think it’s less safe, because it’s east of Troost.

  “The crime level is the same,” Josh Hamm sighs, “but the perception is that this is not a safe neighborhood—drives me crazy. We have a good friend who lives at the 5700 block of Harrison, about four or five blocks west, and she always asks if we’re safe over here. I’m like, ‘It’s four blocks. How is it any different?!’”

  Hamm is right about Troost Plateau. It’s not so different. But he’s wrong about the four blocks. Four blocks can make all the difference in the world. Go four more blocks east, across Paseo, and you’ll be getting your mail addressed to 64130. The Murder Factory is just next door, in Blue Hills.

  By the time Bob Wood and his colleagues were done with Blue Hills, it was shot through with more than three hundred vacant houses. Standing in the middle of that wreckage was Father Norman Roetert at St. Therese of the Little Flower. Roetert realized that saving his parish would require him to be more than your typical man of the cloth. So he sent himself to night school in real estate. He passed his boards, got a broker’s license, and would spend the next thirty years fighting to pull his community back from the brink. Is he a priest with a broker’s license or a broker in a priest’s collar? To hear him reel off HUD statistics, it’s hard to tell. But given Roetert’s experience, I figured he would be best able to answer the very simple question that eighty years of federal housing policy has utterly failed to grasp: what makes a neighborhood a neighborhood?

  “Relationships,” he said. “Relationships make a neighborhood, to a very great degree.”

  It’s no coincidence that Kansas City’s Murder Factory sits right in the scorched-earth path of blockbusting. Black families that moved into Blue Hills thought they were buying their way out of the ghetto, but they were really buying into a different kind of ghetto. O
ne that, by some measures, was worse. Eighteenth and Vine, for all its ills, was a community. It grew naturally out of families and social networks that migrated west and built churches and schools. But the black tenants being randomly shuffled into these blockbusted zones weren’t joining communities. They were buying into neighborhoods that were no longer neighborhoods, where the social fabric was in tatters.

  “We had a flood of new people into Blue Hills,” Roetert says. “They didn’t know each other. Some of them did, had previous connections in the African-American community, but surprisingly a lot of them did not. And they had no institutions. They didn’t belong to our churches; they were still going to their churches back north. Their kids were being sent to schools all across town, and so for a long time there was nothing to pull the community together. It became clear to us early on that we could rebuild every single house in the neighborhood and we still wouldn’t have rebuilt the neighborhood.”

  Four blocks over, relationships are the very thing keeping 49/63 viable. Starting in the early nineties, one of the area’s first new residents was Ruth Austin. Older and semiretired, Austin, who is white, was looking in the area for investment properties. “I was going to be an absentee landlord,” she says. Instead, she decided she liked the place, got involved with the coalition, and signed on to head its new COMBAT program, part of a new county-funded effort to root out drug-related crime.

  According to neighborhood legend, Austin was like a one-woman SWAT team, sort of Golden Girls meets Miami Vice. “When I was working full-time at this, I knew lots of people in our African-American community,” she says. “And that’s where I got so much information. We were the first neighborhood that worked with the street narcotics and investigative units to do multiple busts on one block. We had five busts one day and two the next, and that was a big deal. And it was hard work.” Austin didn’t limit her social networking to the home owners, either. “I had relationships with a lot of the drug dealers, too—naturally you do when you get to know people,” she explains. “I went behind the cops whenever there was a bust, and I told the dealers, ‘You better stop now, because your name’s on the list.’”

  Working with the police and concerned residents, Austin and 49/63 drove out the worst of the crime, which was the first stage of bringing the neighborhood back. Today, the cops do their part, meeting and coordinating with the coalition every week. But to a large extent the neighborhood looks out for itself. On the 49/63 Facebook page, there’s a posting anytime someone has a break-in or sees something suspicious. Each posting usually generates numerous responses, saying that the authorities have been called or offering a different report on the same thing from across the block.

  Jason Peters’s neighbor Herbert Kelly is one of Troostwood’s older lower-income black residents. One night, Jason tells me, when his partner, Eric, was walking home up their street, two young black men circled up behind him in a car, a drive-by mugging. The passenger jumped out and grabbed Eric on the sidewalk. One neighbor yelled for help from his front porch, and Herbert Kelly came flying out his front door with a shotgun, locked and loaded. Then the old black guy drew a bead on the young black punk and told him to leave the little white gay kid alone.

  Turns out if you want to stop crime, you don’t need a white neighborhood. You just need a functioning one. “We know probably about 80 percent of the people that live on our block,” Peters says. “We all look out for each other. If something happens, I have no problem calling anyone in the circle and they’ll come over and take a look and make sure everything’s okay. It’s that whole mentality people move to the suburbs for, but that doesn’t actually exist. We still have it.”

  But is it integrated? The best proxy anyone’s come up with for integration, still, is “racial balance.” Every ten years the census numbers come out and we haul out the spreadsheets and check to make sure all the black people are in the right place. The borders of 49/63 don’t line up with any of the census tracts where racial balance is tallied. But if you were to eyeball it, Troostwood is about 70–30 white to black, Troost Plateau is about 70–30 the other way, and everything west of Troost is still around 80 percent white. And that varies block by block. Some lean black, some lean white, and some are a mixed bag. So what do those numbers tell you? They tell you nothing. In the aggregate, of course, the numbers are atrocious. Look at the census maps and all you see are big, racially homogenous blobs with little multicultural dots sprinkled here and there. But what do the little dots actually mean? Do the dots like each other? Do they ever hang out and play Scrabble together? How often do the dots rush to each other’s aid with shotguns in the night?

  The real story is inside the dots, and every person’s got a different story to tell. As one of the first blacks in the area, Helen Palmer has been in the same house on Virginia Avenue since the 1960s. She’s close with all the folks up and down her block, black and white alike. “It was a little prejudiced back then,” Palmer says, “but now it’s fantastic. I would rather live in an integrated neighborhood. Most of the people are friendlier. No prejudice at all in the neighborhood and mostly all white, and they are beautiful people.”

  Calvin Williford agrees. He sees diversity, rather than homogeneity, as the thing bringing people together. “In a cul-de-sac in Johnson County,” he says, “you may get to know each other through some process, but by and large the only commonality is that you belong to the same racial group. That would be true in an African-American community or a Latino community. But when you make the choice to move into a multicultural neighborhood, then you are making a conscious decision to become a part of something. By my living there and my having a dog and all of us having front porches, we see each other. It’s just a neighborhood with real people that actually talk to each other and genuinely like each other and occasionally feud over parking.”

  But those are the optimistic voices. Every block in a neighborhood is really its own subneighborhood, a microclimate. Attitudes vary, and not all of them are positive. White home owners living on the well-off, western frontier of 49/63 rarely deign to participate in community affairs; they tend to orient their lives toward the commercial hubs of the Country Club District and probably wouldn’t use “mixed-race neighborhood” as a primary selling point when putting their homes on the market.

  Conversely, many black residents to the east still keep the white-run coalition at arm’s length. Jason Peters recently found himself trying to reach out to an older black woman who had emailed Ruth Austin to complain that college students were littering on her lawn and she “knew it was because she was black.” As the neighborhood group president, Peters says, he wrote back, offered her his phone number, and “assured her that we (Troostwood) would do what we could to resolve this for her.” The woman never contacted him, and never came to a neighborhood meeting. All she did was send another email to Ruth Austin, saying if the littering didn’t stop she was going to contact “a group that helps black folks with issues like these.” The problem went unresolved.

  Decades have gone by and black folks and white folks still can’t manage a constructive conversation about whose dog crapped on the lawn. The present-day 49/63 Coalition (finally) has one black council member, Maryanne Youngblood, and the occasional black volunteer. But overall the group is still persistently, intractably white. “We’ve struggled to get our African-American community to participate in the organization,” Ruth Austin says, “and it’s still a problem. Lots of efforts were made through the years, knocking on doors of people that we knew, because we knew a lot of wonderful people. I would beg them with tears in my eyes, and they’d do anything but come to a meeting.

  “It’s understandable in a sense because cultures are different and interests are different. People that get highly involved in an organization often do it as a social thing. I got involved because I’m really interested in the growth of our city and crime and drugs and other stuff, but on the other hand, it’s social for me, too. And we have two different cultures here tha
t, generally speaking, socialize in different ways. We may be friendly with each other, but those that are going to be actively involved in an organization have different ways they wish to do it.”

  So is it integrated? Yes and no. The point of 49/63 is not that it’s produced some golden mean of racial balance. It hasn’t. It can’t. The point is that the coalition stepped in, restored a sense of order to the marketplace, and provided for the equal protection of residents’ property rights, creating a stable and open environment. Within that, it’s up to the people who live there. They can either form a community or not form a community.

  “My sense is that it’s about choices,” Calvin Williford says. “People are going to gravitate to wherever they gravitate; you’re always going to find clustering. I see government’s role as providing choice and opportunity, making sure that there are no barriers to residential mobility, and that whatever incentives are being granted actually allow people to make choices about where they want to be.” Unfortunately, as Williford has seen though his work in local politics, city hall tends to work just the opposite. It takes choices away. Real communities are fragile, hard to hold together; they ebb and flow with cultural and generational change. That’s not what the people in charge want. Politicians want guaranteed incumbency. They want voting districts with fixed social, racial, and political bearings. Inner-city slumlords want low-income tenants stacked by the square foot to cash in on the easy money of federal housing subsidies. Out in the suburbs, developers want all the high-end, good-credit families clustered, too.

  Today, the J. C. Nichols empire has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the disturbingly named HomeServices of America, Inc., a conglomeration of twenty-some different realty companies covering twenty different states. In the early 1990s, the Walt Disney Company broke ground on its very own town, a suburb of Orlando called “Celebration, Florida,” marketed as “a place that takes you back to that time of innocence.” Just like the Country Club District, Celebration is a suburban dream factory manicured down to the last blade of grass. In the twentieth century, Kansas City produced two true geniuses. In the twenty-first century, the visions of J. C. Nichols and Walt Disney have come full circle and joined. “Neighborhoods” are increasingly “developments,” corporate theme parks. But corporations aren’t interested in the messy ebb and flow of humanity. They want stability and predictable rates of return. And although racial discrimination is no longer a stated policy for real estate brokers and developers, racial and social homogeneity are still firmly embedded in America’s collective idea of stability; that’s what our new corporate landlords are thinking even if they’re not saying it. And as long as black people and white people are still arguing about whose dog crapped on the lawn, why should those companies think any different?