Shall Martin Luther King Village Apartments be restored, and trigger redevelopment of the Wendell Phillips Neighborhood? Shall it be the the first redevelopment in the new Black Heritage District of Kansas City?

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If you want to read up on the history to date, select here.

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If you want to undertake Tasks by joining the project team (there is work and fees involved), chose here.  

Summary of the Circumstances:

September 14, 2008

1. Monarch Community Improvement Council was the (non profit, community based) general partner of Martin Luther King Village Apartments, a 108 unit senior apartment complex in Kansas City, Missouri, located just south of the historic Jazz District.

2. In keeping with Kansas City's (at the time) advanced leadership in HUD funded social and economic development experimentation to find ways of solving racial injustice, poverty, and blight, MLK Village Apartments was allowed to purchase the assets of the bankrupt Martin Luther King Hospital in 1992.

3. The City's Office of Housing and Community Development had been established to handle the planning, management, disbursement, and allocation of the City's HUD funds. OHDC, from its inception until the late 1990's was headed by a Department Director who reported to the Assistant City Manager for Community and Economic Development, James I. Threatt.

4. Mr. Threatt was uniformly regarded as a highly skilled housing specialist, whose stature was developed and encourage by frequent visits to HUD central and regional offices. In the days when east coast housing academics had a vigorous role to play in the design of national housing policy (see Joint Center of Harvard-MIT for Urban Studies) Mr. Threatt maintained fluid access to the implementation of both competitively bid and sole source grant awards for Kansas City.

5. At the time, the civil rights movement in Kansas City evolved into a power political organization, whose leadership attained and maintained control over east side council positions.

6. In a political arrangement suiting the most important influencers of public and private power in Kansas City, the eastside side political machine was given control over the Community Development Block grant funds, and maintained control over the City's most powerful council Committee, Planning and Zoning.

7. In practice, this meant that projects which were awarded CDBG funds or local subsidies, or state and federal tax credits for housing, could and were decided on political merit, and not on how effectively blight was reduced, poverty eliminated, curbs and sidewalks rebuilt, sewers replaced, polices protection improved, crime reduced, among a few of the objectives of the CDBG program.

8. For reasons which suited this design, the OHCD created an outside non profit agency it called the Housing Development and Information Center (HDCIC). It was headed from its inception by Karl Arterberry, a person whose command of housing regulations was made famous by his ability and willingness to take far more time then was ever necessary to lecture on its arcanity.

Next:

How the $6 million MLK scam works, and who benefits!

copyright, Lawrence Goldblatt, 14 September, 2008