Little Blight Lies

Think of blight, and you probably think of poverty and crime and broken windows and raw plywood siding and cats with no collars and dogs with no manners. You think of empty lots with large slabs of broken concrete and weeds that cause hay fever. You think of dictionary definitions -- of "deteriorating conditions" and "injury marked by withering."

And when someone says the Country Club Plaza is susceptible to blight, your reaction falls somewhere between amusement and anger. Of all places, you ask, the Plaza? It vexes you. Blight? Only slums have blight, and only slumlords profit from it.

But you're wrong, so terribly, terribly wrong. Blight is everywhere, and that's not necessarily bad. Everyone can benefit from blight: investors, cities, laborers, lawyers, taxpayers.

Everyone except Paul Nickols.

It's 1993, and Nickols sits in a boardroom in downtown Kansas City for a hearing, but it feels like a mugging -- one with no gun, no stickup and no panty-hose masks. In fact, the host is a Kansas City government agency, something called the Planned Industrial Expansion Authority.

At this hearing, the PIEA is taking away Nickols' land and handing it over to an Ohio company because the property is in the West Bottoms and is therefore blighted, end of story.

Blighted? After the work he'd done to the property since 1982? That's when Nickols branched off from his father's West Bottoms business, a massive warehouse of restaurant and bar supplies. Nickols had shopped around before borrowing $200,000, and soon he owned a little corner just across the street from Kemper Arena.

He cleaned out the building and attracted tenants. Some bands rented units for $350 a month for rehearsals. The third-floor went for $750 a month. The guy who peddled popcorn during the Big-8 basketball tournaments moved in and paid $500 a month for his space.

Nickols made a go of it, but more than half of his monthly gross went toward paying off the loan. A chunk of the rest went back into the property. Furnaces. Boilers. Paint. Windows. Gravel for the parking lot.

Then a real estate agent paid a visit and told Nickols "someone" wanted to buy him out for $60,000. Nickols said no.

Later, the offer jumped to $140,000. Still no.

Nickols received a letter from the PIEA. He learned that in 1976, the city had declared the West Bottoms blighted, which gave the PIEA power to condemn and sell any land therein to a new developer. Nickols needed to write a development plan, and he had to hurry because that Ohio company had already filed a plan for Nickols' property.

Cincinnati-based JBC & Associates wanted to build a country-themed restaurant and a boutique hotel beside Kemper Arena. The PIEA gave Nickols one month to come up with something better.

Now, Nickols sits in the boardroom. He hears JBC present its case for his property. He cringes when committee member Ed Drake accuses him of doing nothing with it for ten years.

Nickols wants more time to draw up a development plan, but the committee says he had just as much time as JBC. Bullshit, he thinks. Hope flickers when committee member Ron Posey agrees with Nickols: Obviously, JBC's real estate agent had ideas for the property when he'd made the original offer months before.

But more time for Nickols would mean more work for the PIEA staff, so the committee takes mercy and votes. Posey abstains. The seven remaining committee members unanimously give Nickols' development rights to JBC.

Of course, the U.S. Constitution requires the PIEA to pay Nickols something, so it condemns the parcel and offers $140,000. Disgusted, Nickols ignores the offer and stops paying property taxes in protest.

Then disaster strikes. The bank that holds Nickols' note goes belly-up. His loan on the now-condemned property suddenly belongs to a bank that wants the entire balance, which is secured by a mortgage on his house. Nickols can't get a loan on the condemned property and can't pay off the old loan. The bank says, "Fine. We'll take your home." And suddenly Nickols has no property, no condemnation payment from the city and no house.

He moves in with his parents. He works in his father's West Bottoms warehouse. Every so often, he leaves work in the evening and starts driving toward Midtown. He damn near gets to his house before he realizes: I don't have a house.

It eats at him constantly. "I think about it every day," he says later. "It pisses me off every day."

So now you feel sorry for Paul Nickols. But it's time for you to embrace reality: For Kansas City to prosper, to stay competitive, just about anything standing above-ground can be considered blighted. Anything built before the 1970s is old. Even that struggling mall that's younger than a college graduate, the one with cracked parking lots on Bannister Road -- even that's blighted.

This definition of blight has been fifty years in the making. As early as 1954, the Supreme Court let Washington, D.C., take a clean, well-lighted department store from its owner to clean up other people's blight surrounding the store. That same year, the Missouri Supreme Court let Kansas City condemn four blocks of downtown, including the 38-year-old Kay Hotel at Ninth and Main, which plaintiffs opposing the city called a safe and sanitary building "of sound brick construction." Twice in the following decades, the state Supreme Court rejected arguments that Kansas City was condemning the wrong properties for blight.