Home Groan

Jerry Young knows how to get City Hall's attention.

But when it comes to Stan Barrett, the director of the city's Housing and Community Development department, Young might have met his match.

Young, along with many neighbors in Ruskin Heights, has spent years fighting to keep the neighborhood from sliding downhill as absentee landlords took over rental houses and pawnshops replaced hardware stores. As members of the Church Community Organization affiliated with St. Matthew Apostle Church, Young and his neighbors have learned how to show up in force at city meetings and demand that slow-moving bureaucrats get off their butts.

And they've perfected the art of "the action."

That's when they invite public officials to a forum, at which they lay out their problems and extract a promise that the officials will actually do something.

The strategy works. In the '80s, such actions helped create Jackson County's quarter-cent sales tax for drug-prevention programs. In the mid-'90s, another action spurred the city to channel almost $10 million to neighborhood improvement programs. When Young or Church Community Organization leader Phyllis Bahner invites you to an action, you better believe they've done their homework.

Which brings us to October 28, when Young and Bahner, along with 100 residents of Ruskin Heights, held an action inside the wood-paneled basement at St. Matthew's, off Longview Road.

They knew that federal money had been sitting around at City Hall for three years, set aside for rehabbing rundown houses in Ruskin Heights. City staffers had promised that every year, they would use the money to fix up at least three houses, then sell the properties to responsible homeowners. The program might have begun lifting up the entire neighborhood -- had it been working. So far, though, the city had refurbished and resold only one house.

In recent months, the city's Department of Housing and Community Development -- the office in charge of the rehab program -- had been showing signs of life. Contractors were finally getting busy on houses the city had bought more than a year earlier. Young and Bahner planned to acknowledge that officials had picked up the pace -- but they also wanted to urge them to keep going.

They'd invited Mayor Kay Barnes, along with their two city councilmen, Chuck Eddy and Alvin Brooks. But the most important person they expected to show up was Stan Barrett, the head of Housing and Community Development. Barrett's department was the one in charge of the program. The bucks stopped with him.

Young and Bahner set out a chair for him.

Five minutes before the meeting, though, one of Barrett's aides informed the crowd that Barrett wouldn't be attending. Young and Bahner say Barrett's rep offered no explanation. Eddy and Brooks arrived soon after the announcement. Young remembers both councilmen heading upstairs, and he could hear them on their cell phones, insistently trying to find out where Barrett was. "Get him down here," Young heard one of them say. "Find him."

Brooks tells the Pitch that he did call Barrett, who explained that he was home baby-sitting his daughter and would be coming as soon as his wife returned from an evening class. Brooks says he wasn't angry with Barrett.

But those who attended were.

As the meeting began, one of the speakers, Joe Dekat, pointed to Barrett's empty chair and said sarcastically, "If Mr. Barrett was here we would thank him."

Halfway through the meeting, Barrett arrived. He offered an apology about having had to care for his daughter. He promised that the city would hustle to finish rehabbing the homes. That night, the residents wanted promises, which Barrett gave them.

So they gave him a round of applause.

That was in October. By November, their enthusiasm had vanished.

"We get that this is what they promise, and they assure us it has been done. And we are trusting individuals," says St. Matthew's Church Community Organization member Lillie Walker. "Then when you go and find that hasn't been done, I question everything."

Kansas City is pockmarked with depressed neighborhoods. Hardworking people depend on Barrett's department to help them improve the quality of life in parts of town where every little bit makes a big difference.

About $20 million is poured into Barrett's department each year from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The money is supposed to be used for economic development and affordable housing. Much of the money goes directly to the city's dozen or so community-development corporations, or CDCs. These organizations provide social services or build low-cost houses in the city's poorer and working-class neighborhoods; the HUD money pays the salaries of the CDCs' small staffs, who work out of storefronts, houses, modest office buildings -- and even one fire station -- in the northeast, on the West Side and in the east part of town.

The rest of the money that comes through Barrett's department is funneled to a nonprofit agency called the Housing and Economic Development Finance Corporation. Because state law forbids the city from making economic-development loans directly, the HEDFC serves as its lending arm. In turn, the HEDFC also passes on money to CDCs. This money doesn't pay salaries. Instead, the CDCs use it to leverage private dollars to build affordable housing. Technically, the HEDFC isn't a city agency, but Barrett's Department of Housing and Community Development is responsible for monitoring the nonprofit's funding decisions.