He's The Scrap Man

When most people in Kansas City think of Troost, they think blight.

People who live around Troost think about Tom Wright.

Greg Hooper moved to 4232 Troost in May 2002, lured by cheap property and one building's Spanish-style architecture. He planned to refinish the old plumbing-supply house, making it a model he could show to potential clients for his building-renovation business, Brass Ring Restorations. When he arrived, Hooper says, he found a truck with a trailer full of scrapped cars parked at his doorstep. A motorcade of stripped vehicles dotted the curbside to the end of the block.

Hooper walked across the street to a mechanic's yard, where he met the owner of the run-down property, a soft-spoken, gray-bearded man named Tom Wright.

"It's not my business to get in the middle of your business -- you've been here longer," Hooper said. "But could you get your shit out of the front of my building?" Wright moved the clunkers, but, Hooper says, they eventually migrated back.

A few weeks later, a tow truck rolled loose from the lot, barreling backward through four lanes of traffic and smashing into a 4-inch steel post just outside Hooper's building. The impact shook the house, creating cracks that run like stair steps along the north wall.

One Saturday in July 2002, Hooper was sitting in an oversized chair on the second floor of his two-story building, surfing channels on his television, surrounded by white wall-to-wall carpeting. On the first floor, raised two-by-fours outlined places where the walls had been stripped.

From his window, Hooper could look across the street and see a 20-foot tall humpbacked building with a partly sunken roof, bordered by smashed-up cars. Grease-smeared men stepped past scattered engine blocks, ripped couches and junked appliances baking in the heat.

Watching the screen in front of him that Saturday two years ago, Hooper was flipping between World's Greatest Police Chases on one channel and World's Greatest Natural Disasters on another. He didn't see a man stride out of Wright's mechanic's yard and pour gasoline across the interior of the man's own late-model Chevy, parked outside Hooper's office. But he says he saw Wright and heard yelling. Then the man stepped back, struck a match and set the car on fire.

Since then, Hooper's annoyances with Wright's businesses have been less dramatic -- like the time one of Wright's mechanics knocked on his door with a 5-gallon jug, asking if he could collect water to flush their shop toilet.

Hooper eventually contacted City Hall to complain about Wright. City officials organized a meeting with neighborhood activists. They learned how much property Wright owned along the infamous avenue -- and how Wright had been dodging property codes and zoning violations. They also discovered that he had unpaid real estate taxes dating back almost fifteen years.

"He played the system inside and out, to the point where he could get away with anything," Hooper says.

Pockets of revitalization along Troost -- especially in the few blocks directly north of Emanuel Cleaver II Boulevard -- show that people are investing in the area again ("Troost Colors," April 17). Meanwhile, Wright has spent years stalling on cleanup orders and avoiding paying property taxes.

Jim Jackson, who has lived near 44th and Troost since 1977, says he's seen broken cars sit on Wright's lots for six months at a time. Ron McCabe, who moved in near 45th Street in 1979, says the properties look like dumps and operate as salvage yards.

The same year McCabe moved in, Dona Boley, who worked as a chemist collecting samples of gas and fuel for Williams Pipeline Company in the Fairfax District, and her husband, a high school English teacher and track coach at Shawnee Mission East, bought a two-story Arts and Crafts-style home at 3521 Harrison Street, a block of 1900-era homes just west of Troost. The Boleys' home had been split into rental space for thirteen tenants. They gutted the kitchen, put in a shower and built a two-car garage. Over the years, they'd make many more repairs.

Today, Boley says, her neighborhood has "come the furthest of any historic neighborhood north of the Plaza." Wright, though, has "stymied improvement and development along Troost," she says. New stores, like Walgreens and Osco, would stretch much farther north if it weren't for Wright, Boley says.

Like Boley, Wright invested in the area more than twenty years ago. One of Wright's former partners says Wright, too, saw enormous potential for the land.

Terry Young says he met Wright in the early '80s. Young was working at a manufacturing plant where Wright would come in to buy auto parts. Young remembers that Wright was full of energy and ideas about starting a business. Together the duo quit their jobs and joined other speculators who were grabbing land along Troost.

They targeted the 4000 blocks, a retail district commercially zoned to allow everything from bars and cocktail lounges to small auto dealerships, car washes and drive-through restaurants.

"The value per square foot was really down because of drugs," Young says. "We thought it would be really valuable property someday."

In 1983, Young says he and Wright bought three buildings on the 4200 block of Troost for $75,000 and spent more than $10,000 reroofing and remodeling them. They bought a bar on the 4400 block and kicked out the renters, installed central air and new carpet, and leased it to a Baptist church. They snatched up office space at 4536 and rehabbed it with walnut paneling.