NEIGHBORHOOD LEGAL SUPPORT OF KANSAS CITY

For the last seven years, Neighborhood Legal Support of Kansas City has run a focused community development project in the Lykins Neighborhood in the Historic Northeast District of Kansas City. We have organized over 40 project partners to bring a wide array of resources to the neighborhood to remediate blight. Working with residents, police, City codes inspectors and numerous other partners, we identify blighted and abandoned homes in the neighborhood. We then bring litigation to either require the existing owners of the properties to convert them into good quality homes or to have a rehabber selected by the neighborhood do so. The entire process is focused on empowerment of the neighborhood residents. The residents, for example, chose the focus area and decide which rehabbers will be awarded which properties to develop. Neighborhood residents make all major project decisions. We see our role as empowering neighborhood residents, to the greatest extent possible, to implement their vision for community development in their neighborhood. The project has been successful. Some highlights of the project to date: We have acquired over 50 blighted properties in the neighborhood for participating rehabbers and builders; we have litigation pending to acquire 30 additional properties; and, we have agreements with 16 additional property owners to rehab their properties themselves. As part of our work, we acquired a one-acre vacant lot on behalf of the Lykins Neighborhood Association and solicited developers to build affordable housing on the lot. As a result of our work, in 2024, Habitat for Humanity agreed to build 8 new, highly affordable houses on the lot and preserve their affordability by placing those houses into a community land trust. The lot is immediately adjacent to a public park that had frequently been used for drug dealing and human trafficking. The project has greatly reduced this criminal activity and having eight occupied, high quality houses adjacent to the park will further discourage criminal activity and encourage healthy use of the park by families and children; Due to the success of the project, we have had to expand our focus area twice. Now the focus area includes the entire Lykins Neighborhood, and, as of the end of November 2022, we had litigation pending to acquire all remaining blighted and abandoned houses in the neighborhood. Indeed, we now have a bounty program in which if any neighborhood resident can find a property in Lykins that is blighted and abandoned and not part of the project, we will pay them $100; Violent crime in Lykins is down by more than 20% in the last three years. Although there are numerous causes of this, we believe that the substantial reduction of blight in the neighborhood is one of the primary causes; and, In 2020, the American Planners Association recognized the Lykins Focused Community Development Project as the Outstanding Community Planning Initiative for 2020 for the State of Missouri.