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Nothing For Dinner

Al Fleming is in charge of bringing new business to 18th and Vine. But he's inspiring some sour notes.

By T.R. Witcher 

Walk down the streets at 18th and Vine on a warm spring afternoon, and you're supposed to be able to step into a white-tablecloth steak house. Or slide into a booth at a cozy café or a loud bar and grill. Relax at a coffee house. Pick up some fresh vegetables at a grocery store, buy vitamins at a pharmacy, check out movies at a video store, get a facial at a beauty salon or a shave at a barber shop. Drop off your clothes at the dry cleaner. Stop next door for an ice cream cone. Today.

That's what you've been promised by the Jazz District Redevelopment Corporation, the latest nonprofit organization to oversee the district's redevelopment.

In 1998, Al Fleming, the JDRC's executive director, told a reporter that his group was trying to finish the two-block stretch -- from Paseo to Woodland, and from the north side of 18th to the north side of 19th -- in 2000. If you drive by now, a sign greeting you at the corner of 18th and Paseo claims that all the new buildings will be filled with people and buzzing with activity -- by last summer. But the storefronts are vacant. The sign on the block's west end is mangled. Cars pass through on their way to the city's east side; speed bumps slow traffic, but not enough for anyone to actually park and walk around.

This is not a "district" in a real city. This is blink-and-you'll-miss-it. A shame. A joke.

One of the few people on the street one recent afternoon was a homeless man with beautiful brown-hazel eyes wearing a long olive-colored coat. "Think they'll ever bring it back the way it was in the '20s and '30s?" he asks.

If you count the facades installed for Robert Altman's period jazz epic Kansas City, the film director and KC native certainly tried. The so-called historic district is half new construction, half studio backlot and all irony, a fake place that becomes real -- becomes historic -- only if you rent the movie.

Legendary? Not anymore. Kansas City's 18th and Vine can't even be mentioned in the same conversation as Bourbon Street in New Orleans or Beale Street in Memphis. Those cities have capitalized on their histories as influential musical centers -- checking out their sounds is a mandatory part of a trip to either city. Here, even the facades are giving up the ghost. The drywall is cracking. The thin brick veneers are starting to peel off.

Kansas City has dropped more than $20 million on 18th and Vine. An additional $41 million in public and private money is headed into the vortex.

Fleming has been in charge for four years. Part of his organization's budget comes from taxpayers, the rest from loans and grants from foundations. His main responsibility is to find money for building -- then get the properties filled. Yet despite his $110,000 annual salary, not a single store or business has opened with his support.

"What has he done?" asks Marie Young, head of the Black Chamber of Commerce of Greater Kansas City Inc. "Absolutely nothing."

In fact, dozens of entrepreneurs have been stymied in their efforts to open businesses in the heavily subsidized two blocks. Many of them say Fleming makes it nearly impossible for small businesses to come to 18th and Vine. With poor communication and unreasonable leases, he is repelling more businesses than he's attracting.

Fleming says he'd rather turn away business owners than have them "come in and fail, lose all their money." He adds, "I'd still be the bad guy."

From the early '80s to the mid-'90s, the development of the district and its surrounding blocks was in the hands of Sylvester Holmes, executive director of the Black Economic Union. His group drew up the first plans for redeveloping 18th and Vine. But the BEU was largely unable to attract private dollars to the district, and in 1997, then-Mayor Emanuel Cleaver created a new organization, the Jazz District Redevelopment Corporation, to focus on 18th and Vine. (The BEU would continue to lead development efforts in a larger area of Kansas City's east side.)

Cleaver appointed a board of directors, stacking it with heavyweights such as Aquila chairman Richard Green, Blue Cross Blue Shield executive Peter Yelorda (now the chairman of the city's Tax Increment Financing Commission) and United Beverage CEO and former Kansas City Chiefs player Deron Cherry. They selected Fleming to run the organization in 1998. He had led urban redevelopment projects in Newark, New Jersey, and Maui, Hawaii, and had worked as an urban-studies researcher at Rutgers University. His swagger suggests that he is unfazed by the slow timetable in Kansas City.

Fleming doesn't like ultimatums. He says that when he took over a troubled redevelopment project in Marin County, California, in 1986, he had to play hardball with one minority developer who had tried to arrange a sweetheart deal on the project. Fleming gave him a deadline to commit or bail; thinking it was a bluff, the developer threatened to quit the project. Fleming watched him go. Fleming then approached a second minority developer, who turned in what he calls a "stupid" bid and made his own demands on the project. Fleming turned him down, as well.

That project took twelve years, Fleming says, but resulted in 150,000 square feet of commercial space, anchored by Best Buy, Ross Dress for Less, Linens and Things and Long's Drugs, with a child-care center and 355 units of housing. "He got the job done here," says Benny Stewart, the executive director of the Marin City Community Development Corporation. "Three or four months after Al left, we had a packed-to-the-hilt appreciation dinner for him, entitled 'The Dream Builder.'"

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