This article is part of a two-part package that includes. “A Wichita man’s tale of two family homes reveals unexpected barriers to saving older houses in 67214”
By Janelle O’Dea and P.J. Griekspoor
Just over half of all demolitions in Wichita and Sedgwick County in the last decade were of single-family homes. Of those, nearly a quarter occurred in ZIP code 67214.
The area had the most single-family demolitions of any other ZIP code over the last decade. The population there is majority Black and majority Hispanic.
Parts of all six ZIP codes in Wichita’s urban core, including much of 67214, touch areas that were formerly redlined. “Redlining” refers to a practice adopted by the Homeowners Loan Corp., a government-sponsored corporation born out of the Great Depression. Almost a century ago, the practice was used to categorize neighborhoods according to how secure the area was for mortgaging.
Those areas graded as the least-desirable were shaded in red on the maps, leading to use of the term “redlined.”
“HOLC did not invent redlining, as life insurance companies previously discriminated in this way, nor did HOLC circulate its maps beyond a small group of government officials,” according to On The Line, a book by Trinity College professor Jack Dougherty, who works with students and community partners to analyze the relationship between schooling and housing in the city and suburbs of Hartford, Connecticut.
Though the corporation’s maps did not cause redlining, they reflect the racist and elitist perspectives of the federal officials who created them, the book says, and the vestiges of the maps and the perspectives they reflect remain today.
In 1937, 64% of the city of Wichita was redlined by those maps. That made it the third-most redlined city in the country.
Redlining contributed to generational wealth gaps that still plague Black Americans. Even today, in areas that were previously redlined, it can be a struggle for residents to secure loans, including for refinance or renovation.
Redlining is often misunderstood, and it’s not the only indicator of inequality. The maps were made in the 1930s and 1940s, and capture the houses built at that time. Naturally, some are in distress almost a century later, said Eric Seymour, a professor and researcher at Rutgers University who studies housing and neighborhood dynamics. Seymour was most recently a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University’s Population Studies and Training Center, where he worked on the spatial demography of urban population loss.
The median house size today is 2,300 square feet. The smaller houses built decades ago may not be what most families today desire.
“Redlining, broadly understood and not limited to the use of HOLC maps, is an important but partial part of the story, one that has shaped continuing processes of racialized disinvestment and marginalization,” Seymour said of the demolition trend in Wichita.
Places for People
The term “redlining” does appear in vision documents from 2021 outlining the Places for People plan, which drives the city of Wichita’s urban infill strategy. Maps outlining “formative neighborhoods” for reinvestment roughly track with historical redlining maps.
The plan was adopted into the Wichita-Sedgwick County comprehensive plan in 2019. Places for People includes starting a city land bank, devoting more resources to “ridding neighborhoods of dangerous and unsafe structures,” putting $5 million into an affordable housing trust fund and approving a pilot program for special assessments.
As a part of the fund, the city opened applications for up to $40,000 to use on rehabbing housing in northeast Wichita.
And redevelopment is happening.
In the time between the Places for People plan’s adoption and last year, 77 new single-family homes were built in the area — still less than 2% of all new homes built in Sedgwick County in the same time frame.
Wichita Habitat for Humanity has completed and sold 104 homes in the area since within the last decade. Wichita Habitat started the “Rock the Block” program to build infill houses in the A. Price Woodard neighborhood, and dedicated three more homes, known as the Air Capital Build, in August. One home that is a part of the Women Build initiative is near the closing process as well, said Quang Nguyen, marketing and communications manager for Wichita Habitat.
Nyugen said Habitat has two more homes that are nearing completion, totaling 110 homes in the area over the last decade.
“This number only consists of what was part of our Rock the Block efforts since 2014 and may not include the rest of 67214 or homes built before 2014,” he said. “It also does not include our rehabilitation or recycling efforts.”
Construction in the A. Price Woodard neighborhood is now paused temporarily, and Habitat is focusing on new construction in “Rock the Block #211” and “Rock the Block #213, designated based on ZIP codes.
As a non-profit, Wichita Habitat qualifies for subsidies to help get owners into the homes for less than the market value of their new homes. Even at the discounted price, the purchase price for new homes can have the impact of raising values across the board in the area.
“That means more taxes for existing homeowners but it also means they can realize a profit if they want to sell their home,” Nguyen said.
Mennonite Housing, another non-profit organization, built 10 infill homes last year, all of them in 67214, utilizing the city’s “Home 80” program. Mennonite has more recently concentrated its efforts on managing rental properties owned by the city.
“At one time, we would buy a lot with a condemned structure on it and demolish and rebuild,” said Mennonite spokeswoman Julie Smith. “We stopped doing that as costs went up. We only built on vacant lots last year.”
Wichita City Council passed fee waivers in May, which may make it easier for developers of low-income housing to obtain federal and state money through the low-income housing tax credit. A review of one low-income housing tax credit program in Kansas over seven years “reveals that of the 85 projects awarded, only four were in Wichita,” according to council agenda documents.
No link between demolition and redevelopment
While urban infill is a strategy for redevelopment, city officials say demolitions are not “considered for use as part of a redevelopment process, strategy or incentive.”
“Emphasis from city council and city leadership has very clearly been on saving and rehabilitating structures into affordable housing whenever possible,” city spokeswoman Megan Lovely said in an emailed statement. “City council has also placed an emphasis on mitigating dangerous conditions and combating blight in our neighborhoods when seeking voluntary compliance proves ineffective.”
Academic research bears out that cities cannot demolish their way to renewal. RJ Koscielniak is an assistant professor at Eastern Michigan University who studies demolition and urban decline. Koscielniak published his dissertation on the Detroit Demolition Program, which has razed thousands of properties in response to blight and population decline.
“There’s a notion that a blighted building is an impairment to development,” Koscielniak said in an interview. “If you demolish buildings, development will come. But that hasn’t really happened.”
In his dissertation, Koscielniak writes that “even with elevated interest in the market potential for depopulated or declining neighborhoods, demolished properties are often scattered and difficult to assemble in schemes attractive to developers and investors.”
In his study of thousands of demolitions in Detroit between 2013 and 2020, he found only one, 20576 Syracuse Avenue, was sold to a developer. Bernard Butris purchased the lot for just under $14,000 and asked for a downgrade in zoning, which was approved. Now it’s a parking lot for the Flavors Detroit dispensary owned by Butris.
The city of Wichita made clear in an emailed response that the majority of demolitions completed are initiated by private interests, and that any efforts to focus work in a specific area of the city are a result of requests and complaints from neighbors and neighborhoods.
For people who have been able to move into new houses in the area, the impact of redevelopment there has provided happy endings.
‘“Houses are much better than empty lots,” said Jesus Martinez, who lives on North Green Street in a Wichita Habitat house he purchased. “I’m happy to have my house and happy for the other people who get the same chance.”
But real estate investor William Vann doesn’t like to see houses torn down if they could be affordably rehabbed. He’s also built a couple of new duplexes and said he knows first-hand how much more expensive that is.
“I hate to see us lose inventory of houses that are really affordable to the young people who want to stay in this neighborhood,” he said. “A lot of the houses we’re talking about are fairly small and many of them are overall pretty sound.”
Over on North Grove Street, Brandy Richardson lives in an older home she bought several years ago.
Richardson works at Spirit AeroSystems and has three children ages 21, 15 and 10. The youngest, Ki’Moni, said she hopes the new families who move in will have kids for her to play with.
Early signs of construction are visible on two vacant lots directly across the street from Richardson’s home. She said she thinks the new construction is making the area look better, but she hasn’t seen much change overall.
“There are still a lot of vacant lots,” she said.
Janelle O’Dea is an investigative data journalist based in St. Louis. She previously worked for the Center for Public Integrity, and after the Center laid off all staff earlier this year, O’Dea opted to finish the project with the Wichita Journalism Collaborative as a freelancer. She now works as an investigative reporter for the Illinois Answers project, the nonprofit newsroom arm of the Better Government Association. O’Dea’s data work was funded by the Wichita Foundation, which also funds the Wichita Journalism Collaborative.
P.J. Griekspoor is a semi-retired journalist now working as a free-lancer. She has a 57-year history as a newspaper reporter, editor and magazine editor, including 18 years at the Wichita Eagle and most recently, 13 years at Kansas Farmer. Her recent work has appeared in The Community Voice and the Kansas Leadership Center Journal.
Selena Favela is a freelance photographer in Wichita. Favela enjoys channeling her natural curiosity into telling stories through photojournalism. She regularly finds herself learning something new and unexpected while on assignment. In her free time Favela loves to garden and listen to crime podcasts.