Meet Me In the Middle: Three Days in Kansas City
Last week, I got a chance to attend Small Scale Development Forum (SSDF) #22 in Kansas City, Missouri. SSDF is my favorite real estate-based event of the year, and reflects a growing, largely word-of-mouth cohort of people from all over the country committed to doing development the right way. As founder, Jim Heid, describes it, Building Small “is not about numbers — square feet or dollars. It IS about attitude, perspective and commitment. It is about scale and grain of development. And most of all, it is about using real estate development as the means to the end, rather than the end itself, with the end being more thriving communities, more authentic places, and more locally based economic resilience.”
This was my fourth SSDF and my first time ever visiting Kansas City. It was a packed few days exploring the city, meeting with local developers and entrepreneurs, and sampling some amazing BBQ. Some highlights that are particularly relevant to our work at Graffito:
Cultural Revitalization Through Destination Retail
One of the highlights of the Forum was meeting with the team behind the rehabilitation of the City’s Water and Street Department buildings and their key tenant Vine Street Brewing. The 18th and Vine neighborhood is the City’s historic Black Wall Street and one of the geographic origins of jazz, but over the decades has been subject to redlining and disinvestment. These historic buildings were purchased from the City by a partnership of local entrepreneurs and have become a symbol of locally-driven reinvestment in the area. Particularly of note, the developers were required to move their own businesses into the building as tenants to prove their commitment to their lenders, and each partner (lawyers and designers by trade) self-performed in their own area of expertise to keep costs low. Vine Street Brewing, the anchor tenant, is Missouri’s first Black-owned brewery, and sees its (very good!) beer is only a part of what it offers the community—the space is constantly programmed and is explicitly used as a third place and arts venue by and for the neighborhood, with a particular focus on hip hop and comedy events.
Alternate Structures
As part of our Neighborhood Investments + Partnerships work, we’re experimenting with creative ways to partner on developments themselves, and also for small retail and F+B businesses to participate in the economics of the real estate they lease. In addition to informally reconnecting and building my network with folks from across the country coming up with innovative ideas in this space, it was particularly great to get to see a panel of all-female developers talk specifically about structuring deals to allow tenants to participate in returns, and specifically hear Candace Baitz of Pivot Project talk about the nuances of tenant ownership stakes in their EastPoint development in Oklahoma City, including how their approach has evolved over time and the tools they have developed in the background to make it successful. Pivot’s work has been a significant inspiration for me over the years, and I hope to make it to OKC to see some of it in person sometime soon!
Climate Change
It’s real, folks. And it’s here. I couldn’t help think about our friends and clients working in Western North Carolina as I explored West Bottoms in Kansas City. Historically home to the City’s famed stockyards and a thriving warehouse district, the area was wiped out during the Great Flood of 1951. Today, the area is very evocative – with antique shops, bars, and nightclubs popping up, hulking warehouses, and freight trains rolling by in the background. But how long until the next major flood? Most of Kansas City is on a bluff high above the river from West Bottoms, which still sits down a huge embankment, at rivers edge, where the Kansas and Missouri Rivers meet. Is this going to be the City’s next hottest neighborhood or is it just sitting there waiting for the next major flood to carry it away again? In commercial real estate, how do we best manage growth and investment in areas like this, or do we stay clear of them entirely? These are questions we all should be wrestling with as the climate becomes more and more erratic.
