Volunteer Attorneys Give Marlborough Neighborhood a Bright Future

by Gregg Lombardi, Executive Director

There are times when you have to fight and scratch to make a project work and then, thankfully, there are times when things work out much better than you had even hoped.

Steve Chinn’s work for the Marlborough Neighborhood is a shining example of the latter. About a year ago Latricia Scott Adams, the Director of our Volunteer Attorney Project and I made a presentation to a group of about 30 Stinson Morrison Hecker LLP attorneys about possible volunteer projects that the firm could take on. One we suggested was adopting an urban core neighborhood. Steve was at that meeting and immediately took interest in the idea.

As the Chair of Stinson's Public Law Practice Group, Steve knows a lot about community problem solving. It’s just that normally he devotes his time to massive, multi-million dollar projects like developing the Kansas Speedway.

Under Steve’s leadership, Stinson Morrison Hecker adopted the Marlborough neighborhood, a low-income neighborhood in southeastern Kansas City. Steve immediately put his skill and experience to work in solving problems for the neighborhood.

And the work that they have done has been tremendous. They have gotten the state and federal government to approve the neighborhood association as a tax exempt not-for-profit organization. They are fighting an unlicensed, under-aged drinking establishment that is a major nuisance and serious danger in the neighborhood. When the federal government suggested using the old Bendix plant, which is just outside the neighborhood, as a lead waste storage facility, Stinson attorneys drafted comments on the draft Environmental Impact Statement and the proposal appears to be dead.

Stinson attorneys are also working closely with the neighborhood and a local community development corporation to create a model block in the neighborhood, in which the city will focus resources.

Steve goes to all the neighborhood association meetings, so he can address whatever legal questions come up. All told, 13 Stinson attorneys and one Stinson paralegal have put in over 300 hours on the project.

Steve reports that the work is gratifying and fulfilling. The neighborhood, in turn, is ecstatic about the firm’s work. Betty Ost-Everly, the Marlborough Community Coalition President reports:

Many people have commented at what Marlborough has been able to accomplish in a very short amount of time and have wondered how. From start-up discussions in May 2008 to present, we have established governance, received Nonprofit status from the State of Missouri and our 501(c)(3), protested against the Federal Government's proposal of placing a Mercury storage facility at the Bannister Federal Complex, and started on the long and arduous task of stablizing housing in the four neighborhood association areas that make up the Coalition. Absolutely none of that could have been possible without Stinson. The firm came to us as part of Legal Aid’s Volunteer Attorney Project, and has worked alongside the Coalition and in partnership with Legal Aid and Neighborhood Housing Services to help us. This area has been neglected for a number of years, but with Stinson's help, we are looking to a much brighter future.

Many thanks to Steve and to Stinson for their fantastic ongoing work on this project.

Post-Foreclosure Task Force Makes a Difference

Gregg Lombardi, Executive Director

Some times, when you have good, practical problem-solving skills you can make a giant difference.

A great example of this is the problem solving work that Legal Aid’s Michael Duffy and the Post-Foreclosure Task Force that he leads has been doing lately. One of the projects that the Task Force has been working on lately has been to assist local community development corporations (“CDC’s”) in overcoming obstacles to their use of $7 million in federal stimulus funding that was provided to Kansas City to rehab blighted, foreclosed properties in the City’s urban core. The City sub-contracted with the CDC’s to do this work.

This funding presents a race against the clock. If the developers fail to have commitments to use the funding by October 1 this year, all of the uncommitted funding must to be returned to the federal government. On the other hand, if the funding is committed to rehabbing specific houses by October 1, then, when the houses are sold, the proceeds will be placed in a revolving fund to rehab more houses. So, if properly and timely used, the funding will actually do much more than $7 million of rehab work.

One of the major obstacles that the CDC’s found in doing this work was that HUD policies for the project prohibited them from spending any money toward the purchase of a house until their plans for renovation of the house had been approved by the City. This process takes approximately 6 weeks and sometimes longer. HUD’s policy meant that the CDC’s would often find a house, negotiate a price with the seller, then having tentatively established a price, prepare plans and submit them to the City for approval. Once the plans were approved, they would return to the seller, only to find that the house had already been sold.

Not only was this a tremendous waste of resources for the not-for-profit developers, it threatened to keep them from meeting their October 1 deadline. Furthermore, the problem, in theory, was easily solvable. If the CDC’s could offer the owners of the houses some sort of contingency or option agreement, that provided the sellers with minor compensation (say $500 per house) in exchange for a commitment to sell the property if City approval came through (which it consistently has), then they could eliminate the risk of the house being sold during the approval process. HUD’s policies for the project, however, prohibited this, not only in K.C., but nationally.

Michael brought this problem to the attention of the Post-Foreclosure Task Force, which includes members of the City Council of Kansas City, representatives of the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, neighborhood organizations, bankers and other major stakeholders who have been impacted by the blight that foreclosures have caused in Kansas City’s urban core. It’s essentially a think-tank for reducing the blight caused by foreclosures.

The Post-Foreclosure Task Force saw the solution to the problem and negotiated with HUD attorneys in Washington for a change of the policy. After lengthy debate, HUD agreed to a change in the rules, nationally. This means that the CDC’s in Kansas City will be able to use all of the $7 million in federal stimulus funding to rehab foreclosed properties and use the proceeds from the sale of those properties to create a revolving fund to rehab even more properties. And developers around the country will be able to do the same. The result is that tens of millions of dollars, and perhaps hundreds of millions dollars, can now be used nationally to rehab blighted urban core properties.

That is good problem solving with a great impact.