A Decade On, LAMP Remains Beacon in Kansas City Neighborhood
If a building can be compared to a cat, then the Linwood Area Ministry Place (LAMP) would be a fitting example: it seems to have had nine lives.
The property itself, located near the intersection of Linwood Boulevard and Bruce R. Watkins Drive in Kansas City, Missouri, has a long history with the Presbyterian Church, dating back to a one-room Sunday school built in the late 19th century.
The Presbyterians subsequently built larger churches, including the 1923 Neo-Gothic structure that still stands on the site. Another building on the site, now known as the Harold Thomas Center, opened in the 1930s as a convalescent home for working women.
Architect and planner Jim Scott
“In the course of that church's life, it actually was a really high-profile, early Kansas City civic leader church,” said Kansas City architect and planner Jim Scott, who has worked on the revitalization of the site for nearly three decades. “It had all sorts of mission intent in the 20s, 30s, 40s, and a lot of movers and shakers in that church.”
But even by the 1930s, Scott said, nearby residents were decamping for tonier addresses in the newly developing Brookside and Country Club Plaza neighborhoods. With a dwindling congregation, the church left the building in the late 1970s to merge with a nearby Methodist congregation.
The following decades saw the sale of the building, a failed redevelopment effort by the funeral home across the street, the repurchase of the languishing, vacant property by the Heartland Presbytery in 1995, an unsuccessful attempt to make the site a health care campus, and a brush with the wrecking ball.
A nonprofit real estate company closely tied to the Presbytery finally brought the building back to life in late 2015 after a 20-year effort yielded an $11 million renovation. At the time, the former sanctuary space had been vacant for four decades.
Today, the four-story Harold Thomas Center and the former church building host several nonprofit tenants, including reStart, a nonprofit supporting or individuals and families experiencing homelessness; ReDiscover community mental health center; and the Front Porch Alliance, a multi-purpose organization serving youth and families in Kansas City’s East Side.
The former sanctuary space of LAMP.
The campus also includes a community kitchen, offices for the Key Coalition neighborhood group, and Linwood Gardens, a 36-unit affordable housing complex serving families who've experienced domestic violence.
Scott said the project never would have happened without the $9.85 million New Market Tax Credits (NMTC) provided by AltCap and Central Bank of Kansas City.
The federal NMTC program drives private capital into economically distressed areas by offering tax credits to investors who help finance development projects and businesses. Since 2010, AltCap has facilitated more than $275 million in NMTC transactions.
The financing mix for LAMP also included a hard-to-obtain bank loan and historic tax credits.
“We were stretching everything to make it work,” Scott said. “It was either going to happen, or it was just where we're going to have to give up, because there was just no more to draw on to keep the hope alive over there.”
He found the bank a friendly partner, but Scott said, “AltCap had a better grasp of the organizational complexities that nonprofit community development can create.”
Scott said LAMP helped revive the neighborhood.
The LAMP community garden beds.
“It stabilized a declining location,” he said. “That church was a symbol of … institutional disinvestment … and so reinvesting in the church kind of arrested that negative.”
LAMP is one example of what the NMTC program was designed to make possible. Enacted in 2000 to break cycles of disinvestment in low-income communities, the program generates roughly $8 in private investment for every $1 in federal funding.
Since its inception, it has supported the construction or rehabilitation of more than 268 million square feet of commercial real estate and the creation or retention of more than 888,000 jobs nationwide.
Since 2010, AltCap has facilitated more than $275 million in NMTC financing for more than 20 catalytic real estate projects, all located in severely distressed, low-income communities in Missouri and Kansas.
AltCap has deployed that capital across a range of project types — from community anchors to job-creating businesses, including the Linwood Family YMCA, Sioux Chief Manufacturing, A. Zahner Company, the Emmanuel Family and Child Development Center and others.