Apartment Rentals
A Clash of the Way In
Rachel Miskec watches the news each night and worries she’ll see an apartment fire in Kansas City, Kansas. “If something bad happens, I know someone is going to ask us when did you go into [the apartment] last,” said Miskec, the coordinator of the rental license program for the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and…
Exploring Frank Lloyd Wright’s Naturalistic Legacy
By Christopher G. Olszewski Our area certainly has some distinctive architecture, including the art deco Power & Light Building in downtown Kansas City and the massive new Church of the Resurrection sanctuary in Leawood, Kansas. Before those bricks were laid, one of the world’s most famous architects left his mark on Kansas City. During a…
Changed Locks: Getting Evicted in Wyandotte
It takes two minutes for the woman in the wheelchair to roll in front of Judge R. Wayne Lawson. It only takes another two minutes for her to be legally evicted. “You have to leave, just not today,” Lawson tells her. The plaintiff’s lawyer asks her to wait for him in the hallway. He still…
How’d We Get This Data? See the Human Side of Records Analysis
44 days. That’s how long it took our research intern to obtain all the eviction information for Wyandotte County. Across that month and a half, Flatland’s Ryan Hennessy spent about six hours a day combing eviction records the only place they were available: on one of three public computers on the first floor of the…
Affordable Housing: The Apartment Fight
When the Kansas City Housing Authority won a coveted $30 million federal grant in 2015 to tear down Chouteau Courts, a low-income housing project east of downtown, and replace it with mixed-income housing, housing advocates were thrilled. But when the Northland was proposed as a location for one of the new properties, area residents took…