The Kansas City Star

‘The eviction crisis is real’: It was years in the making. COVID-19 was a tipping point.

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The end came in a note taped to Cherrie Hakim’s door.

It may not ​be her door for much longer.

Hakim has lived in the southeast Kansas City home with her husband, a Korean War veteran, for the past 19 months. The foundation leaks, so much so that family photos stored in the basement have been destroyed from water damage and black mold has laid claim to surfaces.

Still, behind that door is a home. It’s where Hakim and her husband are helping to raise their three grandchildren.

Hakim, who has dealt with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease for most of her life, spent a month in the hospital this summer. Then she and her husband had to buy a new car because the old one gave out — after they poured $2,000 into it trying to fix a number of issues, including the battery and starter. The setbacks exacerbated the Hakims’ already fragile financial footing.

Bills were piling up, and the couple fell a month and a half behind on rent.

They’d had housing issues before. Their last address had three floors, which was a struggle for her husband, Bilal Hakim, who served in the Marines and had one of his legs amputated. Cherrie Hakim spent much of her time helping him get from floor to floor so they could go to doctor’s appointments.

One of their homes before that caught fire.

When the pandemic hit and Cherrie Hakim’s hours at her part-time job were cut, they applied for protection through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s eviction moratorium — which the Supreme Court ended in late August — but her husband’s retirement and Social Security income meant they didn’t qualify.

The notice on her door told Hakim they had 10 days to vacate. Her landlord had given her a first notice two days before. In the months since she came home to that second eviction notice, Hakim has been locked in a legal back and forth with her landlord that will determine her family’s housing future.

Hakim and her husband are among the hundreds of renters in Kansas City and the millions across the country who face eviction daily — the result of ​systems that often keep those scraping to get by out of safe and affordable housing, which activists regard as a basic right.

For landlords, evictions are often a way to get the most out of and to protect their investments — simply a business decision. Tenants’ rights activists see evictions as acts of violence.

Hakim has been trying to work with her landlord to get back on track, she said. She came up with nearly half of the rent they owed one month and said she asked for more time to catch up. But instead they received an eviction notice.

A crisis escalated by COVID

More than 3.5 million people, or 43% of those surveyed, said they were “somewhat likely” or “very likely” to be evicted from their home, according to a survey done in August by the Census Bureau.

In Missouri, 93,459 people were likely to be evicted — more than half of those surveyed.

This is not a new phenomenon. Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, which has compiled data on evictions as far back as 2000, found that Missouri’s eviction rate — the number of evictions per 100 renter homes — peaked in 2010 at 3.98% compared to ​2.95% nationwide after the Great Recession.

The specter of an eviction crisis in Kansas City and across the country ​has loomed for years.

In 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic thrust a bigger strain on those already experiencing financial distress and housing instability, a group of tenants’ rights activists and renters struggling with some of the ​same issues founded KC Tenants. It’s a diverse multi-generational tenants’ activist group that’s been working to ensure affordable, safe and accessible housing.

The group was the driving force behind the city passing its first-ever tenants bill of rights ​in December 2019. KC Tenants leaders who championed the resolution and ordinance shared stories of evictions; one woman was forced to choose between paying medical bills and paying her rent — she was evicted.

Landlords at the time saw the bill as potentially damaging to business and creating a hostile environment in which to provide housing.

“I bought a house in Kansas City today. I actually just closed on it,” Robert Long, president of Landlords Inc., said at the time. “And I’ve never been so unexcited to purchase a home in my life.”

Three months later, Kansas City and Jackson County saw their first cases of COVID-19.

The region shut down in an effort to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Then, unemployment skyrocketed. By the end of March 2020, thousands had already lost their jobs: 42,207 Missourians filed initial unemployment claims for the week ending March 21, up from 3,976 the previous week and an increase of more than 961%.

The job losses disproportionately affected low-income workers, women and people of color, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

Evictions occur for a number of reasons: tenants ​damaging property, violating the lease or simply falling behind on rent.

Not being able to pay rent is one of the most common reasons for an eviction filing. And with thousands out of work in the state at the beginning of the pandemic, fears of an eviction crisis increased.

Those fears in part led to the 120-day moratorium on evictions that was tied to the CARES Act, passed in March 2020. Research from the Urban Institute estimated the moratorium covered one in four rental units. The act also provided some emergency rental assistance.

In September 2020, the CDC, too, issued an eviction moratorium it hoped would slow the spread of COVID-19, saying in the order that the moratorium facilitates “self-isolation and self-quarantine by people who become ill or who are at risk of transmitting COVID-19.”

The moratoriums seemingly worked, putting in place a barrier to evictions during what was for some the most vulnerable time in their lives. It has its staunch critics, however, who argue it wasn’t enough. It didn’t, for example, prevent debt from accruing.

Tara Raghuveer, director of KC Tenants, recently shared on Twitter the story of a young dad who noticed a “huge negative balance” in his bank account after his wages had been garnished to pay down his more than $12,500 eviction judgment. He’d already been evicted months ago.

One paycheck from disaster

When it comes to determinants leading tenants into a cycle of eviction notices and housing instability, nothing may be worse than not knowing where the next paycheck will come from.

Kirk McClure, professor emeritus of public affairs and administration at the University of Kansas, who has decades of experience in affordable housing, said income certainty has a big impact on someone’s ability to be securely housed. A widely fluctuating income is worse than a steady income at a lower rate, he said.

Gina Chiala, the executive director and staff attorney for the Heartland Center for Jobs and Freedom, said that the majority of tenants are cost-burdened, which, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, refers to those households that spend more than 30% of their income on housing.

The root of the issue, she said, is in the workforce. Companies paying less than a living wage and not providing paid sick days or sustainable working conditions mean “the tenant is always just one mishap away from falling behind on their rent and being evicted.”

In many ways, the battle for sustainable housing is being waged on the front lines of the minimum wage war.

Stand Up KC, a worker advocacy organization, has organized local rallies in the Fight for $15, a labor group unionizing fast-food workers. McDonald’s has said its hourly wages will rise to $15 an hour by 2024.

The federal minimum wage has stayed stagnant at $7.25 since 2009, even as inflation has risen 24% and workers have had to work more hours to afford the same items.

The Kansas City Council has introduced a resolution to increase the minimum wage of all city employees to $15 an hour. Missouri’s minimum wage is $10.30 an hour. By 2023, it’s expected to rise to $12.

Despite increases, however, it’s still hardly enough for a single adult to get by — let alone if someone has children.

According to an MIT Living Wage Calculator, launched by Amy K. Glasmeier in 2004, a single adult in Kansas City would need to make at least $14.40 an hour to get by. That doesn’t account for disposable income for eating out, entertainment, savings or investments. Add one child into the mix, and the number doubles to $30.02. With a second child, it’s $36.64. Even with two adults working full-time and no children, the living wage would be $11.56. Add one child, and it jumps to $16.43 and then $20.25 with two children.

Hakim has seen her hours and income decrease over the years.

Working part-time for a home health care company, she spends about three to four hours during the day taking care of seniors. After helping her husband and grandchildren get their days started, she visits her clients to help them get out of bed, make breakfast and take medications.

Since her hours were cut, the strain of caring for her clients and her family has only increased.

Couple suffering through health issues and job loss now face eviction

Rents skyrocketing

Shanita Williams has lived in her current home with her bubbly 8-year-old daughter for two-and-a-half years.

She tries to keep her daughter sheltered from her own stress: “I don’t want her to experience homelessness.”

She received $8,000 in rental assistance that her landlord has refused to accept, she said, “because he didn’t want me as a tenant.”

She wants to leave her current living situation but has found it challenging to find a new place with the eviction already filed against her. Plus, she’s dealing with the rising cost of housing.

If she doesn’t find a place soon, she’ll have nowhere to go.

“I would literally be living in a tent somewhere in a park. … I would lose my job, because I work from home,” Williams said.

Kansas City, according to a recent report from Apartment Guide, saw rental rates skyrocket through the first full year of the pandemic.

The apartment finder’s April 2021 Rent Report, which was based on March 2021 data, listed Kansas City as having the largest increase in rent of the 100 largest cities in the nation for one-bedroom units. Rates jumped 33.5% since March of last year, according to the report.

The average rent in Kansas City for one-bedroom apartments was $1,435 as of March, according to Apartment Guide’s listings data. The average two-bedroom rate was $1,774.

Those rising rents are a challenge when it comes to finding a new place to live that’s affordable and accessible. Kansas City’s average rent for a one-bedroom is nearly $600 more than Hakim was paying each month for her house.

Brian Carberry, senior managing editor for Apartment Guide, said that in general, cities like Kansas City; Sacramento, California; St. Louis; and Boise, Idaho, are becoming more popular and more in demand for renters.

“As such, we’re seeing prices going up there because of very limited supply,” he told The Star when the April report was released. “Landlords have the ability to price things a little higher because they know there’s a strong rental market.”

Adding to that, the city has seen a good deal of new development, highlighting concerns of gentrification as people with higher incomes move into lower-income neighborhoods and price out their neighbors who have been there for years.

McClure said that a “certain amount of gentrification is a good thing” when it comes to turning around a neighborhood. What is harmful, he said, are corporations from out of state that purchase housing strictly as investments, turning homes into rentals and then selling them for a profit.

A high number of property owners with units in Kansas City live across the state line in Johnson County, Kansas. Those property owners ​also have the highest eviction rates across the metro.

In Kansas City, there have been 230,000 formal evictions and 350,000 filings since 1990, according to the KC Eviction Project.

What’s eye opening is that housing providers from outside Kansas City proper have caused 63% of the formal evictions during the pandemic, one KC Eviction Project researcher Jordan Ayala — also a researcher with the Open Society University Network’s Economic Democracy Initiative — found in a separate parcel by parcel analysis. Just over half of rentals are owned by property owners outside of Kansas City.

A third of rentals have owners outside of the state entirely. They account for 53% of pandemic evictions.

“We need to refocus the conversation around these structural issues and we need to be talking about these structural issues,” Ayala said about the underlying causes of evictions.

‘We need to eat, too’

John Collura owns a duplex in the northeast area of Kansas City that helps fund his and his wife’s retirement. He told The Star that one of his tenants who is in his late 60s has had COVID-19 twice, spending almost two months in the hospital. Now on dialysis three times a week, his tenant lost his job as a school cafeteria manager. He got behind on rent payments.

The tenant has lived there for nearly 10 years, Collura said, and has been “as good as you could’ve asked for.” He said he could charge more for the rent but is happy to keep the tenant in place.

They’ve spent weeks trying to connect with the millions of rental assistance dollars meant to help people like his tenant.

“He can’t get anyone in this system that has millions of dollars sitting around to help people like him,” Collura said.

The federal government gave hundreds of millions of dollars to Kansas and Missouri to compensate landlords and to prevent evictions. President Joe Biden’s administration called on states and cities to speed up the distribution of Emergency Rental Assistance.

Last month, the Kansas City Council passed a resolution designed to do just that.

Stacey Johnson-Cosby, president of the landlord group KC Regional Housing Alliance, previously told The Star that the end of the moratorium meant things were “getting back to normal.” However, most property owners, she said, don’t want to evict tenants — it’s easier to keep them in place.

“We need to eat, too,” Johnson-Cosby said. “If we are not getting our business income that we use to pay our bills and feed our families, we’re in trouble, too.”

Landlords Inc. represents more than 400 housing providers across Kansas City. Most, Long said, are small business landlords living in the area who have really taken a hit during the pandemic, being asked to bear the cost burden of the eviction moratorium.

“It’s not the housing provider’s job to house the citizens for free,” Long said.

He said there are landlords in the metro who’ve gone nearly a year and a half without being paid all their rent while still having to pay property taxes and insurance. As a result, he said, some landlords have sold their properties because they could no longer afford their mortgage.

When landlords leave the market, he said, the domino effect is increased rents.

Lives turned upside-down

Evictions cause “extremely heavy-handed consequences for the tenants,” said Gina Chiala of the Heartland Center for Jobs and Freedom.

A 2018 study of the impact of housing court cases on health, earnings, houselessness, employment and public assistance in New York City published through the New York University School of Law found that evictions result in an increase in the risk of houselessness and living stability, as well as an increase in trips to emergency rooms.

What’s more, once an eviction is on a tenant’s record, it’s difficult for them to find housing again.

Michelle Albano, a supervising attorney on the housing plus team for Legal Aid of Western Missouri, is among those who have been watching the looming eviction crisis for years.

In addition to the issues activists raise concerning the dearth of affordable housing, she said evictions are likely under the microscope now because people are coming to understand how drastically they can negatively affect somebody’s life.

“People’s lives are turned upside-down,” Chiala said. “They sink further into poverty and in a way that’s almost impossible to get out of.”

When an attorney represents a tenant, they usually fight to get an eviction dismissed or reach a settlement to satisfy both parties.

It takes two years, Chiala said, for a tenant to return to where they were in their lives before an eviction. People end up in housing shelters, on the streets, sleeping in cars and doubled up in homes. Kids can drop out of school. It causes mental and physical trauma, she said.

Diane Charity, a leader with KC Tenants who also works with Show Me KC Schools, said it’s been sad talking to people who don’t have a place to enroll their kids in school. Some weren’t sure what district they lived in.

“What we’re experiencing is people who because they’re housing insecure or just don’t have a place to live anymore — where are their children going to go to school, how will that happen when they’ve got to move to grandma’s house, to auntie’s house, to a friend’s house?” Charity said.

Kids are resilient, she added, but why even make them endure that?

Dozens of people spent a few months on the south lawn outside City Hall and on a median in Old Westport earlier this year in a ​protest designed to call attention to the needs of the houseless community.

The protest eventually led to the city helping a few hundred people stay in Kansas City hotels as part of a city housing initiative.

The Eviction Lab at Princeton found that in 2016, Kansas City ranked as the 65th most evicting city in the country, with 3,776 evictions, equaling 10.35 households every day and 4.19 out of 100 rental homes evicted every year.

Kansas City, Kansas, ranked 31st, with 5.6 in 100 renter homes evicted every year.

“It’s heartbreaking, it really is,” Charity said. “To hear the people that we’re talking to on our hotline not knowing what they’re going to do.”

Another KC Tenants leader, Charity said, applied for rental assistance seven months ago and never heard back. She was evicted and is now staying with friends.

“I might as well ask my cat to help,” Charity said. “And I don’t have a cat.”

Kansas City reopened its portal to apply for rental assistance this month.

What comes next?

KC Tenants has made strides in its push for a People’s Housing Trust Fund. That proposal would give tenants oversight, provide dedicated revenue and add innovative programs to ​the city’s Housing Trust Fund, which is meant to encourage developers to add affordable housing or rehabilitate current low-income housing.

”We’re just after places where people can live comfortably, safely and affordably,” Charity said.

McClure, the KU professor, said Kansas City doesn’t need to build more housing but instead should help lower-income people afford the city’s current housing stock.

He has recommended expanding the Housing Choice Voucher Program — a subsidy system that helps low-income families secure housing — and redesigning the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program, which gives state and local agencies the equivalent of approximately $8 billion in annual budget authority to issue tax credits for the acquisition, rehabilitation or new construction of rental housing targeted to lower-income households.

Kansas City created the Department of Housing and Community Development to focus on finding solutions for the unhoused, creating affordable housing and supporting tenant advocacy. The city has also created an Unhoused Task Force, whose goal is to develop long-term solutions.

Chiala said the city needs limits on how much rent housing providers can charge ​as well as subsidized housing programs.

“The eviction crisis is real. It’s not getting better,” Chiala said. “The only thing that’s going to cure it on a long-term basis is tenants organizing and winning affordable housing.”

As far as short-term solutions, Chiala wants tenants to be guaranteed counsel so they can be properly represented in court hearings.

Hakim is working with Legal Aid on her court case, she said.

When they first moved into the home they’re currently renting, their landlord was still in the process of moving out the last tenant, so they helped clean. Then they noticed the issues, which she said their landlord promised would be repaired; that never happened.

“They’re not working with me, but they expect me to keep paying,” Hakim said.

The family has to find something that can meet their needs. But with the increasing rent prices across the city and an eviction on her record, it’s nearly impossible.

Hakim and her husband on Thursday had a court hearing regarding ​their eviction.​ According to court records, Hakim’s case will go to a bench trial on Nov. 4. In the meantime, she’s still searching for a new place to live. She wants out.

“It’s just hectic to find a home nowadays,” Hakim said.

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The Kansas City Star

Stop Asian Hate leans into legacy of civil rights to spark movement, dismantle racism

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By Cortlynn Stark and Katie Moore

Kayla Reed stood in a line of dozens of people along the sidewalk near West 119th Terrace and Grant Street as she held up her South Korea flag. They were all gathered to support Asian Americans. They gathered in defiance as hate against those communities hit a fatal crescendo.

Reed turned to a Black woman standing next to her and thanked her for coming. “We got you,” the woman said.

Reed, 23, showed up to the rally organized by Allies Against Asian Hate in Overland Park in March because she was tired of staying quiet. For much of her life, she was afraid of her identity and heritage. But on that day, she wore a shirt with pride that she wouldn’t have worn a year ago: a Black T-shirt with a quote from actress Sandra Oh that read, “It’s an honor just to be Asian.”

Over the last year, largely the result of escalating racist anti-Asian attacks during the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian activism has grown. The Stop Asian Hate movement led to rallies across the country, spurred by the killings of eight people, including six women of Asian descent, in Atlanta. In Kansas City, a number of groups and individuals have attained broader visibility, speaking up for the nascent movement.

Activists have said people need to stand together across various movements, bringing Stop Asian Hate and Black Lives Matter together. Ultimately, they have the same goal: to dismantle white supremacy.

“Until we get justice for everybody, an injustice to anybody is a threat to justice for all,” said George Williams, who founded Stand Up for Black Lives Prairie Village.

What’s in a movement?

Last year, hundreds of people filled Mill Creek Park by the County Club Plaza to protest police brutality. Crowds chanted “I can’t breathe,” “Black Lives Matter,” and the names of local victims of police shootings: Cameron Lamb, Donnie Sanders, Terrance Bridges and Ryan Stokes. Police used pepper spray and tear gas against protesters.

Protests on the Plaza continued for days. Even after protests quieted down along what was once J.C. Nichols Parkway, they sprung up elsewhere: outside Kansas City Police Department’s East Patrol Station, near the police department’s downtown headquarters and outside the home of Jackson County prosecutor Jean Peters Baker.

New social justice and advocacy organizations emerged, including Black Rainbow, White Rose KC and Stand Up for Black Lives Prairie Village. People who were not in the public eye rose to the top, becoming prominent Kansas City figures, as they called for change.

“We’ve always seen social movements happen we just didn’t have a term for it, and movements for justice and equality and shared space, and shared resources,” said Toya Like, associate professor of criminal justice and criminology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. “I think so many of the things that I see are that these are the parallel of what we’ve done historically.”

The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, which originated in 2013 around the death of Trayvon Martin, is sometimes referred to as the “modern Civil Rights Movement,” Like said. And while this movement is more decentralized than the days of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, she added, the same push to bring issues to the public’s attention is happening.

“It used marches, public demonstrations to sort of bring awareness to this issue of social injustice and racial inequality, but it also had the advent of social media right away,” Like said.

The same thing is happening again as organizations blossom on social media and people rally to Stop Asian Hate.

More than 6,600 hate incidents were reported to the Stop AAPI Hate nonprofit since March of last year, including verbal and online harassment, physical assault and civil rights violations.

The number of incidents surged by more than 2,800 in March this year alone.

This year, as the community rallied in Overland Park, where a large portion of the metro’s Asian population lives, a 9-year-old girl whose grandparents live in China carried a sign that read, “Don’t hurt our grandparents.” She’s afraid of them visiting her here.

The day after that rally, about 500 people turned out in Kansas City’s West Bottoms to stand in solidarity against anti-Asian hate and to pray for the Atlanta shooting victims. It was sponsored by Cafe Cà Phê, a Vietnamese coffee shop near West 11th and Mulberry streets. The shop, owned by Jackie Nguyen, has become a focal point in the movement locally.

After attending the rally in Overland Park, Reed joined a group to help launch Asians Do Matter, a website dedicated to amplifying the voices of the AAPI community and sharing their stories. The group organized primarily through social media. Another woman, Marina Le, who lives in California, reached out to Reed on LinkedIn. She wanted to start a movement and had an idea of how to start one.

“I can’t just sit back because it’s happening to our people,” Le said. “If we don’t galvanize as a people, we would lose this opportunity to amplify our voices.”

Movements are no longer isolated, Like said.

“But now we have imagery through print media and photos and now through video and then now social media, which is taking a life of its own too,” Like said, “I think this is what brings together these groups where you can have alliances in ways that we probably didn’t have before.”

In April, community activist PaKou Her co-founded API Underground, the mission being to build kinship among the Asian American community in Kansas City and provide opportunities to get involved in grassroots initiatives.

“We deserve to have space in the racial narrative as Midwesterners,” Her said.

The organization is still assessing the community’s needs, but is considering ways to expand bias reporting as well as education about the Asian American culture that goes beyond food, delving deeper into issues around race and identity.

Last weekend, Her joined more than 100 people spread out around Ilus W. Davis Park, across from City Hall in downtown Kansas City as the city declared May as Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month.

“I think when we look at here locally, we’ve seen the rise of people coming out and supporting Asian American activists,” community activist Justice Horn said, “because they’ve been doing this work and they’re finally getting appreciation and being seen and finally given the mic.”

While speaking to the crowd Horn said: “I think it’s important, no matter if it’s Black Lives Matter, AAPI lives matter, trans lives matter, as well as women’s rights, that we show up and show out and fight against racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and all the nasty things that call themselves home in our community.”

Everyone has to show up, he said.

“It’s not co-opting and taking up space, it’s standing together in solidarity,” Horn told The Star.

Lessons in history

In other cities, Asian communities have carved out entire city blocks to create spaces such as Koreatown or Chinatown — enclaves of culture, language and identity. Kansas City does not have the same place. In the metro, about 80,200 people, or 3.7% of the population, identifies as Asian.

Those enclaves helped build socioeconomic capital to enter the middle class, said Like, who has studied social movements across the country. She pointed out that in the inner city communities of color are not called ethnic enclaves, but rather “ghettos,” an example of how systemic racism is used to continually separate groups of color.

It’s hard for her, she said, as someone who is African American and who studies race and ethnicity, to “hear African Americans speak anti-other minority group rhetoric.”

Like said the levels of oppression and racism other groups face is different, but that all have had difficult pasts in the U.S. when it comes to the “centering of whiteness … and the de-centering of other people of color.”

Sharon Quinsaat, a sociology professor at Grinnell College in Iowa, said the violence that different minority groups face varies — from police brutality to attacks on individuals by individuals. But both can be traced back to ideas of hatred and discrimination perpetuated by the state, which has used the idea of the “model minority” to pit marginalized groups against each other. The effect, as Asian Americans Advancing Justice of Los Angeles said, is the minimizing of systemic racism and its impact on Black people.

“We need to get rid of all those barriers that we see as preventing us from sitting down and talking about our common struggles,” Quinsaat said.

Recognizing that many of the goals are the same, namely dismantling white supremacy, can be especially important for Asian American activists in parts of the Midwest where numbers are small, Quinsaat said.

“Within the Asian American community, there’s a lot of conversations about multi-racial organizing, so connecting with the Black Lives Matter movement, connecting with movements focusing on the undocumented, so immigrants rights, to identify those common struggles,” Quinsaat said.

For Asian and Black activists in the Bay Area fighting racism, coalition building is not new

The Black Lives Matter movement in particular has been successful in confronting racist state structures and using a diversity of tactics to sustain momentum, she said.

That persistence paid off last month, she said, when former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering George Floyd.

There are historical examples of connections across groups being successful, said Scott Kurashige, a professor of comparative race and ethnic studies at Texas Christian University.

“In the late 60s and into the 70s, the idea of Asian American identity was very much tied to the Asian American movement which was in large measure inspired by the Black Power movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement,” Kurashige said.

Both groups tended to reject assimilation and white standards of success and beauty.

Today, Black Lives Matter “is very much establishing a model and a movement to be in solidarity with,” he said.

For those in the Asian American community, that has meant conversations about how to address anti-Asian violence that recognize solutions like increased policing that may hurt other people of color.

“The whole idea of doing this work has to begin with the notion of justice for all,” Kurashige said. “And how we formulate our organizations and our identities has to begin with this intersectional concept of how oppression works and how social justice can be achieved.”

It also means recognizing the diversity within the Asian American community, which includes many ethnic groups and a spectrum of religious and political beliefs. Asian Americans are represented at the top levels of the economic bracket as well as the bottom, Kurashige said.

In Kansas City, Her said it was important “to see ourselves in the full landscape.”

“We’re not here to have some kind of liberatory experience just for Asian Americans,” Her said. “We know that if we’re going to have a radical, revolutionary anti-racist experience, then we need to be fighting for that for everybody else as well, and that is a core value for us.”

Reed said she hopes they can unite with the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement and that with the movements supporting each other, people will truly listen.

Solidarity between movements

George Williams, who founded Stand Up for Black Lives Prairie Village, attended the rally outside Cafe Cà Phê with his wife Trudy, carrying signs that read: Black Lives 4 Asian Lives.

He learned about the event through one of their group members. He and his wife wanted to be there, he said, to show support. His group tries to be “deliberate about inclusion,” as they invite other organizations to participate in their actions.

Williams is just one generation removed from slavery. His grandfather was born on a plantation in West Virginia. He grew up in Fort Riley, where he said mixed race couples were sent before the practice was outlawed in 1967. His father is Black and his mother is Korean. For much of his life, he strongly identified with his father’s heritage.

The massive turnout last year at a rally for Black lives in Prairie Village was incredible, he said. It came at a time when they felt depressed, Williams said, watching the trauma happening to Black people across the country.

He’s experiencing the same emotions now. Williams said he feels a sense of loss and sadness as he sees news about the attacks on Asians in America. Then, it turns to anger at the perpetrators and their inability to recognize humanity.

“The cultural climate in America and that was kind of set by the last administration, I think, the former president almost gave people permission for things that might be a little more suppressed, even though it still existed,” Williams said.

At the vigil outside Cafe Cà Phê, he said he felt encouraged by the Japanese drummers from Three Trails Taiko. The same drummers performed last weekend as the city recognized May as AAPI Heritage Month.

Horn, who attended both events, said he has faith the community will show up for social justice issues. He added that everyone has to band together to dismantle white supremacy.​

As for the future of the movement, Like said in order for people to not forget that it is important for people to not treat the hate crimes as if they happen outside of your community. It didn’t just happen in Ferguson, she said, and it didn’t just happen in California. Social media helps keep the movement at the front of people’s minds.

“They’re all social justice movements, and they’re aimed at saying we need to do something to bring about equality,” Like said.

Reed said she has to tell herself that this movement will sustain — it’s how she keeps hope alive.

“I have to be confident that my children won’t have to experience the same things I did growing up,” Reed said. “This will work out. Why do anything if there’s just going to be hate?”

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The Kansas City Star

‘A lie’: Mother of teen killed by police says record shows Overland Park misled agency

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Sheila Albers read over the six-page document twice.

The mother of 17-year-old John Albers, who an Overland Park police officer fatally shot in 2018, was both infuriated and overwhelmed — she never expected the city to release the document so quickly after the judge’s order.

“My head’s about to blow off from just seeing how flawed the system is and how easy it is for the government to cut a deal and then the public never knows,” Sheila Albers told The Star in a phone call Friday morning.About an hour earlier, Overland Park had released its severance agreement with Clayton Jenison, the officer who shot and killed her son. A Johnson County District Court judge had ordered the release on Thursday after The Star sued the city under the Kansas Open Records Act.

The shooting occurred in January 2018, after police were called to the Albers home on a welfare check for the teen, who was believed to be suicidal. Jenison shot Albers six times as the teenager backed out of the driveway.

Jenison was paid $70,000 in severance when he left the department. He faced no criminal charge and his actions were deemed a “proper use of force” under Kansas law by Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe.

In a news release Friday, the city wrote that the Feb. 15, 2018 severance agreement “allowed the City to end Jenison’s employment quickly and decisively without a lawsuit, which could have resulted in Jenison remaining an employee of the City and the additional costs of litigation.”

The document released Friday says the city would report the separation to the Kansas Commission on Peace Officers’ Standards and Training as being a “voluntary resignation under ordinary circumstances” and say he resigned for “personal reasons.”

That line on the third page jumped out to Sheila Albers.

“It’s a classic example of what people call pass the trash,” she said, when an employer wants to get rid of an employee who did something wrong as easily as possible. “That is just so disgusting.”

An FAQ section the city released along with the document Friday says Jenison was not being investigated when he entered the agreement. Days earlier, the district attorney completed his criminal investigation. And just before that, the police chief concluded no law or policy was violated.

“They’re playing the date game,” Sheila Albers said. “They omitted he (had been) under investigation. Lying by omission is still a lie.”

Attorney Bernie Rhodes, who represented The Star in its lawsuit, said the detail about how the city reported Jenison’s separation to the Kansas CPOST is “why they’ve been hiding this document.”

Because the city approached Jenison through his attorney to initiate a discussion and negotiate the severance agreement, as the city’s statement described, the police department should have told CPOST that Jenison involuntarily resigned to avoid legal action, Rhodes said. In receiving the $70,000, the agreement said Jenison would not take legal action against the city.

“The severance agreement confirms the cover-up that so many people in the community have thought has been occurring,” he said.

When an officer’s employment status changes, a form is sent to CPOST, which oversees the licensing of law enforcement officers in the state, explaining the circumstances.

An officer can voluntarily leave under ordinary circumstances, voluntarily leave under questionable circumstances, involuntarily resign or be terminated.

Permitting Jenison to resign under ordinary circumstances meant he could be hired by a different police department especially since at the time, his name had not been released.

Jenison’s current certification status is in good standing and inactive, said CPOST commission counsel Michelle Meier.

The CPOST form is signed by the head of the police department under penalty of perjury.

Meier said if there were grounds to believe a law enforcement officer knowingly submitted false or misleading documents, it could be investigated.

“The Police Department agreed that this was the accurate choice in the CPOST document,” city spokesman Sean Reilly said in an emailed statement Friday.

Sheila Albers called the police chief’s decision a “slap in the face” to policing, saying “he is passing problems off to other communities.”

“I think it means that it’s proof to the public that we have people in government who are misrepresenting the truth in order to make problems go away.”

In the FAQ section, Overland Park said it approached Jenison about the separation agreement because the high-profile nature of the shooting meant Jenison could no longer “effectively serve the community.”

But in a 2018 interview with FOX4, Overland Park Police Chief Frank Donchez had said Jenison was never encouraged to leave the force.

“He left before we even had those discussions,” Donchez said.

The agreement also says the city wold not provide any information to media about Jenison’s status before the district attorney decided on criminal charges and to tell media after the decision that Jenison resigned for “personal reasons.”

The city promised not to release records related to Jenison’s employment unless required to by law.

After the shooting, Sheila Albers formed a group called JOCOUnited and became an advocate for changes in state law aimed at casting more light on the disciplinary actions taken against law enforcement officers.

In January 2019, the Albers family settled a lawsuit against Overland Park for $2.3 million. The suit claimed Jenison acted recklessly and violated Albers’ constitutional rights.

In July 2020, the police department amended its use of force policy to prohibit shooting at or from a moving vehicle “unless someone inside the vehicle is using or threatening lethal force … by means other than the vehicle itself.”

Overland Park City Councilman Chris Newlin, who represents the ward Sheila Albers lives in, said he is taking steps to ensure what happened to John Albers never happens again.

Newlin chairs the Overland Park Mental Health Task Force and pushed for Donchez to mandate crisis intervention training for all officers.

Newlin had been a councilman for about two weeks at the time of the shooting. He called it a “horrific day.”

He said he could understand Sheila Albers’ concern that the city misled CPOST. He pointed to the FAQ that says the agency investigated Jenison’s resignation and closed it without further action in March 2020.

“To me, CPOST did their job,” Newlin said. “How they did their job I have no idea.”

Newlin said the mental health task force will make recommendations to City Council in May, including recommending the city and police department expand the crisis intervention team and co-responders coverage time to 24/7. Right now, he said, it’s only Monday through Friday.

He added that he is glad the city released the document without appealing the judge’s ruling.

The Star’s Katie Bernard contributed to this story.

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J.C. Nichols’ whites-only neighborhoods, boosted by Star’s founder, leave indelible mark

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J.C. Nichols and William Rockhill Nelson shared a vision for their city — a vision tarnished by white supremacy.

One Sunday afternoon more than a century ago, an ambitious young home builder named Jesse Clyde Nichols called on Kansas City’s most powerful man, hoping to make amends.

Nichols had recently opened one of his first few residential subdivisions, just southwest of the grand limestone mansion he was visiting. He was there because he’d learned that his names for two of the developments, Rockhill Park and Rockhill Place, had angered the man inside, William Rockhill Nelson, founder and editor of The Kansas City Star.

The butler answered the door and took Nichols’ card. He could see Nelson at the end of a long hallway, in his study. But when the butler returned, he handed Nichols’ card back and said Nelson wasn’t home. The following Sunday, Nichols returned with his wife and made it through the door, according to the story told over the years by his son, Miller Nichols.

Whatever resentments Nelson harbored about Nichols’ clumsy attempt to trade on his name were set aside. What began instead was a friendship and mentorship based on a shared vision of their city — a vision tarnished by white supremacy.

In Nichols, 40 years his junior, Nelson saw a protege who could continue the work of a national social movement that his Star had relentlessly promoted, called City Beautiful. Kansas City would be a place of lush green boulevards, parks, grand fountains — and segregated residential neighborhoods.

Nothing in the surviving record paints either man as a virulent racist. But like most powerful men of their time, they viewed the world through a white lens, and saw segregation as a necessity for a cohesive, ordered society. In the world of real estate, that meant homes built with restrictive covenants — documents that dictated not only the details of design and construction of homes, but who could live in them.For Nelson and Nichols, “segregation of the races, like segregation of economic classes, was both a fact of life and an essential means of defusing sectarian conflict,” wrote Harry Haskell, grandson of Star editor Henry J. Haskell, in “Boss-Busters and Sin Hounds: Kansas City and Its ‘Star,’” his history of the paper.

Their relationship would last less than a decade, until Nelson’s death in 1915. But its legacy rippled across the decades in Kansas City, laying the foundation for a system that denied Black families access to a housing market that created wealth for generations of white families.

Nelson’s support provided Nichols a critical early boost, helping pave the way to a 50-year career in which he built homes and apartments for tens of thousands of Kansas Citians. The painstaking design of his neighborhoods, from Armour Hills to Prairie Village, all included covenants with racist clauses.

Nelson also gave the young developer technical help, as his foreman lent equipment to help Nichols pave his streets. “He was an ardent believer in better residential areas, and better planned cities,” Nichols wrote years later in an unpublished memoir. “He encouraged me greatly by telling me that anything would be better than the use of the land made by the pre-Civil War owners.”

“As a matter of record, he learned the real estate business almost literally at Nelson’s knee,” Haskell said.

The two could not have been more different. Nelson, known as “the Colonel” — for his commanding presence, not military service — was bombastic, arrogant and headstrong. The Star, which he founded in 1880, was his cudgel, and he wielded it to get his way in the business of the city.

“Remember this,” he said, “The Star has a greater purpose in life than merely to print the news. It believes in doing things.”

Nichols, owlish and reserved, turned home construction into a science and created a template for the modern American suburb. While many others contributed to the creation of residential segregation, his influence was overwhelming.

“No person accelerated white flight, redlining, and racial division in the Kansas City area more than J.C. Nichols,” Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said earlier this year.

And among those enabling Nichols was the founder of The Kansas City Star.

‘WHERE DISCRIMINATING PEOPLE BUY’

Nelson is best known as a newspaperman who crusaded for clean government, publicly owned utilities and economic growth. But, like Nichols, he was also a real estate developer.

“Building houses,” he once said, “is the greatest fun in the world.”

He built them — many for Star employees — on land north of Brush Creek and just south of his Oak Hall mansion, now the site of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. The neighborhood was called (what else?) Rockhill.

And, like Nichols, his homes came with racially restrictive covenants, according to historian William Worley, author of “J.C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City.” The only difference was that Nelson’s expired after a period of years; Nichols’ did not.

Nichols’ first major development, the 1,000-acre Country Club District, came with a detailed list of requirements for home builders and buyers.

Among them:

“OWNERSHIP BY NEGROES PROHIBITED:”

“None of the lots hereby restricted may be conveyed to, used, owned nor occupied by negroes as owners or tenants.”

Nichols was not the first to employ racially restrictive covenants to control his neighborhoods. But he was the first to incorporate them with a self-perpetuating renewal process. His systematic use of the tool, on such a broad scale, spurred other developers to do the same.

Nelson never invested money in Nichols’ ventures. And Nichols wasn’t hurting for cash. By age 29, he was a director of the Commerce Trust Co. and had an $800,000 line of credit along with a group of investors. But Nelson provided something just as valuable: favorable coverage in the city’s most influential daily newspapers. He also reaped profits from the countless pages of advertising that Nichols purchased.

The Star chronicled Nichols’ progress in detail, covering every land transaction that led to what became the Country Club District. Even his 1908 case of typhoid fever merited a brief article.

Nichols’ ads in The Star were far more genteel and coded than his covenants, but they conveyed the same message. They beckoned readers to visit the “highly restricted” Country Club District, “A Place Where Discriminating People Buy.”

An advertisement in The Star in the early 20th century promotes J.C. Nichols’ Sunset Hill development, billed as “The Most Highly Restricted Part of the Country Club District.” File THE KANSAS CITY STAR

A November 1913 ad described the district as “the most beautiful residence section in Kansas City” because it will “retain its exclusiveness forever — the only one so carefully safeguarded that it will permanently withstand all conditions that deteriorate property values and injure the individuality of homes.”

One fawning article in July 1909 expressed astonishment that the young businessman could have come so far, so fast.

“He became a real estate operator with 1 1/2 million dollars behind him to spend in the development of 1,000 acres of land in the same time that it would take the average man to reach the position of confidential clerk in a rental agency.”

“Nelson was signaling, in the clearest possible way, that he regarded Nichols as his designated successor at the helm of the City Beautiful brigade,” said Haskell.

A PARTNER IN D.C.

Nelson and Nichols were not alone in creation of a starkly segregated city. Local, state and federal housing policies were all drivers. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), created in 1934, essentially codified residential segregation by refusing to insure mortgages in and around Black neighborhoods, the practice known as “redlining” for the color-coded maps the agency used.

It also subsidized creation of whites-only subdivisions, stipulating in its underwriting manual that “incompatible racial groups should not be permitted to live in the same communities.” Nichols, as a member and leader of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, had a role in developing the guidelines.

In May 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racially restrictive covenants were not legally enforceable. The decision was in response to a case brought by Black families in St. Louis, Detroit and Washington, D.C., that had been barred by court injunction from living in houses they’d purchased in white neighborhoods. But the court also said that the covenants were valid if homeowners complied with them voluntarily.

The Star ran the story on the front page in its lead right-hand news column, but made no mention of Nichols. His position didn’t change. Six months later, the paper carried a story on his comments to the real estate board, where he maintained that “legally binding private restrictive covenants should control residential neighborhoods.”

Nichols died of lung cancer on Feb. 16, 1950. The Star and Times filled their papers with tributes and biographical pieces.

“A great vacancy has come into the life of Kansas City,” said an editorial in the next day’s Star, which praised his “work and wizardry.”

“Nichols stands as one of the very few city leaders of vision that carries beyond his time.”

In this, The Star was spot on.

‘RACISM DOESN’T TAKE A DAY OFF’

Nelson and Nichols left behind a city with two housing markets: one for Black people and one for white people.

Even with the advent of open housing laws, white real estate professionals would refuse to show Black families homes in certain neighborhoods. Advertising in The Star underscored the color-conscious system. Ads were always careful to specify properties as east or west of Troost, the avenue that had become the city’s de facto boundary of racial separation.

Lewis Diuguid, who worked at The Star from 1977 to 2016 as a reporter, columnist and editorial writer, remembers his former mother-in law’s struggle to buy a home in south Kansas City in the late 1990s. Even then, he said, she encountered resistance from real estate agents when she wanted to see certain properties.

“Racism is resistant to change,” Diuguid said. “Racism doesn’t take a day off. It doesn’t take a holiday; it doesn’t take vacation. It is constant and mutates to change with the changing time.”

The restrictive covenants, said CEO and president of the Urban League of Greater Kansas City Gwen Grant, are “an example of structural racism,” and are one piece of the layer of policies that have been designed to suppress Black people.

“The impact is systemic, and it’s impacted all aspects of quality of life and economic mobility,” Grant said.

Today’s underlying economic problems can be traced back to slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation and restrictive covenants. Those policies trapped wealth in a bubble for one group of people.

U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver said the fallout from the restrictive covenants can still be seen by looking at Kansas City’s housing patterns today.

“People always want to say that because they didn’t have slaves, they aren’t at fault for where Black people are today, Cleaver said.

“That’s true,” he said, “but they benefited from it.”

Conditions have improved somewhat.

In 2000, a Brookings Institution analysis reported that Kansas City had a segregation index of 70.8, representing the percentage of the city’s Black population that would need to relocate to be fully integrated across the city’s neighborhoods. It was the nation’s 11th highest among cities. By 2017, with Black people moving into the suburbs, that percentage dropped to 59.5, and the city’s position dropped to 27th.

This spring and summer, the United States faced a reckoning over its systemic race issues as people across the country demanded change. In Kansas City, thousands turned out to protest.

And in the weeks following the protests — which still continue, though they aren’t always as visible — Nichols’ name was removed from the fountain and boulevard near the Country Club Plaza he developed. J.C. Nichols Parkway and Memorial Fountain are no more.

As part of its coverage, The Star published an editorial about Nichols that would never have appeared in Nelson’s day as publisher or in the many decades to follow.

The headline began: “J.C. Nichols was a racist.”

The Star’s Judy L. Thomas and Matt Kelly contributed to this story.

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‘Revolutionary’: Traffic lawyer turned activist leads protest movement in Kansas City

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Stacy Shaw sat alone in an Overland Park jail cell and sang freedom songs.

She sang to smother her fear of being another Black woman to die in jail — another Sandra Bland. She wanted the camera to record her singing if anything happened to her.

It was Shaw’s second arrest since she joined protests for racial justice at the end of May. Since then, she’s received hate mail, has been targeted with racist messages, and found her car broken into twice. She suspects unmarked police cars have parked outside her office.

For some years now a familiar face in city courts around the Kansas City area, where she is known for handling traffic tickets and family law, Shaw over the summer has reinvented herself as a leading protest organizer demanding revolutionary change.

Fellow protesters have described her as a warrior, a guide and the face of a movement. While some leaders and politicians have attended protests in their local areas, Shaw has shown up to 28 across the metro making one of the most visible protest leaders in the region.

And she says she’s not going to stop.

“There is nothing that you can do to me or anyone else in this revolution that is going to stop us,” Shaw said.

Gwen Grant, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Kansas City, said she first met Shaw several years ago at an Urban League event where Shaw was educating people on the court system. Back then, the lawyer was just what she advertised: “Stacy Shaw – Attorney At Law.”

But this summer, Grant said, moved in part by Shaw’s law firm’s work representing arrested protesters, Grant found Shaw’s number and reached out. They started working together to provide support to the protests.

At one of the first mayor protests this year, Black Rainbow organizer Ray Billis said he was leading a march with a megaphone when Shaw approached him. Initially, he thought, “Who the hell is this lady?”

The two developed a mutual mentor relationship, calling each other at least twice a day. Billis, 24, introduced Shaw, 37, to new, radical ways of thinking, and Shaw helped him through major life decisions.

When they first met, Billis said he remembered Shaw saying something like, “Oh my goodness, are you sure we should be saying these things?”

Now, Billis said, she’s a fearless revolutionary.

“No one can do anything or say anything to deter her from what she believes.”

THE ATTORNEY

Shaw started her law firm at the Super Flea in Northeast Kansas City.

A podium and a white banner with red letters read: “Stacy Shaw – Attorney at Law. I fix traffic tickets.”

She had wanted to be a lawyer since second grade, and arrived in Kansas City about 10 years ago after earning a business administration degree from Harris-Stowe State University in St. Louis and graduating from Texas Southern University’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law.

When she opened her firm, she could only afford 50 business cards and a judge called her unprofessional for not having them on hand.

She handed out little red fliers, attended community events and advertised a base price of $99 to handle traffic tickets. Over time, her firm grew, working for a while at Nate’s Swap and Shop, then a few other buildings before settling at 39th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.

She’s kept her prices low to make sure they’re affordable for the people. Now, she’s found that her protest activities aren’t appreciated by everyone.

At one protest outside police headquarters, a woman carried a sign that said, “Disbar Stacy Shaw.”

The woman pointed across the street to a woman in a yellow skirt and said she supported protesters more like her. This protester, she seemed to suggest, was happy and friendly.

The woman didn’t realize that protester was Shaw.

Drawing that kind of attention is a risk. Most lawyers don’t want to alienate potential clients among the general public.

“There are things in life that are so important that you have to be willing to put it all on the line,” Shaw said. “You have to put it all on the line for what you believe in and what is good for America.”

THE REVOLUTIONARY

During the first weekend of protests this summer at the Country Club Plaza, Shaw saw a police officer pepper spray a protester in the face, then continue to spray the protester even as his friends dragged him away

She was horrified. Shaw threw her body between the protester and the pepper spray in an effort to protect him.

On June 2, again at the Plaza, Shaw was trying to help move protesters from the street to the sidewalk after police threatened to arrest anyone in the street. She stepped in front of a young woman and said, “I got you.” Then, with her hands in the air, back facing the police and standing in the street, she was arrested.

Before that, Shaw had protested on only a couple of occasions. She never would have gotten so involved with the movement if she hadn’t watched how Kansas City police responded to protesters that first weekend.

Outside Kansas City police headquarters on June 16, when protesters demanded to be let into a Board of Police Commissioners meeting, Shaw used her knowledge as an attorney to push for answers about whether protesters were allowed to protest outside the windows.

At other protests, she’s led protesters in song, called for unity to change America’s destiny and demanded people stop tolerating systemic racism — using her platform to demand change and fight for what she believes in.

When she speaks at protests, she often acknowledges that she is afraid.

On a recent Wednesday, Shaw arrived about 9 a.m. to Kansas City’s metro patrol station to wait for the release of a fellow protester arrested the night before while driving home.

That afternoon, she sat in a lawn chair with a group of about 30 people discussing the concept of unconditional love, where the protest movement is headed next and abolishing systemic racism.

“This is a revolution for the soul of America,” Shaw said. And the foundation of the revolution, she told The Star, happens in conversations like those. Those conversations help educate people about the movement as it continues to mature.

It isn’t just about marching in the street, Shaw said. It’s about empowering vulnerable communities.

Rachel Hudson, 19, sat on a mat on the grass outside the station and listened to Shaw. She said Shaw’s persistence in attending protests shows who she is.

“It really just shows that she’s not a performative person; she’s not just doing it for the camera,” Hudson said. “(She’s saying) ‘I’m here for the people; I care about people here.’ And that’s what I love about Stacy Shaw.”

Shaw said she’s inspired by the recent election wins of progressives such as Cori Bush in St. Louis, who defeated incumbent William Lacy Clay to represent Missouri’s First Congressional District. And she’s watched her friend and mentor, former Kansas City councilwoman Alissia Canady, win the Democratic primary for Missouri’s Lt. Governor.

Patrick Wotruba, an organizer with The Miller Dream LLC, a community advocacy organization, described Shaw as a “warrior” and a guide.

Because she’s stepped up, he said, protesters are willing to follow her leadership.

Billis, the Black Rainbow organizer, said Shaw’s willingness to speak out despite having so much to lose, such as her law license, makes other people feel empowered to do what’s right.

The morning after she was released from police custody in Overland Park, Shaw and other protesters drove to the Johnson County jail in Olathe to lead the group in calling for the last protester’s release.

Sheriff Calvin Hayden declared the gathering an unlawful assembly. He said the group was inciting a riot because there were more than five protesters.

He handed Shaw a stack of papers, saying these were the ordinances the protesters would be charged with. Billis watched as Shaw read him the definition of inciting a riot. He later recalled seeing her as a “powerful, courageous Black woman.”

The protesters then split into groups of four, each protesting something different, to defeat Hayden’s definition of inciting a riot.

THE FIGHTER

In her Midtown apartment, away from threats of arrest, racist phone calls and chants of “I can’t breathe,” Shaw sang along to a Nina Simone song.

Shaw sliced homegrown basil. She marinated catfish in lemon juice and Old Bay seasoning. She boiled neck bones to cook collard greens — her aunt’s recipe.

Cooking is how she helps to heal herself. It’s how she manages her fear.

A group of men, former specialized military, have formed a private security detail for her. She herself is armed at all times, even in her office.

One friend, Shaw said, has on three occasions dreamed that Shaw was going to be shot in the back of the head at a protest.

But Shaw knows she won’t die until her purpose is complete. She believes in Buddhism and chants every day for world peace.

Everyone has a purpose, she said, and anyone can change the world.

After her arrest, Shaw decided she wasn’t just going to sit down and accept oppression. If she doesn’t fight for justice now, people will still be marching in 20 years.

An arrest is temporary. Tear gas is temporary. Even jail time is temporary. But being born Black in this country, Shaw said, is a permanent condition — until change happens.

There is nothing that anyone can do to stop the revolution, Shaw said. The goal is to dismantle systemic racism and white supremacy: “These chains that have been on Black and brown communities since we’ve gotten here.”

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‘Enough is enough’: Former KC VA employee and Navy vet alleges racial discrimination

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The last straw for Charmayne “Charlie” Brown was the lack of communication. That came after she filed 18 complaints of racial discrimination against the Kansas City Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center.

It was after the Navy veteran had been called “Aunt Jemima.”

It was after the 35-year registered nurse had been repeatedly passed over for promotions.

It was after a supervisor had beckoned to her with a finger and when she stepped closer, told her that he wanted to see “if he could make me come with his finger.”

When that supervisor stopped communicating with Brown, she said, that “was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” and she retired after working there 17 years.

Thursday afternoon, Brown spoke out.

At a news conference in her attorney’s office, Brown said she wanted to speak out so others don’t have to experience what she did for so long. She was joined by leaders in other organizations who are calling for change and accountability at the VA.

Brown is part of a group of about 50 Black current and former employees who have experienced racial discrimination at the Kansas City VA and are making a stand. Over the last three months, other employees have told The Star their stories, several asking that their names not be used for fear of retaliation. But they all described one thing: systemic discrimination against Black employees.

One woman said that some staff members would start to make monkey noises when they would see a Black employee.

Another woman ultimately resigned after going to work caused her to experience chest pains, nausea and vomiting.

U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Missouri, said in a statement that the “disturbing reports” his office and the office of U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids, D-Kansas, have received are “unacceptable.”

“No American veteran and at no work place in this country in the year 2020 should an employee be discriminated against for the color of their skin or retaliated against for standing up to this dehumanizing behavior,” Cleaver said in the statement.

He called on leadership at the VA to be transparent and hand over documented complaints.

Sitting by her husband, Theodore Brown, Brown said discrimination at the VA grew increasingly blatant over the years. She said sometimes it wasn’t even verbal, but that she would be thrown dirty looks.

She was one of the few Black employees in a position to hire staff, Brown said, and was considered middle management. At one point, she said, her manager told her to not hire all black nurses.

Brown said she was also required to go to work an hour before her shift started and stay an hour late. But her supervisor told her she couldn’t clock the comp time due to policy. Two and a half years passed. After speaking with a co-worker, Brown said she realized the other nurses, all white, were clocking their extra time.

When she would come home after work, Brown said, she would think about how she just wanted respect. She would think about what she did to deserve the treatment. And her husband, Theodore Brown, wanted to fix it — he’s a “fixer,” Brown said — but all he could do was watch.

He said the fight against racism will continue everyday, despite people who don’t want it to change.

“Now I’m watching my children go through what I went through and what my grandma went through,” Charmayne Brown said. “The humiliation, the name calling, the degrading things that have been done to us — enough is enough.”

Each of her complaints resulted in no action, she said. Instead, she faced retaliation.

The Rev. Rodney Williams, president of the Kansas City chapter of the NAACP, appeared on video at the news conference and said that while a work environment does not have to feel like home, it should never be hostile.

“The stress and the trauma that those persons have to deal with on a day to day basis when you come into the hospital,” Williams said, “I think is unfair.”

The Rev. Vernon Howard, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Kansas City, said at Thursday’s news conference that his organization got involved in the case a week ago.

“We will fight with all of those who have a legitimate claim of racism and employment discrimination,” Howard said. “We do know that in this country right now the original sin of racism is causing this nation to implode.”

Howard said he is calling on the highest levels of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to intervene and to defend victims of discrimination.

“We feel the anger, we feel the pain, we feel the frustration,” Howard said. “And there is a weariness. And that’s why this kind of social unrest and social upheaval is taking place in our country right now. Those frustrations are bubbling over.

“Now we are able to say to individuals who did not take it seriously. This is what we have been ignoring racism still exists, and we must stand as a nation together.”

The Star left a message with the VA on Thursday. A statement previously issued by a VA spokesman in response to another race discrimination lawsuit filed in February said the center doesn’t “tolerate discrimination or harassment of any kind,” and is “proud of its diverse and inclusive culture.”

In that statement, the spokesman said the VA encourages employees to contact the Equal Employment Opportunity manager, Employee Threat Assessment Team or the VA’s Office of Resolution Management at 888-566-3982.

“Every complaint is thoroughly investigated and handled appropriately,” the VA said in the statement. “Based on the outcome of that process, VA takes appropriate personnel actions, if warranted.”

Justice Gatson, a Kansas City-based organizer for the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri, also appeared on video at the news conference and said the reports coming out of the VA need to be immediately addressed.

“We are calling for accountability, transparency, and an answer to their demands that they have set forth in order to write these tremendous wrongs that are happening,” Gatson said.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Gatson said, Black doctors, nurses and medical technicians deal with additional weight as they care for Black patients.

“So right now when we’re talking about Black Lives Matter, when we’re really, really pushing that message, let’s make sure that we are acting in ways that show that we need it,” Gatson said.

For those who are still working at the VA, Brown said she wants them to know that they do have a voice and that they do matter.

“As we unite, we become stronger,” Brown said. “And when we begin to speak, our voices will be heard. If you sit and say nothing, then nothing will be done.”

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Laid off, homeless and coronavirus positive: KC couple’s problems pile up in pandemic

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Every word John Price spoke was a struggle.

Every breath was exhausting. Every morning he woke with a fever.

It took him a week to get tested for the coronavirus.

He worried it wouldn’t happen. For about four months, Price and his wife Sarah have been living north of the Missouri River in a broken-down van in the parking lot of a department store where Sarah had a job until the pandemic put her out of work.

With the van out of commission, Price couldn’t drive to a testing facility. He was too sick to make the 10-minute walk to the bus station.

In the van, they divided the passenger and driver’s seats with whatever items they could find — dirty clothes, canned food — to build a barrier.

John Price didn’t want to get his wife sick.

They had joined the ranks of the most vulnerable. Those who are experiencing homelessness are often older, have pre-existing health conditions, and can’t follow guidelines of social distancing. Frequent hand-washing and quarantines are harder to manage, all of which puts them at higher risk. An outbreak in the homeless population could endanger the entire region.

For people already struggling with low income, the pandemic hits twice as hard. Between Missouri and Kansas, more than 66,000 people filed for unemployment for the week ending March 21. About 119 people in Kansas City have tested positive for the virus.

The Prices were evicted from their apartment in August. They spent months living in the van, in the parking lot near Interstate 29 and Highway 152, before police told them to leave last weekend. They’ve been out of food stamps for two weeks.

“All the services trying to help the homeless in Kansas City, they expect you to come to them,” John Price said. “There’s no one willing to come to us.”

Because Price deals with PTSD, anxiety and extreme claustrophobia, he said, he can’t go to a shelter. Sarah won’t go without him.

Though Price sought his doctor’s help as soon as he began showing symptoms, many of Kansas City’s most vulnerable are afraid to do so because of the potential cost.

Price’s symptoms were not bad enough to send him to the hospital. But when a hospital stay is necessary, the cost is enough to keep people away, especially families living paycheck to paycheck.

One report examined the cost of treatment by looking at diagnoses such as pneumonia, which often requires the same level of hospital resources. People without major issues could see an average cost of $13,767 for a pneumonia admission, including the amount paid out of pocket and the amount paid by insurance.

Those with major complications could see the cost top $20,000.

The Samuel U. Rodgers Health Center, just west of Ninth Street and Prospect Avenue, serves much of the city’s vulnerable population. It also absorbs much of the cost of care for its patients.

However, if a patient needs more intensive care, they have to send them to a hospital — where the cost starts to spike.

The center’s 100,000 clients are mostly working poor. Sixty percent speak Spanish, and a small number make just enough money to not be eligible for Medicaid.

“They really have no other avenue,” said CEO Faisal Khan. “How do people who struggle to pay bills get to meet those needs?”

Khan said those who are uninsured would be reluctant to seek care when they first show symptoms, clogging emergency rooms later on. In Wichita, a hospital’s emergency room has already been clogged by people requesting testing for COVID-19.

Khan predicts the health center will soon be hit hard by a wave of patients.

The crisis means trouble for the health center, too.

In addition to imposing a no guest or visitors policy, it has canceled all non-emergency dental procedures to limit the spread of infection, causing a loss in revenue.

Because it absorbs much of the cost of care, its income dries up when people stop going — as they are currently supposed to stay home.

“If (the federally-qualified health centers) go under,” Khan said, “that exposes potentially 2.3 million people in Missouri to almost no resources for healthcare. Once we recover from the pandemic . . . their healthcare needs will go unanswered.”

Khan said that’s when complications from health issues such as diabetes will pop up. Another issue is children getting on-time vaccinations. He said children could be behind on getting vaccines such as measles or chicken pox, creating a second round of a public health threat.

All of the community health centers in Kansas City are still seeing pediatric patients and pregnant moms, though those appointments are only during morning hours to limit exposure.

“Some of the worst effects are yet to play out,” Khan said. “We do not have any testing capacity.”

Khan said he would like to set up drive-thru testing, but would need free test kits first. The 10 kits the center has now, from commercial labs, cost $150 each.

He said supply is a huge problem, especially for masks and ventilators. He pointed to New York as an example, where the state could be forced to ration ventilators.

Last week, the federal government announced additional funding for community health centers across the country, including $82,000 for Samuel U. Rodgers Health Center.

But that’s just a small degree of relief. It’s not enough to keep the health center fully functional.

Unless it receives emergency aid from the federal government, Khan said, it will take a year to recover.

“We’re all starved of resources,” Khan said. He added: “When there are no pandemics, no one cares about public health.”Finding resources is especially hard when living in a non-functional minivan north of the river.

The trouble started for John and Sarah Price when they were evicted from their apartment after having problems with their housing vouchers.

For months, they bounced back and forth between hotel rooms and their van. In December, Sarah was in a car accident, which rendered the van undriveable.

The couple towed the van to the J.C. Penney’s parking lot in Kansas City, North, so Sarah could continue to go to work as a sales associate.

But when the coronavirus pandemic struck, she was out of a job.

“It’s still been overwhelming to not have a paycheck, not have the funds to do what we need to do,” Sarah said.

Price, who has PTSD, is unable to work most jobs. And when he became symptomatic, he had to put his job search on hold.

So the pair spent their days cooped up in the van, only leaving to use the bathroom in Target. One of the employees they made friends with offered to charge their phones and battery packs. John Price’s doctor delivered a pair of masks to the couple.

When John Price woke up each morning, he would reach for whatever soda they had bought on sale. He spent each day scouring the internet for jobs or trying to relax by playing a game on his Switch Lite. Sarah Price might use a coloring book app on her phone.

John Price had blankets blocking the windows to keep people from being able to easily look inside the van.

“I’m homeless but I’m a human being,” John Price said. “As a human being, I don’t deserve to be treated as some animal in a zoo where you go in and stare at me.”

Over the weekend, someone called the police on them. John Price had been told that as long as he wore a mask, he could use the bathroom in Target. He didn’t like just going in to use the bathroom, so he would also buy a drink from the front.

But when police officers showed up, he said, he and his wife were forced to leave.

A San Diego-based organization called Sisters of the Street helped book them a hotel room and ordered them an Uber.

Price hasn’t had a fever over the last several days, though he still struggles to breathe.

The couple ordered chicken poppers to eat Monday. Price would order off the dollar menu from the surrounding fast food restaurants if he could, but the dining areas are closed. The drive-thru operations don’t take walk-ups.

Their food stamps don’t come in until April 2.

The couple hopes to buy a trailer soon, after the field it is sitting in has dried up. A volunteer from Free Hot Soup offered to drop it off to them.

That way, they’ll at least have a roof over their heads.

But when they have to leave this motel on Wednesday, they don’t know where they’ll sleep.

Star reporter Luke Nozicka contributed to this report.

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The Kansas City Star

They’ve put up with leaks, mold, insects, mice. Now these tenants face eviction

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When it rains, Shawn Harris dumps dirty water out of a big pot perched on his bed at least seven times a day.

If he doesn’t, water spills through the ceiling onto his mattress, which is ruined anyway, he said. So is his couch. The three-year tenant knows both furniture pieces, among other tattered items, will be trashed when he manages to come up with the money to move out of Nob Hill Apartments & Townhomes in South Kansas City.

That moving day is coming sooner than he expected. Last month, the 47-year-old got a letter from the Housing Authority of Kansas City, Missouri, telling him he had 90 days to move out of the complex, bordered by Bannister Road and Highway 71. When all of the units, funded partially by housing choice vouchers, failed inspection once and often twice, the housing authority stopped funding vouchers to Nob Hill apartments and any other property owned by the same company: KM-T.E.H. Realty.

The housing authority said tenants aren’t being forced to leave. But without the vouchers, tenants would have to pay the full price to avoid an eviction.

Tenants on a fixed income said that’s nearly impossible.

“We not some dogs in the kennel,” Harris said. “We human beings.”

The company has a record of failing to maintain its properties and has faced multiple lawsuits in Kansas City and St. Louis. It’s being sued by investors, court records show. In January, the Jackson County Circuit Court granted a request for receivership filed by U.S. Bank National Association, acting for a mortgage company, against an LLC the company operates.

The lawsuit filed in Jackson County alleges that T.E.H. Realty buys distressed properties, like Nob Hill, and rents out units without hands-on management despite numerous complaints from tenants. Some of those issues include roaches, mice, mold, and lack of air conditioning and heat.

The lawsuit sums up the Israel-based company’s business practices as profiting “at the expense of vulnerable tenants by collecting full rents while refusing to invest in keeping its properties safe and habitable” and retaliating “against its tenants who complain of the substandard conditions.”

Sen. Josh Hawley has called for federal investigations into the company. In November, Mayor Quinton Lucas endorsed Hawley’s calls, saying in a statement that, “TEH Realty is a large, out-of-town company that’s made a fortune preying on low-income Kansas Citians and Missourians.”

When The Star called the Nob Hill office, a company employee refused to comment. When The Star called again with additional questions, the phone line was no longer operational.

Tenants like Harris said they have paid their rent on time each month. Now, because the management never took care of the property, they face eviction.

If they want to keep their voucher, they have 90 days to find a new home. The alternative for many is homelessness.

FAILURE TO MAINTAIN APARTMENTS

Tenant 35-year-old Antweania Brown said that to keep warm this winter, she had to keep her stove on constantly, heat pots of water and huddle under blankets with her cats before her heat was fixed.

“We fell through the cracks,” Brown said.

Her two children, a 15-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter, haven’t been able to stay with her much this winter. If it’s too cold, they can’t come over.

“They want to come home,” Brown said. “They’re barely home. I can’t have my babies in there.”

Like Brown, Harris knows it’s humiliating when family arrives at the home.

He knows that the ceiling in his bedroom will cave eventually.

Pieces of dingy popcorn ceiling barely cling above his bed. He can see where maintenance attempted to paint over the damage and tried to tape it up.

When he first moved into one of Nob Hill’s units three years ago, he was glad to have four walls and a roof over his head. Harris had spent the last six months homeless, sleeping on friends’ couches. So he didn’t notice the problems with his ceiling.

Then the tape gave out.

He didn’t notice the growing hole in his living room ceiling until water dripped on his daughter while she sat on the couch. That leak, while not as dramatic as the one in the bedroom, has still ruined his couch, he said.

“It’s embarrassing,” Harris said. “But I have to keep a smile on my face.”

His heat was out for four months this winter. In the middle of December, he filed a maintenance request but it took weeks for it to be fixed. Harris kept his stove on all day to stay warm.

“No holidays have I been happy,” Harris said. Not Thanksgiving. Not New Year’s Day. Not Christmas, he said.

And he doesn’t expect a happy birthday in March.

WHY WERE VOUCHERS PULLED?

The housing authority receives funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for the housing choice vouchers.

KM-T.E.H. Realty began operating in Missouri in 2013, according to secretary of state records.

Edwin Lowndes, executive director of the housing authority, said there have been voucher residents in Nob Hill for years.

Nob Hill has 269 units. The housing authority conducted an inspection of 83 voucher-funded units in November and December. Each one failed. The organization then gave T.E.H. Realty a list of the issues to fix within 30 days of a second inspection.

“Over 80% of those failed as well which meant they’re just not taking care of the property,” Lowndes said.

According to the housing authority, landlords with voucher-paying families are obligated to provide “decent, safe, and sanitary housing.”

The housing authority, Lowndes said, pulled all funding from Nob Hill. “That way we’re not using public money to pay an owner who’s not fulfilling their responsibilities.”

Lowndes said some units failed for critical issues and others failed for non-critical issues, ranging from toilets not draining properly to broken door handles.

In November, he said, the housing authority met with one of the owners. Since that November meeting, they haven’t had any communication. They have had “sporadic” communication with other management team members, usually when inspectors have been on site.

Lowndes said the property needs a landlord who is going to pay attention.

THE BIG PICTUREIn January 2019, the Poverty & Race Research Action Council published a report about where families with children use housing vouchers in the 50 largest metropolitan areas.

According to the nonprofit, the census tract showed Nob Hill apartments is located in an area with a poverty rate of 35% and a 60% share of people of color.

Housing vouchers in Kansas City are concentrated in high poverty areas (with more than 30% living in poverty) and in areas of the city with a greater diverse population.

In the Kansas City metro, just 9% of voucher- assisted families are placed in high-opportunity neighborhoods.

And according to that study, 55% of low-income renter households of color are in minority-concentrated areas.

“There’s a history of government-supported segregation throughout the United States,” said Phil Tegeler, president of Poverty & Race Research Action Council. “The problem today is we have a lot of policies that perpetuate those kinds of segregation. It’s very hard to undo.”

AN UNCERTAIN FUTURESitting on a chair in his two-bedroom apartment, Harris said Nob Hill tenants shouldn’t have to worry about their heat not being on when they’ve paid rent. A sign outside the property advertises “free heat.”

Harris said if he could afford to pack up and move immediately, he would. But scraping together hundreds of dollars for a deposit and application fee for a new apartment is proving difficult.

He said he feels he is walking on thin ice and frequently checks his front door for an eviction letter. Harris doesn’t know where he might live next, though he did receive a new voucher from the housing authority and help with a $35 application fee for an apartment near Kauffman Stadium from the Community Assistance Council.

The housing authority said families have been given vouchers to take with them to another apartment.

On Feb. 6, the Community Assistance Council, a south side nonprofit, hosted a meeting a mile from Nob Hill to help residents find resources such as access to attorneys or where to find help with a deposit.

Representatives from the Community Assistance Council, Housing Authority of Kansas City, Kansas City Police Department, the Heartland Center for Jobs and Freedom and Evergy were there. Six people were in the audience, not all of them residents.

Brown, the most vocal attendee, voiced her frustration with what is happening to her and other tenants.

“I feel like a refugee,” she told organizers. “Nobody’s respecting that I’m a person.”

Brown told The Star that there’s mold on her ceiling. And last summer, there were times she couldn’t stay at home because the air conditioning didn’t work.

She’s struggled to find resources for moving.

Another tenant, Catrice Echols, showed The Star a video of her ceiling that had fallen down, spreading insulation over her couch and shattering her fish tank. She had to live with her cousin for a week after.

While management ultimately repaired the ceiling, cracks in the ceiling are still visible, Echols said. She has lived at Nob Hill for two years.

The floor in her kitchen is bulging from water damage. Her downstairs neighbor told her that Echols’ kitchen sink was dripping into her apartment.

Echols said management tried to make the water damage seem like her fault.

She said she has to move by the end of February.

Few of the residents know where they will be living next, or where they will find the money to get there.

Brown said that for her to not be liable for the eviction, she has to move immediately.

She said they’ve only heard one question from management since the housing authority pulled funding:

Where’s the rent?

Echols struggled like many with money problems.

“I don’t know how to feel,” Echols said. “I’m still trying to figure it out. We still got to come up with the deposit money and move out.”

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