‘Are we upset? Hell, yeah.’ New Jackson County jail may force dozens from their homes

When Joy Ufford and her late husband moved into Heart Village mobile home park in 1970, Joy was turning 40, their son was 6 or 7 and their two-bedroom trailer was brand spanking new.

Joy is 90 now and still lives in the same double wide. Her son Gregg, now 57, his wife and daughter also live there. It’s in decent shape but, as Gregg will tell you, that trailer is never leaving Heart Village in one piece, if his family and other residents are forced out to make room for Jackson County’s new jail.

“This trailer can’t be moved,” he said on recent afternoon as a cat nosed its way into the screened front patio. “It’s just way too old.”

The same is true for many of the roughly 100 occupied homes at the east Kansas City mobile home court at 7000 E. 40 Highway.

While none have lived here longer than Joy Ufford, other long-timers may also have to leave their homes behind, should the jail land deal go through. Their mobile homes are not mobile anymore. Or their owners might not have the several thousand dollars it can cost to uproot and relocate those that are still roadworthy.

Neither the county nor the residents of Heart Village are looking forward to what this will mean in terms of expense and inconvenience to taxpayers and mobile home park residents, all in the name of providing Jackson County with a more efficient, safe and humane place to hold detainees awaiting trial.

But as things stand, that challenge seems virtually unavoidable. Jackson County officials seem set on the Heart Village site, even amid concerns about the site’s record of flooding.

“It’s so far down the road now, I think it’s done,” one county legislator told The Star last week, saying he did not want to be identified because of the confidential nature of pending real estate transactions. “I mean, I think we’d be tilting at windmills” to think an alternate site might be chosen.

More than 40 were considered by the county’s consultants and this one “punches all the buttons,” another top county official said privately.

Meaning its mid-way between the two county courthouses — in Kansas City and Independence — and has easy highway access for transporting inmates to their court dates. It’s on a bus route and close to inner city neighborhoods, where the families of many detainees live, making visiting inmates more convenient than if the jail was built farther away.

And at 99 acres, the site is big enough to accommodate a large, single-level facility that could be expanded, with surrounding green space for recreation and set back from neighbors.

But what of the people who live there now? If the jail deal goes through, what will happen to them? Where would they go? How would they afford it?

Residents have been dwelling on those questions since The Star first reported last month that Heart Village was the preferred location for a new facility to replace the 40-year-old Jackson County Detention Center in downtown Kansas City.

But they haven’t gotten many answers to questions about their futures. Neither their landlord nor the county will publicly acknowledge that the parties have signed a letter of intent to consummate a land deal, so no information has been forthcoming.

They are left to fret.

“I like where I live,” said 58-year-old Allison Wilson, a Heart Village resident the past 20 years. “We’re low income, a lot of us. Some are elderly.”

Moral duty

In their public pronouncements and off-the-record conversations, county officials acknowledge that they have a moral obligation to help Heart Village’s residents find new homes, if the project moves forward.

“I believe the county should be making people’s lives better, not worse,” said county legislator Jalen Anderson, one of the only elected officials who has been willing to acknowledge on the record that a sale is in the works for this particular property.

Saying they are bound to keep quiet about pending real estate transactions until deals are finalized, most of Anderson’s colleagues have only publicly acknowledged that there’s a tentative agreement to buy an unidentified site. But in private they express the same concerns that Anderson has.

“If we are going to move forward with this property, I think that we should provide adequate moving costs to wherever they would like to move to,” he said. “We should be in the business of making sure that their living situation is taken care of and that we are not hurting our own citizens.”

But the amount of compensation, the form it might take and who will arrange it is unknown at this point.

“We want to be generous,” said a high-level official who is part of those private discussions. “It would not surprise me if they will live rent free for a year somewhere else.”

Legislator Crystal Williams seconds that.

“Requiring people to upend their lives means we must make sure we add value to their situation,” she said.

The people who live at Heart Village have not heard those assurances directly from anyone associated with the county or Park Holdings LLC, the Wichita-based company that bought Heart Village in April 2019 for $3.4 million, land records show.

Residents will likely be kept in the dark until Park Holdings and the county hear later this month whether an independent appraisal supports the undisclosed purchase price that was agreed upon.

If that appraisal is positive, the county will then go public, officials say, and the residents of Heart Village will have a better idea of what their fates might be as the transaction moves toward completion, possibly in the fall. If not, their wait could grow longer as negotiations continue.

Or the deal could fall through.

“Nobody’s got a real clue what’s going on,” said Jeannie Anderson, who has lived at Heart Village for 14 years and until recently was responsible for cutting all the grass.

She said she was fired in late April, in part, because she put a Star reporter in touch with the Uffords and other residents.

“They said I created too much drama,” she said.

Owner Rick E. Hodge Jr. did not respond to requests for comment on that or any other aspect of this story.

“Are we upset? Hell, yeah,” Anderson said. “This has been a community for 60 years, and there’s people that have been here 50 plus years.”

While patrolling the trailer park on the company riding mower, she got to know many of them.

“We’re old. We’re disabled. We’re low income, everything. And they’re picking on us, you know. Do you think anybody’s going to be able to afford to move?

“No.”

On Friday, she was served with an eviction notice. She’s not sure what she’ll do next.

Hot dogs and floods

Spread across a floodplain just north of Interstate 70 and east of the Blue River, Heart Village got its start in the late 1950s when property owner Sam Licata asked for the city’s permission to convert his private airstrip there into a mobile home park.

It remained in the Licata family’s possession until two years ago. The private streets are named after kin. Lenn Drive for Leonard Licata, Sam’s son who would later take over the place. Monaco and Baldwin, the married last names of two daughters, became street names as well, and so on.

Anderson, the Uffords and others have fond memories of the Licata family, particularly Leonard, who ran the place until his death in 2017.

He was friendly, kept their rent affordable and rewarded his employees with gift cards at Thanksgiving and holiday bonuses. At Christmas, he would sometimes host dinners for anyone in the park who’d come.

“When he owned the place,” Jeannie Anderson said, “Deidre (a former park manager) and I would go get 100 hot dogs and 100 buns and everything. And we’d have a little weenie roast and community stuff. You know, I mean, it was a good place to live, just like the sign says.”

The sign facing the road leading into the park does indeed say just that. “Heart Village A Nice Place to Live.”

Gregg Ufford remembers it being that way when he was a kid. Back in the 1970s, all 400-plus pad sites on the pancake flat terrain had trailers on them.

“It was full up,” Joy Ufford said.

Kids tore down Monaco, Lenn and the numbered streets that crisscrossed them on their Stingrays and trick bikes.

“A bunch of us kids grew up down here,” he said. “We had a bus stop down there. It was a nice place to grow up when you were a kid, but then we had a flood in 1976 that didn’t even get into the house. But then in 1990 we had a bigger flood.”

The place flooded several times between those dates as well, but the big one in May 1990 delivered a wallop. Brown water from the Blue River topped the banks and filled the basin several feet high. Trailers around the perimeter were ruined. Residents evacuated.

“Nearly 100 trailer homes sat half under water,” The Star reported. “Boats replaced cars and walkers turned into waders as residents pushed through the water to get back into their homes, although no one knew when they would be able to stay.”

Most people who could move back did so. Other floods since then haven’t been so bad, but evidence of the big one in 1990 can be seen today in the many empty trailer pads and rusty electrical meter enclosures with nothing in them.

“All around the outside (of the park), those people lost their homes,” Joy Ufford said.

Darned if Gregg Ufford can figure why the county would want to invest upwards of $300 million building a jail there now when there’s a flooding risk.

“I wouldn’t put a prison down here until I put in about 20 feet of dirt,” he said. “I don’t know what they’re thinking.”

They’re thinking about bringing in a lot of dirt, though not necessarily 20 feet of it. One county legislator estimated that the dirt work would cost about $10 million.

The county would also need the federal government’s confidence that the runoff from that fill dirt, more paved surfaces and a big new building wouldn’t lead to more flooding downstream.

There are also zoning considerations and other details to weigh, none of which has been touched on in open public discussion before the nine-member county legislature, which will ultimately decide whether to go forward.

That lack of a public dialogue troubled Williams when fellow legislator Jalen Anderson brought up the pending land deal unexpectedly at the end of the legislature’s regular meeting on March 22.

“We should be transparent sooner rather than later, because of the impact that it may have on constituencies that we represent,” she said.

Back at Heart Village, residents have been increasingly unhappy with how Park Holdings has been managing the property. For two weeks in April, the garbage wasn’t picked up.

Service resumed later, supposedly after a past-due bill was paid, Jeannie Anderson said.

They’ve also been worried that their water might be shut off because Park Holdings has not been paying the bill, to which all the residents contribute monthly based on their usage. Park Holdings collects tenants’ payments and then is supposed to write a single check. But that hasn’t been happening.

Heart Village is “severely delinquent,” water department spokeswoman Heather Frierson said.

Residents became concerned about a water shutoff after The Star reported last month that the city had filed a lien against the company for $111,000 in past due water fees. (On Thursday, Park Holdings made its first partial payment since last June. A balance remains.)

But thanks to COVID-19, Frierson said losing water service is one thing that residents shouldn’t worry about, even though it’s a commercial property, which would normally be subject to a service cut.

“Due to tenancy, we treat this as a residential,” she wrote in an email. “We will not be turning water off at this time. KC Water has not conducted residential water shut-offs since March of 2020 due to the pandemic.”