By Joe Jarosz
Northeast News
September 30, 2015

KANSAS CITY, Missouri — Say goodbye to Chouteau Courts.

On Monday, Sept. 28, during a stop in Kansas City, Julián Castro, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), announced Kansas City as one of five U.S. cities to receive a $30 million federal grant. The other cities receiving the grant — which will help transform, rehabilitate and preserve public housing — include Atlanta, Memphis, Milwaukee and Sacramento.

The five cities will receive a combined $150 million to redevelop severely distressed public housing and revitalize the surrounding neighborhood. Kansas City learned it was a finalist for HUD’s Choice Neighborhoods Initiative Implementation Grants this past July. The application for the Choice Neighborhoods Implementation grant was submitted this past February. The grant will help revitalize the Paseo Gateway district, with a community driven vision which will guide the neighborhood’s transformation. This vision includes redeveloping the isolated, 134-unit Chouteau Courts public housing project, which sits on top of an old landfill surrounded by two interstate highways. In its place, a 360-unit mixed-income community will be built in new locations. The plan also calls for demolition of Chouteau Courts — a low-income housing project in the Northeast which has roughly 500 residents — increasing public safety and commercial investment by rejuvenating key corridors, parks, and vacant properties. The goal is to relocate residents to smaller, mixed-income sites over the next five years. A portion of the funding would also go to two housing sites north of the Missouri River, as well.

President Barak Obama’s Choice Neighborhoods Initiative is intended to transform distressed public and assisted housing into sustainable, mixed-income housing with access to community assets and services and to support positive outcomes for families living in the development and in the community. In total, the five cities have proposed to replace more than 1,650 distressed public housing units with more than 2,800 new mixed-income, mixed-use housing units as part of an overall effort to revitalize neighborhoods. For every $1 in Choice Neighborhoods funding they receive, the awardees and their partners will leverage an additional $9 in public and private funding for their project proposals.

Castro said the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative is responsible for transforming what were once vacant lots, crumbling parks and storefronts and distressed housing into vibrant communities.

“It has become one of our nation’s most important tools in the fight to ensure that every family – no matter where they live – has the resources and strong foundation to succeed,” Castro said.

HUD received 33 applications for the FY2014/15 Implementation Grants.

Kansas City, Memphis and Atlanta received Choice Neighborhoods Planning Grants in FY2010. This is the second biggest federal grant Kansas City has ever received, behind the $46 million grant awarded in the early 1990s.