Sam Moore, Kate Shea, And Dick Gregory Place

In an earlier blog item, I mentioned efforts to preserve elements of City’s cultural heritage by designating them as historic structures in order to allow developers to use tax credits to rehab them. After reading the item, Barb Geisman sent me a note.

According to Barb, Dick Gregory Place, the newest historic district in the Ville neighborhood, is already generating positive change. The Ville Neighborhood Housing Corporation, Northside Community Housing, and the Regional Housing and Community Development Alliance are partnering on a development proposal that will produce forty new historically rehabilitated, affordable rental apartments in a block of Dick Gregory Place fronting on Dr. Martin Luther King Drive. The new development will transform long-vacant, but culturally and architecturally significant, structures into quality new homes that will showcase the Ville’s historic importance. Both federal and state historic tax credits are critical to the feasibility of this development — and an application is pending at the Missouri Housing Development Commission for federal and state low-income housing tax credits.

I strongly support this development, which is one of the new Major Development Initiatives that I have worked to structure in partnership with City aldermen over the past two years. I congratulate and commend Alderman Sam Moore, Harold Crumpton, and RHCDA for their work in putting this development package together.

And, since she (and they) too rarely hear it: I thank Kate Shea (and her staff) for their work in putting this new historic district on the National Register of Historic Places. Without their dedication to and passion for making sure that our cultural heritage is appropriately recognized, we’d lose far more of it.