KCK tenants displaced by fire struggle to find new housing. And help is running out

Afraid to leave her temporary apartment in Kansas City, Kansas, alone, Danesha sits on a blow-up mattress, waiting to hear if her case manager will move her for the seventh time since her former apartment complex burned down over one month ago.

The fire left Danesha, who The Star is identifying only by her first name due to safety concerns, without a place to stay. Since then, she’s alternated between motel rooms and people’s couches.

A case worker at Kim Wilson Housing, a Wyandotte County nonprofit, found her the unit and helped her pay the rent at the complex. She spends most of her time calling other apartment complexes, looking for a more permanent home that accepts housing vouchers and has an available room.

“Mentally this is messing with me and I’m just at my wits end,” she said.

Danesha is one of 14 tenants displaced by a Dec. 16 fire at Manor Place Apartments near North 61st Street and Leavenworth Road in Kansas City, Kansas. Many of them are disabled, reliant on housing vouchers and have lived long periods of their life homeless. They saw living at the complex as a chance to start over, but after the fire instead found themselves either moving between hotels with the help of case workers at Kim Wilson Housing or back on the streets.

Each tenant was given cash assistance from a local chapter of the Red Cross and their former landlord paid for a few nights in a Super 8 hotel near the Argosy Casino. But then the help ran out.

The tenants still receive help from Kim Wilson Housing, which uses federal grant funds to provide permanent housing and rapid rehousing services to the homeless. The nonprofit had helped Danesha and many other tenants find apartments at Manor Place before the fire.

Nick Mitchell, who works for Kim Wilson Housing, helped shuttle about eight tenants into temporary housing.

“This is not an everyday occurrence,” he said.

In Mitchell’s experience, it’s rare for so many low-income tenants to be displaced, especially those who are handicapped or without IDs. With short staffing and a lack of affordable housing, finding accommodations becomes difficult.

Gina Chiala, Executive Director of the Heartland Center for Jobs and Freedom, has worked as an attorney for displaced tenants and says that few safety nets exist for people like Danesha.

“That’s an issue I was surprised to see is as common as it is,” she said.

“There’s a dearth of affordable housing and that’s at the heart of this problem. If you lose your housing, especially if you’re disabled and elderly, there should be somewhere for you to go,” she said. “Unfortunately, we don’t have good safety net programs for them.”

‘Nothing to be done’

On Christmas Eve, about a week after the fire, Danesha sat next to five of her fellow Manor Place tenants on the curb outside the Super 8 hotel.

No longer allowed to wait inside for a call from their case managers, the tenants lit cigarettes and hugged trash bags of their former apartment furnishings.

Fifty-eight-year-old William Aghtchison sat nearby in his motorized wheelchair, his sole mode of transportation since a 1989 stroke and car crash left him unable to walk.

He had been homeless for two years prior to moving into Manor Place.

“I don’t know what I am going to do now,” he said, unsure whether a case manager would be able to find him handicap accessible, temporary housing. He had already been told by an employee of Kim Wilson Housing that finding any available units during the holidays would be difficult.

Less than an hour later two men ran by Aghtchison, into the Super 8 lobby and emerged with a large suitcase that they chucked into the trunk of their car.

“Wait, wait! Somebody stop them!... They’re robbing me!” Aghtchison said while trying to follow them on his scooter.

Some of the tenants chuckled, others looked on in shock.

“This isn’t the first time this has happened,” Danesha said, holding a cigarette between her fingers.

“People just come in and take things from us. Because what are we going to do about it,” she said.

Aghtchison explained that he had known the men who stole his suitcase and that they wanted to disassemble the charger to his scooter for parts.

“All my clothes. Gone. These are my only pants,” he said. “Now how am I supposed to get around when this thing dies?”

“I need help,” he said.

Seventy-four-year-old George Bradley, who also lived in Manor Place, agreed.

“Look at us, we’re sitting out here on the street. I’m blind, crippled and crazy. There’s nothing that’s going to be done about it” he said.

Like the other tenants, he received a letter from the landlord at Manor Place, explaining that there were no funds left to fix the damage or help tenants with housing.

“Manor Place is uninhabitable,” the letter said. “If you wish to come back you must obtain a temporary place of living at your own expense until we are ready for you to return, but we cannot guarantee when and we cannot guarantee if it will ever happen.”

The landlord has not responded to The Star’s requests for comment.

George Bradley, another tenant, was not surprised by the letter. Before moving into Manor Place he had spent four winters living under a bridge in Kansas City, Kansas, using abandoned cardboard boxes to keep warm.

He said Manor Place was an upgrade and he was excited when a worker at Kim Wilson Housing approached him with the opportunity to live in a unit. When that apartment went without running water for five months or the water heater flooded, leaving puddles up to his ankles, Bradley never complained.

He silently worked on sewing blankets, joggers and T-shirts for the clothing line he said he was starting. The unit had good lights, Bradley said, which was more than enough for him.

“It was better than the bridge,” he said, laughing.

But then the fire broke out.

Bradley remembers jumping out the window after hearing tenants scream and clouds of smoke billowing through the building. He ran with no shoes on his feet, abandoning his clothes and all the possessions he’d dragged with him over the years.

Sitting outside the hotel, Bradley had nothing with him but the clothes on his back. He did not know where he would wind up sleeping tonight.

“I can’t even think about going back to that bridge,” he said. “I won’t let myself.”

Mitchell with Kim Wilson Housing arrived with a van about two hours later. He scurried around the hotel lobby, breathing heavily as he lifted wheelchairs and large plastic bags of tenants’ possessions into the trunk. Slowly, the tenants’ piled into the few empty seats.

“We’re still trying to find people,” he said of the tenants displaced by the Manor Place fire. “We only have enough funding for our clients, but I’m doing the best I can to help everyone.”

Moving on

Danesha spent about six days in a Quality Inn on 78th Street before moving to the Super 8, where she stayed for about three days, until support from her former landlord ran out.

She then returned to the Quality Inn for another six days, where another tenant displaced by the fire helped pay for food and an extra night of housing.

When funding ran out and she was asked to leave the hotel, Danesha went outside and laid on top of a bag of her belongings behind a gas station dumpster.

Later that night, she received some money from a friend to rent a room at the American Motel, but that did not last long either.

She moved between couches before being placed in a housing complex in northern Kansas City, Kansas.

In her free time, Danesha calls complexes across the metro area looking to see if they have available units and accept housing vouchers. She keeps track of every conversation in her diary, in the hopes that she’s able to find a place to stay and pass on the information to her fellow tenants. But now each page is filled with question marks, unidentifiable phone numbers and the words “left a voicemail” or “no answer” in the margins.

“I don’t know what to do. It’s getting ridiculous honestly,” she said.

Many of the Manor Place units have been robbed since the fire, Danesha said. While her unit was left untouched, she is hesitant to go back.

One week ago she quickly returned to her old room and grabbed her deceased father’s old collection of cellphones, a picture of her grandmother, some clothing and an old television. A security officer accompanied her since her apartment was still damaged by the fire.

“I could look up in my room and see the sky without opening my window. More of the ceiling has fallen into my apartment.”

“I’m so alone in this process,” she said. “There’s a lot of people to rehouse and it just seems like all hands are on deck.”