A Miami fund bought a 126-year-old downtown building, quietly signed away the right to demolish it, then asked Kansas City for permission to demolish it anyway and build a 20-story data center. A leading legal scholar reviewed the paperwork The Defender obtained and called it by its name. This week, Kansas City said no.
KANSAS CITY, MO – The Western Newspaper Union Building has outlived everything that was supposed to replace it. It went up in 1900 at the corner of 10th and Central, printed the news for half the small towns on the plains, watched the streetcars come and go, survived urban renewal, the hollowing of downtown, and the decades when nobody wanted to live within a mile of it. It was renovated, occupied, and quietly profitable, which in the life of a 126-year-old building is a kind of triumph. Then, last December, a private fund out of Miami bought it, and gave the property a double life: protected forever on one piece of paper, condemned to demolition on another.
To learn which paper was telling the truth, The Defender obtained the recorded deed and took it, along with securities filings, and the public record, to one of the nation’s foremost authorities on this body of law: Nancy A. McLaughlin, the Samuel D. Thurman Endowed Professor of Law at the University of Utah, whose scholarship on conservation easements spans more than two decades and has been cited by federal courts. She reviewed the documents before speaking with us. Her assessment: “This appears to be a syndicated conservation easement transaction.” Put simply, it appears the developers attempted to exaggerate their property appraisal to inflate the deductions they could claim.
On Wednesday, the Kansas City Plan Commission agreed. It voted to deny the project…