In 2013, Andrew Ganahl and Scott Richardson, partners with Linden Street Partners, acquired a surface parking lot at 1914 Main Street in Kansas City, Mo., located on the planned streetcar line.
The pair subsequently developed a five-story, 44-unit apartment project on the site, 1914 Main Apartments, with ground-floor retail, which Ganahl described as a “classic infill project.”
Ganahl, now managing partner of AND Real Estate, LLC, discussed his focus on infill development and highlighted his projects in the dense, urban areas of Kansas City during last week’s KC Downtowners virtual meeting.
Completed in 2016, the 1914 Main Apartments provides only 27 parking spaces for its 44 apartments. Ganahl said that proved to be a winning ratio.
“I think to this day, we generally have about a full garage with one or two spaces open at most, but we’ve been able to successfully show you that you can do more limited outside parking than other people think,” he said.
His next project was converting the two-story former paper warehouse for The Kansas City Star into a five-story, 38 unit apartment building with ground-floor commercial space located in the Crossroads at 1721 Walnut Street. The Terrace on Walnuts Apartments opened at the end of 2017.
Most recently, Ganahl teamed with Diane Botwin to develop a site in the Waldo neighborhood that once housed the Waldo Ice House, a five-story, 44-unit apartment project. The 222 Waldo Flats Apartments opened in summer 2021 and features ground-floor retail space located at the end of the MAX bus line.
“This is surface parked behind the building so you have a really nice good urban streetscape, bringing the building up to the sidewalk, hiding the parking behind it, and again, slightly less than one-to-one ratio,” Ganahl said.
“One of the things that attract me to infill in particular is just that we weren’t trying to fit in with the neighborhood. We were trying to respond to the neighborhood, not trying necessarily to create a brand new experience. You’re taking what already makes that neighborhood special and great and hopefully adding something to it,” said Ganahl.
Ganahl said that residents of 222 Waldo Flats already have great restaurants, a grocery store, pharmacies and a local gym in close proximity. Rather than build an amenity heavy building, the residents can take advantage of what already is in the Waldo neighborhood, making the neighborhood the primary amenity.
The addition of this project also provided apartment options to an area where few exist.
Ganahl is committed to finding solutions to making housing options available in dense, urban areas of Kansas City while cutting back on the use of cars.
“[I]f we’re going to bring people into urban neighborhoods and have those urban neighborhoods not just be seas of urban parking lots, then we have to figure out how do we get fewer people in cars and into other alternatives like buses, bicycles, and so forth,” he said.
Ganahl stressed the importance of making more investments in public transit. He said although people still will have cars, the less often they have to be in the car to run an errand or go to the grocery store or a restaurant, the more vibrant the urban neighborhoods will be.
“We want to bring people back to that urban core and somehow figure out how do we handle this issue of one person, one car. . . . This is about the geography of density. How do we solve that problem of having more people able to live in an area, bringing their cars along but not having that crowd out other better uses like office, retail, restaurants,” Ganahl said.
Ganahl also champions providing more “missing little housing.” Although Kansas City has small apartment buildings, duplexes and fourplexes throughout its urban neighborhoods, he said current zoning regulations, lot size regulations, lot coverage regulations, parking regulations and other regulatory impediments make it difficult to add new smaller housing options.
Ganahl is addressing this issue with a planned 10 townhome project in Columbus Park on a site located on the corner of Pacific Street and Troost Avenue, which already has the required zoning. The townhomes will be for sale. To the south of the townhomes, Ganahl said he plans to develop ten for-rent apartments.
“So really just trying to get creative as to how we look at these sites. . . . Instead of just putting four single-family homes on it, how do we provide 20 of them? In this case, ten townhomes and ten apartments. . . . Your alternative for a nice rentable project, neighborhood scale, something that the local neighborhoods have really embraced. They like that we’re doing some of the for sales and some of it for rent, and it really seems to fit a niche that doesn’t really necessarily exist in the city,” he said.
Ganahl had several suggestions for making it easier for more infill development, including changing the zoning code “to re-legalize some of the housing forms that used to be legal” in order to allow more duplexes, triplexes and colonnades.
“There’s also room, I think, for smaller lot sizes as people are realizing the benefits of density,” he said.
He also proposes making tax incentives less complicated for infill developers who don’t have the expertise, the time or the ability to hire expensive lawyers to navigate the complex regulations, procedures and protracted negotiations to secure tax incentives.
“There are a lot of small developers that don’t deserve the hate. . . .We’re not just trying to raid the village, get every last dollar, but build new special stuff in the city,” said Ganahl.
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Feature photo credit by Bob Greenspan: Infill developments, like the 1914 Main Apartments, were intentionally built amenity-light with the purpose of utilizing convenient access to multiple neighboring amenities, including the KC Streetcar and other transit services.