Kansas City’s Jazz restaurant chain sets sights on Lawrence; keeping an eye on list of Gap stores to close; city to address questions about affordable housing tonight

UPDATE, 11 A.M.: I’ve gotten ahold of co-owner Damian Farris, and he has confirmed that the company has signed a lease to locate in the former Buffalo Wild Wings spot near 10th and Massachusetts.

Farris said the company is beginning remodeling work and hopes to be open by late September or early October “at the latest.”

The location will be the sixth for the restaurant chain. Farris said anybody who has gone to the restaurant’s two locations in Kansas City will feel right at home in the Lawrence location.

“It will be the same menu, the same recipes, the same New Orleans feel,” Farris said.

That means lots of seafood, po’ boys, pasta and live music. Farris said plans for the live music schedule haven’t been worked out yet, but the company’s goal is to have live music as often as possible.

“It really comes down to what the restaurant can support,” Farris said. “If we have solid crowds five nights a week, then we’ll have live music five nights per week.”

Regardless, look for lots of jazz, blues and Dixieland performers in the Mass. Street location.

Farris said the deal — the lease was signed Monday — marks the end of a long Lawrence search for the company. Farris said he began looking at Lawrence locations in 2002. He said the company recently was close to signing a deal for a Leawood location, and then heard of the former Buffalo Wild Wings spot — remember, Buffalo Wild Wings moved to South Iowa Street — and cancelled the Leawood project.

“We just saw the space and fell in love with it,” Farris said. “The timing was just perfect.”

ORIGINAL POST: This has been a little bit like talking to my crazy Louisiana cousins: Confusing but exciting at the same time. (I swear, I thought he said toupee, not étouffée.) What I’m talking about is news that Kansas City-based Jazz restaurant is coming to Lawrence.

The company sent out several tweets on Monday to announce it would be coming to Lawrence in the fall. I’ve called one of the Kansas City restaurants, and the general manager there said he couldn’t talk about it. But I’ve reached out to the owner of the restaurant on Twitter, I and hope to hear back.

There has been further speculation that the location will be where Buffalo Wild Wings was located downtown. Jazz tweeted “opening on 10th & Mass this fall!”

The idea of the Jazz restaurant coming to Lawrence certainly isn’t new. Back in 2012, there was a lot of speculation that Jazz was coming to town when somebody associated with the restaurant said such a thing as part of live radio remote broadcast from one of its restaurants. But that ended up being confusing too. (I’ve long said, the Cajun language is one of love but also confusion. You don’t even want to know what I did with dirty rice.) Back in 2012, a partner in the restaurant said Lawrence was on its list of expansion targets but no deal was in the works. But he said if the company was to expand in Lawrence, he expected it would do something smaller than the restaurants it has in Kansas City, and likely would look for a spot on Massachusetts Street.

As for those of you not familiar with the restaurant, it has Kansas City locations at the Legends and also on West 39th Street in Kansas City, Mo. The menu includes lots of seafood, pasta, “blackened” dishes (that’s a good thing in the Cajun world) and ample opportunities to mispronounce words like beignets, a type of doughnut; boudin, a type of sausage; czarina, a type of sauce; and Lafayette, a rich 18th Century French general who roams the restaurant asking if you would like some more toupees. Wait, I’m told I got that last one wrong. Lafayette is also a sauce. I think sauce, if you know what I mean, is a big part of the restaurant. I know if I had to talk this way all the time it would be.

In other news and notes from around town:

• All skinny jean wearers and polo shirt aficionados should be on high alert. Gap has announced that it is going to close about 140 stores this year. The company has not yet announced which stores it will close, so I do not know whether the Lawrence store at 643 Massachusetts St. is on the chopping block. I could speculate, but since multiple big-haired teenagers with Walkmans are now yelling at me that skinny jeans and polo shirts are no longer a thing, you can guess how accurate my assessment is of the Gap world. (Big hair and Walkmans aren’t a thing anymore either? Then, who were those people?)

Some national reports indicate that Gap is expected to release more details about its restructuring today. So I will keep an eye out for a list of store closings. The Lawrence store has been a tough one to gauge. Most of Gap’s stores are located in malls, so that has made the Lawrence location a bit of an oddity from the beginning. Whether that is good or bad for its future, I don’t know.

• If affordable housing is your thing, then come to City Hall tonight and wallow in the topic. City commissioners have added an item to their agenda to talk about affordable housing. Or perhaps more accurately, they’ve added an item so they can be talked to about affordable housing. The new agenda item is listed as a “discussion on affordable housing with Justice Matters.”

Justice Matters is the faith-based group that has brought together a few thousand members of local congregations to talk about social issues such as affordable housing and mental health care. From what I’ve gathered, Justice Matters was not pleased with the study session city commissioners had last week on affordable housing. There was talk by the commission of spending about $75,000 to hire a consultant to do a comprehensive study of the city’s housing market and what problems it may have from an affordability standpoint.

Folks at City Hall tell me that tonight’s item on the agenda may be about nixing that idea of a study. Some believe that now is the time for action, and that limited dollars ought to be spent on projects rather than a study.

Others have noted, though, that it would be good to have a game plan before the city creates an affordable housing trust fund, which is the action Justice Matters has sought from the commission. The city created an affordable housing trust fund around 2001. It eventually spent most of it approximately $500,000, but there was a long period marked by squabbling and indecision. I think many folks were surprised to learn that the city still technically has an affordable housing trust fund that has a little more than $100,000 in it.

City staff members have noted that the affordable housing issue has some key questions that come with it. For example, what does the city want to require of the building industry when it comes to affordable housing? Scott McCullough, director of planning and development services for the city, said that a serious examination of affordable housing will include a discussion about whether inclusionary zoning should be enacted. That’s a policy that generally requires new residential developments to set aside a certain percentage of lots that will be entered into an affordable housing program that is run by a group like Tenants to Homeowners or the Lawrence-Douglas County Housing Authority. Other communities have placed surcharges on new building permits, with the fees being used to fund affordable housing programs. As you can imagine, such provisions can be controversial because some argue placing new requirements on new construction increases the cost of housing.

“There are going to be some lighting rod issues,” McCullough told commissioners last week.

Should the city have a discussion about whether it wants to create any such regulations? Would the creation of those regulations change the amount of money that may be required in a housing trust fund? Would the creation of such regulations change the strategy of how housing trust fund money would be used? What is the strategy for how housing trust fund money would be used today? Does Lawrence have an affordable housing problem or a low-wage job problem? Can a study by a professional firm provide any useful guidance on funding and regulatory issues?

I think the various players in this debate have different answers on many of those questions. We’ll see how much gets hashed out tonight. Commissioners meet at 5:45 p.m. at City Hall.