photo by: Rochelle Valverde/Journal-World

The south portion of the city-owned parking lot at 826 Vermont St. is pictured on Sept. 14, 2022.

A prominent downtown parking lot is no longer set to be donated to the Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center for a unique multistory housing project.

City commissioners at a Sept. 13 meeting had told city staff to begin working on a plan that could include donating a city-owned parking lot — a to-be determined one along Vermont Street — to Bert Nash for what was anticipated to be a three-story building with 24 housing units for people experiencing homelessness. The project also would have room for support services and perhaps even a grocery store.

In some ways, that idea combined two issues that have a history of being volatile in downtown — parking supply and how to serve the homeless community.

Perhaps it should be no surprise that the idea began running into hurdles shortly after the Sept. 13 meeting. I started hearing that several downtown stakeholders began registering concerns about the idea at City Hall. On Monday, City Commissioner Brad Finkeldei confirmed to me that the idea of the parking lot donation has been put on hold.

“It caused an explosion of responses,” Finkeldei said. “Many of the responses were ‘we didn’t know this was happening.'”

Finkeldei said he and other commissioners heard quite a bit from downtown business owners concerned about potential loss of parking spaces, and several also had questions about whether the downtown commercial district was the appropriate location for a housing complex that aims to serve the homeless.

None of that means the project is dead, though. City commissioners could decide to restart the idea of a parking lot donation at a later time, or another site in a different location may get consideration by Bert Nash. Mathew Faulk, director of housing for Bert Nash, told me the project very much is still active, even though the location is unknown.

“We continue to meet with the city and discuss options and opportunities,” Faulk said. “We are committed to being a positive community partner.”

One private developer already is starting to plant seeds for a new location. Lawrence businessman Tony Krsnich, developer of the Warehouse Arts District in East Lawrence, told me he has a contract to buy a nearly 4-acre piece of property near 18th Street and Haskell Avenue. That vacant lot is owned by The Salvation Army, and previously was planned to house a new service center for homeless individuals and other clients The Salvation Army serves. As we’ve reported, The Salvation Army no longer needs that property as it has completed a deal to move into a building along 23rd Street.

Krsnich is pitching the idea of Bert Nash locating its housing project on a portion of that property, which is basically across the street from a subsidized housing development run by the Lawrence-Douglas County Housing Authority.

Krsnich said he didn’t buy the property with the Bert Nash project in mind. He was thinking about putting in traditional apartments or maybe office or warehouse space to capitalize off of expected regional growth related to the Pansasonic project. But, when he heard several downtown property owners express concern about the Bert Nash project, he began thinking of the possibilities.

“What I saw a couple of weeks ago is a community of business leaders that said we are a compassionate people and we support Bert Nash, but downtown is an inappropriate location for this project,” Krsnich said of the conversations he had heard in the business community. “At that point, I dug into these issues and essentially raised my hand and said I might have a more appropriate location.”

To be clear, Krsnich doesn’t have any deal with Bert Nash to build the project at that location. He’s simply pitching the idea. Faulk told me Bert Nash is open to talking about the site as a possibility, but stopped short of assessing its feasibility.

“We remain flexible and are open to any opportunity right now,” Faulk said.

Faulk said Bert Nash still has some time to find a site for the project and is interested in competing for federal ARPA dollars to help fund the project. He said many of those dollars would need to be spent by the end of 2024, in order to meet federal guidelines on when the pandemic relief funds must be expended.

Faulk said there is still time to find a site and tweak the project’s concept to fit the site. For example, he said if a site outside of downtown is selected, the project likely wouldn’t have a grocery store, but it might have some other sort of commercial component that could be beneficial to the project’s residents and the surrounding neighborhood.

Any project on the 18th and Haskell site, for example, likely would be much different than the downtown project. Krnisch said the 3.9 acre site along Haskell could support far more than 24 housing units, and likely would have to in order to be economically feasible. But he also said he’s interested in working with other agencies, in addition to Bert Nash.

“The site is way too big for 24 units,” Krsnich said. “I think that creates a unique opportunity for other agency providers to come up with ideas.”

It will be interesting see how the ideas progress. I would emphasize that while the idea of this project landing in downtown has been put on pause that there is still a chance it ends up in downtown. I say that because it sure appears the city is getting more serious about redeveloping city-owned, downtown parking lots.

Finkeldei said he expects the city before the end of the year to make a request for proposals from entities interested in redeveloping downtown parking lots. The idea of redeveloping parking lots is part of the city’s new downtown master plan. What that redevelopment could look like, though, is pretty uncertain.

Finkeldei said city staff members currently are trying to figure out how to best structure a request for proposals.

“Option 1 is if you have ideas, just tell us about them,” Finkeldei said of a possible RFP process. “Option 2 would be that we develop a series of guidelines the project would have to meet, like it would need to be parking neutral.”

The city has discussed that it wants to be wary of eliminating parking in downtown. That could mean redevelopment of city-owned surface parking lots may require developers to build underground parking or multistory parking garages to replace any existing parking that would be lost to new commercial or residential buildings.