photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

The northwest corner of Ninth and Delaware streets is pictured Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2026. In the foreground is the Wishing Bench.

A new sign of progress appeared this month for an affordable apartment project in East Lawrence that escaped having some of its city funding clawed back earlier this year.

The project is 9 Del Lofts II, a Low-Income Housing Tax Credit project that longtime developer Tony Krsnich is planning to build at 716 E. Ninth St. Earlier this month, a site plan for it was filed at City Hall, meaning the development is starting to seek its necessary approvals from the city.

We attempted to reach Krsnich for more details about 9 Del Lofts II and its next steps, but hadn’t heard back from him as of Wednesday afternoon. But the site plan shows that he’s planning a four-story apartment building with six live-work units on the ground floor and 12 apartment units on each of the upper three floors, for a total of 42 new apartments.

What the site plan won’t show is how many of those units are affordable. And that’s a number that has caused some conflict around the project in the past.

As we’ve reported, if a couple of decisions by city leaders had gone differently, 9 Del Lofts II might not have secured the affordable housing incentives it needed to move forward.

Krsnich, who has experience in affordable housing projects, received money twice from the city’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund for 9 Del Lofts II. The first award, for $450,000, was in 2025, and the second, for $80,000, was in 2026. But the $80,000 award took several twists and turns – including two separate City Commission votes and some statements from an advisory board chair that Krsnich said put the project in serious danger.

Krsnich was seeking the $80,000 for a “fee waiver” that would help his application for the state Low-Income Housing Tax Credits. The state uses a rubric to determine which projects get credits, and one of the criteria is whether the project can get this type of waiver. During the award process, Krsnich said that this waiver could make or break the project.

But last November, the Affordable Housing Advisory Board, which makes recommendations for how to use the trust fund money, didn’t recommend that it be funded. AHAB was concerned that since the $450,000 award, the number of affordable units Krsnich was proposing to build had changed from 29 to 26.

Then, last December, the City Commission overrode that recommendation. The commissioners unanimously voted to fund the fee waiver anyway, with the condition that Krsnich bring the number of affordable units back up to 29.

After this, Krsnich formally requested that he be allowed to reduce the number of units to 26. Then, this spring, AHAB recommended that the city invoke a clawback provision to try to recoup $46,000 of the fee waiver. The City Commission voted 3-2 not to claw the funding back.

AHAB’s then-chair, Christina Gentry, said at that meeting that she thought there was “a lack of transparency” surrounding the number of housing units. She alleged that Krsnich was making “irresponsible, silent changes that were uninformed, and it seemed as though there was a dishonest application process.”

Krsnich disputed this in a complaint to the city attorney, in which he asked for a formal apology and for Gentry to resign from the board. The complaint said that Krsnich had provided the required information on 9 Del Lofts II throughout the process; it also called Gentry’s statements “defamatory” and said that Krsnich had gotten a call after the meeting from the staff of the Kansas Housing Resources Corporation, which is responsible for the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program.

Gentry no longer serves on AHAB. Her last meeting with the board was in August, when her two-year term ended and the City Commission did not reappoint her.

Going back to the site plan, it doesn’t have too much more new information on 9 Del Lofts II, but one thing it does say is that the building won’t displace an East Lawrence landmark: the Wishing Bench.

This ever-changing community art installation invites passersby to sit down, make a wish and contribute to its eclectic decorations. How the tradition originated isn’t clear, but the current version of the bench was created after the original one was destroyed in a fire in 2021.

Some in the East Lawrence community had thought before that Krsnich’s projects would require the bench to be demolished or moved. But the site plan shows that won’t be necessary. It specifically states that the existing Wishing Bench and bus stop on the site will remain where they are.