between the lines
pointed perspectives and penetrating punditry

The Battle for Verona Hills
by Jack Cashill

On the face of things Verona Hills would seem like the least likely battleground for a skirmish against the nominally Christian soldiers of the peace and justice crowd.

The modestly upscale neighborhood, which hugs the state line on the Missouri side south of I-435, may well be the best-integrated executive neighborhood west of Chicago. It is home to many prominent minorities as well as scores of well-intentioned whites who have chosen not to flee Kansas City for the more secure confines of Leawood just across the state line.

But as the residents of Verona Hills have come to learn the hard way, their increasingly nightmarish struggle against America’s social engineers has been as pre-scripted by the local media as a WWF smackdown, and, alas, they ain’t the good guys.

The skirmish began last May when Boys Hope Girls Hope (BHGH), a St. Louis-based non-profit, announced that it had acquired a suitably pricey home in the 11800 block of Pennsylvania, one that borders a small, neighborhood park.

It was only after the purchase that the neighbors got the news. BHGH did not bother to tell the neighborhood association, nor did it invite the association members to a meeting at a nearby church where the immediate neighbors learned of BHGH’s plans, a "done deal" by all accounts.

Those plans were to place eight adolescent boys and three adult leaders into the home. Frank Bednar, who lives four doors away, learned of the meeting the morning it was held. "It was intense from the get-go," says Bednar, "once the proverbial cat was out of the bag."

From the beginning, Bednar and other residents insist, the implication was that all neighborhood opposition was at best un-Christian. The fact that BHGH was about to insert eight youths who were, in their own words, "hurt and at-risk" into a family neighborhood on the edge of a children’s park was not supposed to concern the parents who lived there.

Good citizens that they are, the Verona Hills residents have tried to suppress their anxiety about the kids themselves. They all agree that BHGH’s cause is a fundamentally good one. But what has stunned them, disheartened them, and finally outraged them is the oddly arrogant and conniving way that BHGH has insinuated itself into Verona Hills—not the kind of behavior one expects from a bunch of presumed do-gooders.

According to the residents, BHGH had earlier tried to buy a house near Rockhurst High, but the reaction against it was so explosive that BHGH backed off. Wiser for the experience, BHGH used a cut-out, wealthy Leawood benefactor Don Knopke, to buy the Verona Hills home before anyone could object.

Unnerved, the Verona Hills Homes Association asked the city’s codes administrator to check out whether the plan conformed to local zoning laws. Of course, it didn’t. The subdivision was zoned exclusively for single-family residences. The eleven people in the group home would not remotely "be related by blood, marriage or adoption." BHGH appealed to the Board of Zoning Adjustment and lost again.

Despite its two legal setbacks, and the fact that some 85 percent of the residents polled their opposition to the group home, BHGH did the all-American thing. The non-profit used its benefactors’ good-spirited donations to sue the city in circuit court and lodge a complaint with the Department of Justice.

Wrote Councilman Charles Eddy’s office to the home association, "They [BHGH] have also announced that if they are successful in court, NO city in America will dare stand up against them." Indeed not. BHGH was playing hardball. The organization had admittedly distanced itself from its Catholic roots, and that distance was beginning to show.

In fact, as the residents were coming to learn, the non-profit’s use of state power to enforce its idea of altruism had a not-so-charming whiff of the soviet about it. To demonize the opposition, BHGH began to play its ultimate trump card, race, a gambit that the media always find irresistible. "Where do they want us to put it," BHGH’s Father Tom Pesci reportedly said of the neighbors’ opposition, "25th and whatever?"

At least one African-American in the Verona Hills’ leadership happened to grow up on "25th and whatever" and took double umbrage at Father Pesci’s insinuation. Said he, "The people from BHGH have called us racist and snobs as a matter of course." But when Pesci sniffed at the idea of a home on 25th Street, the folks in Verona Hills had to wonder just who was the racist and snob.

As to The Star, as one might expect, it reduced the neighbors’ opposition to the simple-minded and hard-hearted, "They just don’t want the home in their neighborhood for fear it could harm property values."

That is, of course, partly true. The group home does harm property values. But what The Star fails to examine is why. The reason is entirely rational. After all, what parent in his or her right mind would willingly move next to a home of eight or so admittedly "hurt and at-risk" adolescent boys, whatever their color? Sad but true, these are the kind of people who commit America’s crime, at least a wildly disproportionate percent of it.

If one of them were ever to "go off" and bop a neighbor kid over the head with a baseball bat or worse—a not unthinkable prospect—the parents would forever be racked with guilt for ever having moved there or having failed to move away. Even if nothing ever happened, nearby parents would always live with the anxiety that it could. For current residents, this was by no means part of the understanding—or the price—when they bought into a single-family neighborhood.

The only way the neighbors will be able to get any kind of value out of their homes is to sell their homes when these kids are all off for the day at Worlds of Fun or some such place. Honesty will cost the sellers dearly. "Oh, by the way, there’s a group home for at-risk kids right across the park." That, alas, is a $100,000 sentence.

Fearing the inevitable, and largely abandoned by city leaders, the neighbors have already begun to postpone home improvements and to quietly exit the neighborhood. One neighbor, who has not yet lost his sense of humor, writes:

"All future improvements, especially those planned for the next 6-12 months are on hold. And if they allow the group home to stay, the improvements won’t be done at all and I’m off to the other side of the state line. Maybe I’ll even try to buy the house next door to the guy who bought the house in Verona Hills and gave it to the BHGH. Wait a minute, I can’t do that—he lives in Hallbrook."

The views expressed in this column are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram's Magazine.