KC Sun Fresh lost $885,000 last year and now has only about 4,000 shoppers a week. That’s down from 14,000 a few years ago, according to Emmet Pierson Jr., who leads Community Builders of Kansas City, the nonprofit that leases the site from the city. Despite a recent $750,000 cash infusion from the city, the shelves are almost bare.
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Nearly a decade ago, Kansas City spent $17 million to buy and fix up the moribund Linwood Shopping Center on busy Prospect Avenue. KC Sun Fresh opened in 2018 with a salad bar, fresh shrimp on ice and flower bouquets. “We were thrilled,” Taylor recalled.
The store was first run by a private grocer; Pierson’s nonprofit took over in 2022. Sales were okay at first, but after the pandemic, crime rose and sales began to plummet. Police data show assaults, robberies and shoplifting in the immediate vicinity have been on an upward trend since 2020. Shoplifting cases have nearly tripled.
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Advocates like Taylor have accused the city of neglecting the property. Discussions about fixing a fence behind the store dragged on for months until it was repaired in early July, and the city just remedied the sewer stench that Taylor and others say has pervaded the store for weeks.
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The issues defy quick solutions. The police department’s East Side patrol division is just four blocks away, though police Maj. Chris Young said that even an “overwhelming presence” of officers in recent months didn’t significantly decrease incidents. Young, the patrol division’s commander, links the rise in crime to fallout from the pandemic, rising inflation and a shortage of police officers following racial injustice protests in 2020.
Part of the problem is the city’s lack of a jail, Young said. The left-leaning council closed the previous facility in 2009 as a cost-saving measure — a move the Kansas City Star has called a “$250 million mistake” — and so people arrested for minor crimes are quickly released instead of being held in rural counties miles away.
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