OFFICIAL: Briarcliff Village

[QueSi2Opie]

this is silly. the only reason that place is there is because of barnes and her developer crony. you know that and i know that. both parties live within walking distance of the place. barnes lives right behind the place and garney lives across the hiway. he wanted to develop the land and make lots of money doing it. she wanted to hook him up and have a place close to her house where she could shop at stores she liked. i live a mile away, but they don't have anything there that i would like to be a patron of. i do not know one single person that i know personally that has been there.

rimann's is a quality booze shop. the only reason they are going under at that locale is that they aren't getting the traffic to support them. 

let's see what the place looks like this time next year. i'm thinking it won't be good.

That's funny, I've eaten at Trezzo Mare and Piropos (when I lived in Overland Park), and shopped at Green Market (when I lived downtown). The project is good infill close to downtown.  Not everyone living in a $320,000+ condo in the downtown loop/river market wants to shop and dine repeatively on the Plaza.

[GRID]

this is silly. the only reason that place is there is because of barnes and her developer crony. you know that and i know that. both parties live within walking distance of the place. barnes lives right behind the place and garney lives across the hiway. he wanted to develop the land and make lots of money doing it. she wanted to hook him up and have a place close to her house where she could shop at stores she liked. i live a mile away, but they don't have anything there that i would like to be a patron of. i do not know one single person that i know personally that has been there. 

rimann's is a quality booze shop. the only reason they are going under at that locale is that they aren't getting the traffic to support them. 

let's see what the place looks like this time next year. i'm thinking it won't be good.

nice.

WTF is wrong with you?  Do you seriously want to see a development like this fail just in spite of Barnes?

BTW, Barnes lived in Brookside when this development was fist proposed.  This was not an easy development to do.  It was very risky and at times many thought it would never get off the ground.

Now we have a very nice development only minutes from downtown.  A development that replaced true blight and gave our city a more grand entrance.  A development that competes head to head with Corporate Woods and Renner Blvd much more than Downtown KC.  A development that gives people that do make good money a reason and a choice to live in KCMO proper and not Lenexa, Leawood or Lee's Summit if they don't want to live in a plaza condo, a development that will expose it's employees to Downtown and KCMO in general because otherwise they might be working on 135th, a development that has helped stabilized the older lower northland and is also helping give Riveriside (part of Briarcliff is in Riverside) a new image. A development that has many "local" businesses rather than chains that everybody on this forurm can't stand.

And people on this "development" forum want nothing more than to see it fail just so they can rub it in Barnes face.

I just don't get it.

I wish some of you would call up one of these developers and actually talk to them about their projects and get to know them and see what they risk and what they go through to build something like that.  Try it.

If I were a developer in KC right now.  I would pack my bags and bolt this city faster than shit.

Or go to KS and get some star bonds and at least make sure I will make some money while dragging my name through the mud.

[GRID]

That's funny, I've eaten at Trezzo Mare and Piropos (when I lived in Overland Park), and shopped at Green Market (when I lived downtown). The project is good infill close to downtown.  Not everyone living in a $320,000+ condo in the downtown loop/river market wants to shop and dine repeatively on the Plaza.

What?  You mean downtown residents shop at Briarcliff?  No way.

[moderne]

Briarcliff has had a profound positive influence in that area where Platte and Clay counties meet.  Even Riverside, if you have not been through there for a while, looks great and has some nice new housing areas.

[Beermo]

nice.

WTF is wrong with you?  Do you seriously want to see a development like this fail just in spite of Barnes?

BTW, Barnes lived in Brookside when this development was fist proposed.  This was not an easy development to do.  It was very risky and at times many thought it would never get off the ground.

Now we have a very nice development only minutes from downtown.  A development that replaced true blight and gave out city a more grand entrance.  A development that competes head to head with Corporate Woods and Renner Blvd much more than Downtown KC.  A development that gives people that do make good money a reason and a choice to live in KCMO proper and not Lenexa, Leawood or Lee's Summit if they don't want to live in a plaza condo, a development that will expose it's employees to Downtown and KCMO in general because otherwise they might be working on 135th, a development that has helped stabilized the older lower northland and is also helping give Riveriside (part of Briarcliff is in Riverside) a new image. A development that has many "local" businesses rather than chains that everybody on this forurm can't stand.

And people on this "development" forum want nothing more than to see it fail just so they can rub it in Barnes face.

I just don't get it.

I wish some of you would call up one of these developers and actually talk to them about their projects and get to know them and see what they risk and what they go through to build something like that.  Try it.

If I were a developer in KC right now.  I would pack my bags and bolt this city faster than shit.

Or go to KS and get some star bonds and at least make sure I will make some money while dragging my name through the mud.

there's a lot of things wrong with me, but seeing a duck for a duck is not one of them.

i have no problem with the development and hope it grows and thrives,otherwise k.c. will be screwed.

a problem i do have is the huge amount of TIF money that went to this place. this duck of a development told us it was going to be a swan. it even looks like a swan, but if you are already having stores closing, than maybe your first impressions were correct and the swan is actually a duck.

your thoughts on all development seem to be "let's build, build, build and build some more". you never seem to question any new development or rehabs. you never question who is on the hook for these projects either. you take everybody involved in any development at their word and seem not to care about how much money that the developers get from governments around here and how you and i will be paying for any failure out of our pockets while the developer makes out like a bandit. you just want to see a building go up.

you have a development fetish and don't care how your fetish gets scratched, as long as it gets scratched  somehow.

TIF's are very useful tools, but were not needed in this case.  what the tif did in this case was take a shaky and very possibly a money losing idea and make it a reality. if the developer thought that this place would make any money at all for him, he wouldn't have wasted any time building it. he wouldn't have asked for a tif. he would of just got his permits and built the damn thing and hope like hell that the city would of stayed out of his way. 

if you do not question your government and the people who run it, than your are a fool. in some countries you don't have that right. in this country we do and it's essential that people question our government and voice our opinions on how it is run.

if garney would of built this project on his own dime and it failed than all i would be doing would be questioning his intellect on why he even built it, but since my taxes were used to pay for most of the cost , i feel it is my right and duty as a taxpayer to question the whole deal. i'm not hating on him. i don't blame the guy for trying to line his pockets on a questionable project. he's obviously a very smart guy. he suckered the city into giving him a lot of cash for a place that is already failing after a year.

i could be wrong and using the rimann's example is a poor choice, but that place was built with my money and i don't like the indications that are showing after only a year.

prove me wrong and i will admit i'm wrong.

tell me that you and all your friends frequent that place on a regular basis. tell me you know tons of folks that are fighting tooth and nail to get into one of the stores there.

i want to be wrong. please prove me wrong on all aspects of my opinions. please, i am begging you. i really, really want to be wrong on this issue because i don't want my taxes to go up or my services that i'm receiving now to go down because the city has to take it up the wazoo because it failed.     

btw, this place doesn't compete with corporate woods or anything else. obviously you don't live in the northland. there are empty huge office buildings all over the place up here. take a drive up I-29 sometime and then drive around the outer roads and inner roads. you will find all sorts of failed developments and buildings that sit unused.

[Beermo]

Briarcliff has had a profound positive influence in that area where Platte and Clay counties meet.  Even Riverside, if you have not been through there for a while, looks great and has some nice new housing areas.

i totally agree. the place looks great.

my basic question on this whole issue is that if this place was needed, then why did they need to use any tif at all to build it, especially the huge amount that they got from the city?

if the demand was there, then there would of been developers from around the world fighting tooth and nail to build it. just like there were developers from around the world coming to k.c to get their piece of the k.c tif pie.

can you answer my question.

[aknowledgeableperson]

  what the tif did in this case was take a shaky and very possibly a money losing idea and make it a reality. if the developer thought that this place would make any money at all for him, he wouldn't have wasted any time building it. he wouldn't have asked for a tif. he would of just got his permits and built the damn thing and hope like hell that the city would of stayed out of his way. 

Isn't that the case with every TIF project?

[GRID]

Beermo, I was against the "super"tif for the briarcliff hotel.  I was against the tiff for North Oak and Vivion, I do not favor any tifs in the northland unless it's for infrastructure funding for major city streets (which has been mostly the case).  I was extremely against the idea of tearing down the park place (now a hotel) for blackwell sanders, I now question the proposed tif for a development on cleaver that will tear down historic structures when we have plenty of under utilized land to build a tifed project on. The tifs being handed out in Blue Springs are INSANE.  Indep has actually done quite well with their incentives.  Lee's Summit has as well.  Olathe and Lenexa should not be doing tifs for any reason on flat farm land in  suburbs with annual incomes of 80k plus. I don't support tiff on residential.  I think super tiffs should be saved for the most extreme cases.

Again, nearly all of the incentives that KCMO hands out are justified.  A couple of bad ones got through, but by far, I think they have been doing what they had to do to get the northland up to par, get downtown turned around and keep the plaza from going stale.  They need to work on the east side and the SE area, but no amount of tif will bring development that doesn't work.  Bannister is the next big tif that I would probably support under nearly any scenario because it is needed so bad.

You can't just compare KCMO to Denver and Milwaukee and St Louis when it comes to Tifs.  Apples to oranges. KC uses more tifs than Denver.  So what.  There are so many differences in those two towns it's not even funny.

Then to go an ignore what's going on in KS.  KCK has to be the most aggressive city in the nation for handing out incentives.  The incentives to build VW, the speedway etc are off the charts and don't even compare to what KCMO is doing.  I'm not dissing KCK, but you have to look at the entire picture.

What do you guys want this city to do?  I have asked that 100 times.  Do we tif and keep the money at least in KC or do we send our sales taxes to Jeff City and St Louis.  Do we go ahead and tell a developer to use city sales tax to rebuild or build a new 4 lane parkway or do we let the sales taxes to to the city and watch 60% of the money get lost in the city's massive bureaucracy?  Do you know how inefficient KCMO is at getting something like an arterial built vs a private developer?  I'm sure you do.

That's why it take the city four years and it cost four times as much to widen 85th than it does for a developer to do build a new four lane parkway with less money in the northland.

tifs are not all bad and people in general don't even understand them and how they work.

It's so much deeper than people understand.

[Beermo]

Isn't that the case with every TIF project?

no. a tif, from what i know (i also could be wrong) is used as a incentive to get a developer to build a needed project in a blighted area that the developer thinks is too risky to use all of his own money.

the only thing that applies to briarcliff is that the developer thought is was too risky to use all of his his own money. that area was neither needed nor blighted. it was just not developed.

and i am not against tifs, development or developers. i am against the unneeded use of any tif that went to this place or any place that does not meet the criteria for a tif. it did not need a tif. any. at all. none, zilch, zero. nada. 

[Beermo]

Beermo, I was against the "super"tif for the briarcliff hotel.  I was against the tiff for North Oak and Vivion, I do not favor any tifs in the northland unless it's for infrastructure funding for major city streets (which has been mostly the case).  I was extremely against the idea of tearing down the park place (now a hotel) for blackwell sanders, I now question the proposed tif for a development on cleaver that will tear down historic structures when we have plenty of under utilized land to build a tifed project on. The tifs being handed out in Blue Springs are INSANE.  Indep has actually done quite well with their incentives.  Lee's Summit has as well.  Olathe and Lenexa should not be doing tifs for any reason on flat farm land in  suburbs with annual incomes of 80k plus. I don't support tiff on residential.  I think super tiffs should be saved for the most extreme cases.

Again, nearly all of the incentives that KCMO hands out are justified.  A couple of bad ones got through, but by far, I think they have been doing what they had to do to get the northland up to par, get downtown turned around and keep the plaza from going stale.  They need to work on the east side and the SE area, but no amount of tif will bring development that doesn't work.  Bannister is the next big tif that I would probably support under nearly any scenario because it is needed so bad.

You can't just compare KCMO to Denver and Milwaukee and St Louis when it comes to Tifs.  Apples to oranges. KC uses more tifs than Denver.  So what.  There are so many differences in those two towns it's not even funny.

Then to go an ignore what's going on in KS.  KCK has to be the most aggressive city in the nation for handing out incentives.  The incentives to build VW, the speedway etc are off the charts and don't even compare to what KCMO is doing.  I'm not dissing KCK, but you have to look at the entire picture.

What do you guys want this city to do?  I have asked that 100 times.  Do we tif and keep the money at least in KC or do we send our sales taxes to Jeff City and St Louis.  Do we go ahead and tell a developer to use city sales tax to rebuild or build a new 4 lane parkway or do we let the sales taxes to to the city and watch 60% of the money get lost in the city's massive bureaucracy?  Do you know how inefficient KCMO is at getting something like an arterial built vs a private developer?  I'm sure you do.

That's why it take the city four years and it cost four times as much to widen 85th than it does for a developer to do build a new four lane parkway with less money in the northland.

tifs are not all bad and people in general don't even understand them and how they work.

It's so much deeper than people understand.

well then, if what you say is true about your stand against tif's then i was wrong and apologize on that matter. if fact if what you say in your post is true than we seem to see things on this subject eye to eye.

i still believe you have a deep new building fetish and posting about briarcliff being a good thing without also objecting to how it was funded was your fault. not mine.

i am so pissed about the tif for vivion and n.oak i can't see straight. i don't blame the developer for building it, but the main reason it's being built is because of the tif's. it is not needed here up north. if it was the developer would of built it using his own money. 

[aknowledgeableperson]

Sorry, the area was blighted.  It was not a greenfield area.  if you go back to when the TIF was first granted the area was in a sorry shape that would have been cost prohibitive because of the mining underground and some of the above ground areas.

[Beermo]

Sorry, the area was blighted.  It was not a greenfield area.  if you go back to when the TIF was first granted the area was in a sorry shape that would have been cost prohibitive because of the mining underground and some of the above ground areas.

you are sorry.

the area was not blighted. i partied on those hills where the old houses were when i was a teenager. it had mines underneath, just like babydoes did, but the area had grass, trees and foliage for as long as i can remember. having mines underneath and being cost prohibited to build on does not make any case for a tif. the developer owned that land and wanted to build there without using his own money. that's it.

tif equals blighted, needed, risky. that's it. even if it was blighted and risky, it was not needed.

[aknowledgeableperson]

However, because of the mining the area would not support the kind of development that was planned.  There was a huge expense to reinforce the area because of the mines.

[Beermo]

However, because of the mining the area would not support the kind of development that was planned.  There was a huge expense to reinforce the area because of the mines.

so what! he could of built it somewhere else. instead he used my tax dollars to build it where he wanted to. on his land.

[justin8216]

that is not surprising.  i never saw anyone else in there when i was there.  too bad.

it really seems to me that a lot of the BV businesses are struggling.  whenever i go there, with the exception of Piropos and maybe a couple other places, it's quite dead.  maybe it doesn't have enough (upscale) rooftops nearby to support it? 

I had a feeling that Briarcliff Village would be a boon doggle. In spite of the wealth of the immediate neighborhood the larger area (riverside and the lower northland) is relatively poor. The market for most of those stores simply doesn't exist in that area.

[chingon]

Is this project really "struggling"? I don't know that the closing of a liquor store spells doom for an entire strip mall. The first year is awful hard for retail of any stripe, in any location. Especially boutique retail. I mean, even VW, apparently THE retail success story of this middling metro has had businesses shutter their doors.

Now, I haven't been to the Briarcliff development, and probably will not until the next time I want Piropos, which could be a while, but I didn't get the impression it was failing to attract businesses. Enlighten me.

[justin8216]

Is this project really "struggling" though. I don't know that the closing of a liquor store spells doom for a glorified strip mall. The first year is awful hard for retail of any stripe, especially boutique retail, like an upscale liquor store. I mean, even VW, apparently THE retail success story of this middling metro has had businesses shutter their doors.
Now, I haven't been to the Briarcliff development, and probably will not until the next time I want Piropos, which could be a while, but I didn't get the impression it was failing to attract businesses. Enlighten me.

Perhaps "upscale liquor store" as a business model doesn't work. There was what you might classify as an "upscale liquor store" near the Village West area and the last time I drove by it looked like it was closed down to, although I didn't stop to look close and see for sure.

[chingon]

I'm pretty sure the Berbiglia's on Union Hill used to be something else, or maybe just a more "upscale" Berbiglia's. My memory is pretty much shit, but I think it was initially something more schmaltzy, which failed, and reopened as the mediocre lik it is today.

[aknowledgeableperson]

It has been a long time since I have been in a liquor store but from what I can remember Berbiglia would not be called upscale.  Whether it is Berbiglia's or Rihmann's or anything similiar these stores need volume and traffic.  Face it BV was not meant to be either high traffic or volume.  From what I can tell it was geared to be more unique, an exclusive area that valued more quality than quantity or volume.

[kuwolde]

you are sorry.

the area was not blighted. i partied on those hills where the old houses were when i was a teenager. it had mines underneath, just like babydoes did, but the area had grass, trees and foliage for as long as i can remember. having mines underneath and being cost prohibited to build on does not make any case for a tif. the developer owned that land and wanted to build there without using his own money. that's it.

tif equals blighted, needed, risky. that's it. even if it was blighted and risky, it was not needed.

What school did you go to Beermo?  I remember going up there when the roads were first being built through there.