Neighborhood Silence Is Golden

Photograph by Stefan Zacklin

When Alan and Yolanda Young started renovating a house in a troubled section of Kansas City, Mo., their intention was to do the job quickly and move on. The place became their home, however, when they decided to take on another project: the neighborhood.

Ivanhoe, which encompasses 300 square blocks and 12,000 people, was so plagued with drugs and guns that some residents didn’t want to walk a block to the meetings the Youngs organized and instead drove their cars. Since 1997, when the couple rekindled the dormant Ivanhoe Neighborhood Council, much of the drug activity has been eliminated — more than 200 “drug houses” have closed — and the sound of gunshots has become rare.

The council, one of many neighborhood-improvement groups across the country, gets much of the credit for making the area livable again. The charity boasts a full-time staff of three and 110 “block contacts,” whose mission is to patrol and maintain order on their blocks. Working closely with other nonprofit groups and with police officers, on an annual budget of $155,000 supplied mostly from the local Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the council offers a wide array of free programs to help residents. Youngsters enjoy after-school and summer recreation, and adults enroll in life-skills courses on such varied topics as managing money and wallpapering a house.

“The neighborhood would have gotten worse without re-energizing some of the people that were there,” says Mr. Young, the council’s board president and a carpenter by trade. Here, he and his wife stand in front of their renovated home, where, he says, “the neighborhood is a lot quieter.”