In The News

Fall 2007
By Bill Wilson
Published with Permission from The Wichita Eagle

EAST SIDE POISED TO GROW
GEORGE ABLAH AND CHARLES KOCH SAW POTENTIAL OF K-96
THEIR VISION IS PAYING OFF

Jack Ritchie's bullish on east Wichita.

"We're going to continue to see growth out east as long as the Wichita economy stays firm," said Ritchie, the chief executive of Ritchie Development. "In fact, we're just getting started up there in terms of the livability of the area. I don't see anything slowing it."

Ritchie's assessment is embraced by a group of analysts and developers who say the best is yet to come as Wichita spreads toward Andover.

The movement east is more than a century old. The latest spurt was kick-sta rted 25 years ago by two visionary Wichita businessmen who led the charge for the east K-96 bypass.

And there's no end in sight, according to Sedgwick County and Wichita planners who say that the housing and commercial growth spurt should continue through 2030, tying Wichita and Andover together.

"Call it an educated guess," said John Schlegel, the city-county planning director, "but based on the trends we see on the ground, we see no signs of the growth slowing down at all."

East Wichita today

The current spurt is a continuation of an almost century-old desire for quality east-side housing.

The proof is in the numbers. Planners forecast anywhere from 26 to 37 new homes a year along 21st Street to Andover and anywhere from 10 to 18 a year along the southern Kellogg corridor.

That's what made it possible for Wichita developer Paul Jackson's Vantage Point Properties to leap into the Waterfront office project and follow that with a mixed-use development at Kellogg and Andover Road .

"Something we hear a lot when we lease offices is, the folks in an organiza tion making those decisions want to be close to home," Jackson said.

"What attracted us about the Waterfront is quality - upscale housing, good restaurants, supporting retail development."

The influx of those businesses to the east side has driven a lot of the current residential growth, Ritchie said.

"A lot have come from downtown, but there's been medical, other things, just a lot of employment," he said.

"The bottom line to that is people want to live near work. They don't want to drive 20 minutes to work. They want to drive five."

The quality of Andover 's school district also has been crucial to the growth spurt, Ritchie said.

"Families want to be in that district because of its general excellence," he said.

"And traffic patterns have changed. It's easy to get from there to just about anywhere else in Wichita."

Ablah, Koch and K-96

That traffic change, some say, is the real driver behind east-side growth.

Two longtime Wichita businessmen saw what an east-side K-96 bypass could do for commercial and residential development, and they put their money where their dreams were.

In the early 1980s, Charles Koch and George Ablah formed ABKO, a real estate investment company that bought about 2,500 acres in northeast Wichita.

They also donated 10 miles of right-of-way - about $4.5 million worth of land - along K-96 to the state of Kansas at a time when the state had no money to pay for it.

The donation helped push the bypass project through the state transpor tation system, with K-96 coming on line in 1992 instead of a decade later.

"I went to Charles and said, 'You've got 2,000 acres of land out there behind your offices that will be worth twice as much if they put K-96 through there behind you,' " Ablah recalled.

"That road created just an unbelievable change in Wichita . All of a sudden, it became a reality to go east because you can get downtown in eight minutes and west in 11 minutes without a stop sign."

That was - and continues to be - a big lure for developers like Don Slawson, who's developing commercial and residential projects at 21st and Greenwich.

"K-96 isn't solely a loop road now," said Jerry Jones, Slawson's vice president for commercial development.

"It's become a more integral part of transportation on the east side of town, and that creates a lot of opportunities in our business."

Past and future

Those opportunities in Wichita date back to the 1880s, said Stan Longhofer, director of the Center for Real Estate at Wichita State University.

"From the early years of this city, you can see how affluent newer housing has moved north and east, beginning at College Hill and moving on out with Rockwood, Vickridge, Woodlawn Village and heading northeast," he said.

With K-96 tying the east side to downtown and the west, it became easier for developers like Ritchie - armed with city-provided utility improvements - to begin building, Longhofer said.

"That really reinvigorated things and moved the development out again," Longhofer said.

There's room for more east-side growth, but the experts differ a bit on the extent of it.

Ablah is cautious about the area's future.

"We're in a sense overbuilt, I'm afraid," he said. "It's going to slow down some, but I do think Wichita has a good chance of continuing to grow."

New and diversified industry -"We'd be on a lot safer footing if we had a Toyota plant here," Ablah said - would insulate Wichita against any economic fluctuations that might slow or stop east-side growth.

WSU's Longhofer, though, sides with Schlegel: There's no east-side slowdown in sight.

"Because the affluent rooftops began moving east, retail started wanting to move," he said. "Then offices wanted to move.

"Once those landed out there, it becomes even more desirable for rooftops and you've got development that feeds on itself."

Waterfront developer Steve Clark has an even brighter view of the future.

"That ground inside K-96, the die is now cast for how it will develop and in five or 10 years, you're not going to recognize that area," Clark said.

"It'll be a whole new city."