The Keystone Community Corp. aims to engender goodwill among innovators in burgeoning Kansas City industries with the redevelopment of a nonprofit's former "legacy home" in the East Crossroads.
Equity partner Sunflower Development Group has Goodwill of Western Missouri and Eastern Kansas' former office and warehouse building at 1817 Campbell St. under contract. The 78,060-square-foot structure, which Goodwill employees vacated in November 2019, now is envisioned as the Keystone Innovation District's first hub location.
The site could house advanced manufacturing innovation centers, co-working space for entrepreneurs, university lab space or offices for workforce development, Keystone Community Corp. CEO Kevin McGinnis told the city's Industrial Development Authority on Thursday.
While the nature and occupancy size of Keystone's lease in the former Goodwill building continues to evolve, "We are excited to continue working with Kevin and the Keystone Innovation District on the repositioning of a property that Sunflower feels will be another step in pushing the success of the Crossroads to the East," Mark Moberly, the firm's director of development, told the Kansas City Business Journal.
The new Keystone hub is meant to complement the innovation district, unofficially bounded west to east by Holmes Street and The Paseo, and north to south by Interstate 670 and the railroad tracks south of 19th Street.
McGinnis said this programming will be developed around what long-term regional forecasts have identified to be emerging industry clusters — among them advanced manufacturing, robotics, artificial intelligence, biology and life sciences.
Sustainability in general also is slated to be a key focus. McGinnis said the district has the opportunity to develop a "sustainability test bed," in which startups could showcase new building materials, construction techniques and strategies for stormwater and wastewater management. Keystone and Launch KC are developing concepts for a sustainable infrastructure accelerator in service of that focus.
"The idea is to bring all of these different industries together because that's really how the innovation will occur and where we will see these things start to become a hub-and-spoke model back out into the region," McGinnis said Thursday.
Keystone seeks a $150,000 grant from the authority to help cover planning and pre-development costs as the Goodwill transaction moves toward closing within the next two months. The nonprofit already has received other commitments, including funding from Children's Mercy and Kauffman Foundation, and programming by the Sunderland Foundation, McGinnis said.
In the meantime, Keystone in mid-October executed a short-term office lease nearby at 800 E. 18th St., which the nonprofit anticipates occupying in the fourth quarter.
Launched in 2018, Keystone sought to address what McGinnis described as a local deficit of places for bringing together innovation stakeholders, like universities and corporations, to catalyze economic development.
Once the Keystone Innovation District is up and running, the collaborative impacts could be comparable to what other cities experience from major downtown universities, such as the University of Texas in Austin or Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Jim Erickson, government affairs officer with the Economic Development Corp. of Kansas City, told the Industrial Development Authority.
"To do that in downtown Kansas City will just create an enormous economic impact," he said.
Development team partners for the Goodwill building redevelopment include Centric as contractor and Gould Evans as architect.
