(upbeat music) - Welcome to another edition of Kansas City Experience.

I'm Brad Austin, Creative Arts Producer for Kansas City PBS.

Kansas City Experience brings you segments from Kansas City PBS, "Flatland," and, "The Bridge" that you may have missed.

We all know it's been a tumultuous January, so let's go ahead and look forward to Valentine's Day with "The Bridge" performance from St. Paul and The Broken Bones.

♪ My love is growing warmer, warmer ♪ ♪ As our affair grows old ♪ ♪ I've been loving you hard ♪ The Kansas City film community continues to grow and become attractive to creators across the country.

We take a look at a couple of projects that put Kansas City in the spotlight.

- We've been deciding where we're going to bring Queer Eye and fell crazy in love with Kansas City.

- I'd explain it as kind of like an experimental narrative like visual music film.

We touch on a lot of anxieties and emotions that people felt during COVID.

- But first we examine a crisis in Kansas City that continues to intensify during the pandemic.

Despite moratoriums, evictions continue not only for those unable to pay rent.

(tense music) (doors rattling) (people chanting) - [Group] KC tenants ain't playing, playing.

- In our homes, we're staying, staying.

- [Group] KC tenants ain't playing, playing.

- In our homes, we're staying, staying.

I don't know about y'all, but I knew that evictions were taking place, but when I heard that 1700 since June?

- [Woman] That ain't right!

- [Group] That ain't right!

- [Woman] This system has allowed my landlord to illegally evict me and my children.

We are in the middle of a pandemic.

They strictly don't even give a damn about the CDC moratorium.

- Our purposes is to disrupt the eviction process, and slow down the eviction filings and hearings at scale.

- And we want to see a percent reduction in writs of execution and sheriff's evictions, which are the really brutal kind of end stage of that formal process, where the sheriff shows up and actually changes a lock and forces someone out of their home once and for all.

- No one wants to evict, because by the time you get to that point, you've miss several months worth of mortgage payment and writ payments, and you're in dire straits.

I'm talking about surviving today in the middle of a pandemic.

- The courts clearly have license to issue their own moratoriums.

That's clear from the federal government.

That's clear from the authority that Judge Byrne used previously when he issued a moratorium.

It's always dangerous to evict people and extremely dangerous during a pandemic.

- The eviction moratorium helps no one.

And so when the moratorium ends, everybody's in trouble.

I'm in trouble because I haven't been able to pay my mortgage payments, because my house in on fire.

The tenant's in trouble because now all of a sudden, where they couldn't make a $500, $600 a month payment, now they're expected to pay $3,000 or $4,000 all at once.

The way to prevent an eviction is to get the rent paid.

And I'm talking to the United Way and they have money that if not spent, will go back to the end of this month to the federal government, the money is here.

Energy could be put up front and preventing the evictions to begin with, than on the other end, trying to extend the eviction moratorium, which extends the problems and the damage to those tenants who do end up partaking in it.

- Landlords have been able to continue filing cases, they've been able to continue prosecuting cases.

The law only stops that tenant from being forcibly removed from their house, but the court process can still go forward unfortunately.

(tense music) - The current moratorium from the CDC does not prevent us from filing evictions based on attendance, criminal activity, if they are threatening the health or safety of other residents, damaging or posing an immediate or a significant threat to property, violating housing codes.

Again, we terminate for something other than non-payment of rent.

I mean, a lot of non-paying tenants are also bad actors.

They are also not good housekeepers.

There are, they have a lot of problems in their life.

- There's many reasons.

- And the CDC puts forth five ways that you can do that, that you see here.

I don't need to read them to you.

The most useful one is violating any other contractual obligation other than timely payment of rent.

- We don't want to be saying false things to the court.

That would not be good, especially in this political environment.

It is limited to non-payment of rent cases, But you know, we're having to make up a lot of things.

- What the federal government did is they issued kind of really a quasimoratorium that only comes into play as a tenant actually learns about it and then exercises their rights under it.

And so there's a whole lot of tenants out there who don't know about the moratorium, don't know that they have to file a declaration in order to be protected by it, and oftentimes really need legal advice, an attorney to assist them in analyzing whether or not they even qualify for the moratorium.

There's some types of evictions that it doesn't apply to at all.

We're hearing from a lot of tenants right now who are getting notices to vacate.

They haven't tried to negotiate.

A lot of landlords are just flat out refusing to negotiate.

(cars driving) - So I got home Sunday afternoon and like see this paper under my door, and it said, eviction notice, and like right away, I was like, crap, did I like forget to pay rent?

Like, what did I do?

What did I do wrong?

And then it's like, we're renovating.

- I'm currently on quarantine right now for two weeks.

Recovering from COVID.

If this hadn't happened to me, this select two weeks, and it had happened like, what, January 31st, like I could not be moving right now.

Like I could not be caring boxes, I could not be going up and down five flights of stairs.

I'd make it up and down once and be gasping for air.

Like, you know, statistically, there's gotta be at least one person in here moving out during that time that's going to have COVID.

We don't have an elevator.

So people are going to be literally killing themselves to move out.

- I do not apologize whatsoever.

Financially, it's really not a smart thing for me to do, but kind of been in my mind here for a couple years that if ever a building needed the renovation, the Alps is the one.

I want my tenants to have reliable heat, reliable water pressure, plumbing, drain lines, supply lines, electrical lines, gotta bust open the walls, and how the heck can people live there if we're busting open the walls?

I know it's the responsible thing to do, and I take my responsibility to my tenants very seriously.

- He's spinning it as if he's doing it for us.

It just doesn't add up.

- There is no benefit to us to have these improvements, because I think like you said, a lot of us chose to live here and sign those agreements of asbestos and lead paint and all of these things, because this is what we could afford, and nobody's saying, oh, we'd love that.

We'd love those issues, but it's like, that's what we can afford, so clearly we're already kind of stretched.

We're struggling to find deposits in new housing and extended leases past the time that we might have had other plans.

You know, we're creating an entirely different timeline not only ourselves, but our pockets.

- He knows what a January is like.

He knows that we are in a pandemic.

It's the complete refusal to understand the climate and the context of it.

- Today, we're just going through and getting door to door signatures for tenants to sign off on a possible list of demands that they will try to unionize and argue for.

Over 45 tenants in this building have signed on to fight Del Hedgepath as they are being displaced.

- We, the residents of the Alps Apartments have formed a tenant union and demand the following.

Reimbursement for any rent increased paid in 2020, reimbursement for December 2020 rent, security deposits returned in full to each tenant by January 1st, 2021, construction dumpsters provided for tenants use while moving, no fines or legal actions to be levied against tenants during or after the next two months, no rent collecting for January, 2021.

- I feel like it would be perfectly reasonable if he had replied and said something like, hey, I can't do like, I can't reimburse December rent, but I can do this.

He could have negotiated, and yet all he said was LOL.

- We're just asking for the things that are like decent.

- People will spend zero energy on their list of demands.

Are they upset because it's January?

Are they upset because it's COVID?

Are they upset because the rents will go up after renovations?

I gave a 68 day notice.

If I was lesser of a landlord, I would just sit back and enjoy those 85 people giving me a rent check each month.

And I would, you know, continue to hot glue this, and duct tape the place together, and if I did that, KC tenants and the tenants would be unhappy with me.

They want landlords to be, you know, your feet held to the fire, they want landlords to provide clean, functionable, affordable living units.

On the other hand, they're getting upset when the landlord is doing exactly that.

What do they want for me?

It comes time for me to pay property taxes, I can't tell the county that no, I'm affected by COVID.

I can't tell my insurance carrier, no, I can't pay the premium this year.

I can't tell my gas company, electric, and water, you know, I have to pay those bills.

I don't quite know exactly what the problem is and what they would have me do different.

- Landlords have a lot of power.

If you don't pay rent, they have the full right to put you out on the street.

And landlords are not accustomed to having to negotiate with tenants and they're not accustomed to tenants standing up and asserting their rights.

And so the culture, as far as I can tell from my side, is one that's not very accommodating generally.

Landlords have a choice on whether this is an industry they want to get into, tenants don't.

Our housing system is in the hands of the marketplace.

If it makes sense to make more profit by charging more rent, landlords are going to do that even if wages are not keeping up with that.

And so that's why we have an eviction crisis.

It shouldn't be looked at through the lens of landlord versus tenant.

It needs to be looked at as the human right that housing is.

- And it's setting people up to look at us as enemies instead of people who have chosen to invest our dollars in housing, to provide housing for those that need it.

- When you talk about landlords, it's kind of hard to paint them with one brush.

It's a very diverse group, and there's a lot of big corporate management companies out there that can afford to work with tenants, that can afford to make some sacrifice during this time when everybody is having to sacrifice.

For those landlords who can afford to make some sacrifice, and wave back rent and work with tenants, we really urge them to do that.

- [Group] All evictions are acts of violence!

All evictions are acts of violence!

- There are thousands of tenants on the eviction docket in Jackson County and in surrounding areas that are highly vulnerable to being forced onto the streets during a time when obviously evictions will likely be a death sentence for a lot of people, and we've disrupted about 365 evictions and delayed those to 2021, but those evictions are coming up on the calendar again.

So we've got our work cut out for ourselves come January.

- All evictions are an act of violence!

All evictions are an act of violence!

All evictions!

- We're expecting there to be a very ugly situation come January.

- We're going to have a run on the court houses with people being evicted, which is dangerous and unfortunate because then there'll be homeless, with debt hanging over their shoulders with bad credit in the middle of winter.

We're going to have a lot of housing providers lose their own personal housing as well, they're gonna lose their rental investments, wither through foreclosure or they're going to sell them because they can't sustain it.

It's too stressful.

And then the corporate wall street investors are going to come in, buy up all of the properties that are here, renovate them and raise the rents, and then we'll give you an a worst problem that we're in now.

- We all need housing.

Everybody needs housing.

What we really need is good, strong public policy and not to have to rely on the goodwill of landlords because I'm sure it's there sometimes, but oftentimes it's not, and that's just not gonna do the trick for the kinds of problems we're facing.

♪ Living fabulous ♪ ♪ Living lavish ♪ ♪ Living stylish ♪ ♪ Flamboyant ♪ ♪ Extravagant ♪ ♪ Living lavish ♪ ♪ Yeah, I'm a bad bitch ♪ - The 18th Street Fashion Show got canceled this year due to the COVID crisis, but all the participants got together to create a feature called "Summer in Hindsight," a Kansas City fashion movie.

The film was directed by Khitam Jabr, written by Peregrine Honig, starring Calvin Arsenia, a local musician, and shot by the great Jeremy Osborne, and I talked to the director of the film, Khitam Jabr in New York City.

Khitam, tell me what this film's about, 'cause it's hard to do.

It's experimental, right?

- Yeah, yes.

- How would you explain this movie?

- So yeah, I would explain it as kind of like an experimental narrative, like visual music film.

The film follows Calvin navigating a bunch of iconic spaces throughout Kansas City, and through those spaces, he encounters different designers, and so all of this is happening in kind of relevant time.

We do incorporate like, you know, COVID into the situation, and so we touch on a lot of anxieties and emotions that people felt during COVID, so I think that those moments that we incorporated in the film are going to be super relatable.

(piano music) (women singing in German) There's also a really incredible performance by opera singer named Deanna Marie.

She does a German opera song, which acts as like the climax of the film while Calvin Arsenia is the lead, he does, he's not really singing in the film live, he's doing all the soundtrack, but as far as like the live vocal performance, it's actually Miss Deanna Marie.

So I'm excited for people to get to experience her gift.

(woman vocalizing) - So let's talk about Calvin Arsenia.

How did he become, tell us who he is and what he does in the film, and I mean, he's this amazing musician here in Kansas City.

So tell me about Calvin Arsenia and how he got involved with this.

- Yeah, so Calvin Arsenia is a incredible musician, you know, of Kansas City, which if you're from Kansas City, you've heard of him.

He's an incredible singer songwriter, and he also plays the harp.

I directed a music video of his called Toxic two years ago, and that's how we started working together.

♪ Oh, the taste of your lips ♪ ♪ I'm on a rush ♪ ♪ You are toxic and I'm slipping ♪ - He also does, he's like the musical director for the West 18th Street Fashion Show when it's a normal fashion show, and so, you know, and Peregrin wanted to make the film or make the fashion show into a film because of COVID, you know, naturally Calvin was still a part of the process, and I was roped in as well, and so, and now we have a movie that we've done together, so.

(playful chime music) - What about Peregrine Honig?

Tell us about her, tell everybody who she is and her involvement in the film.

- Yeah, Peregrine Honig is kind of the mastermind of the West 18th Street Fashion Show, and you know, our executive producer of "Summer in Hindsight," the film, she's an incredible fine artist based in Kansas City.

I met her again.

We shot in Greenland Social Hall, which is her space.

We shot the Toxic music video there, so that's actually the inception of Peregrine, Calvin, and I's working relationship, and so it's really neat to, you know, come back two years later and get to be in even more incredible spaces in Kansas City.

So yeah, it was a lot of fun.

(woman vocalizing) You know, the production side of things was like the best word I can think of to describe it was like pretty untraditional.

We have incredible DP on this project, his name is Jeremy Osbourne.

He's a seasoned vet, and as somebody who used to PA on sets that DPed on, it was really a great, amazing for me to get to direct a project with him as the DP.

Like not only is he talented, but his energy on set is like the ultimate energy I want around me all the time, so I look forward to it to definitely working with Jeremy again in the future.

(woman vocalizing) Filming the movie, while there was a concept like a lot of it was done on a fly, like run and done, which I'm no stranger to that style, you know, growing up in Kansas City doing videos for all my friends and stuff, like that's what I know, but getting to do it on a level where you're working with a seasoned vet and it's not like you doing everything, that was a nice little change of pace, but you know, at this point in my career, I'm really looking forward to getting to marinate in the creative, so this was kind of like a nice last hurrah of that style of filmmaking, and I look, you know, I look forward to like getting an opportunity to truly sink my teeth into something, so yeah.

(woman vocalizing) (upbeat music) - We've been deciding where we were going to bring "Queer Eye: and felt crazy in love with Kansas City.

The film commission, they did everything they could to make sure that our crew and team and talent and cast were going to be happy while they were here.

- You know, I hit a home run, the city hit a home run.

Our local crew had a home run.

I mean, it was just a love fest back and forth between, you know, their team and our entire team as a metro area.

That was such a great project.

- [Tan] The original show was fighting for tolerance, our fight is for acceptance.

- When we think of what is good for Kansas City to try to bring in as far as this production business goes, a project like "Queer Eye" is such a huge win.

There are fans globally for a show like this.

It's hugely popular.

It's one of Netflix's top shows and it's still reality, so it's not like a humongous, you know, titan of budgets.

So it's still a good fit for our market here in Kansas City.

- So on "Queer Eye," we make probably five mini reality shows every single week, from looking for a restaurant, a salon, and amazing cultural activity.

Kansas City has an endless supply of locations for us and the owners of these businesses, many of them which are entrepreneurs have welcomed us into their city in a way that I've never experienced before.

- They knew they wanted a Midwest city.

They knew that.

And so of course we're a Midwest city, and what we all want here, especially me, is if anybody's thinking of a Midwest city, we want it to be Kansas City.

- Kansas City not only has like these great industrial areas, it also has farm land.

It just has an amazing variety of buildings and architecture and history.

Doing a series, we need a community that's not only rich and mainstream, but also has rural areas, and Kansas City is perfect for that.

- People have this idea still sometimes that cows walk around our downtown, and I always say, if you want a cow, we've got them.

They're just not downtown anymore, and then when they finally told us who they were, Rachel and I audibly screamed in the office in a little conference room together, and they told us who they were, and as soon as we hung up the phone, we screamed, and everyone in the office was like, what's wrong, what's wrong?

And we came out smiling.

And we were like, "I'm sorry, we can't tell you, we signed NDAs, but we're so happy!

- Try not to cry, try not to lose it.

- Welcome home!

- Oh my god.

♪ I want to be strong ♪ - When we had a private kickoff party for them to start, when they started, came here, and started their work, the mayor was there, so everything kind of circled back around.

Greg Razor came and he spoke to them in person about his personal story, so it became really personal.

So these were, you know, these relationships were beginning.

It wasn't about sales anymore, it was about let's have form a relationship, we really are here for you.

It wasn't just sales speak at the beginning.

We are authentically joyful that you're here, and all of us, you know, want you to feel that and know that from the tippity top famous person to, you know, the person who's just learning on their crew, and they picked up a lot of Kansas City crew, and I know a lot of people learned a lot on that show.

- We're also doing our first duo.

- Really proud that they also featured Kansas City so well on the show.

They did different B roll for every episode of Kansas City, and they did a beautiful job.

They also put together a testimonial video for us.

- I was in Kansas City for, I think maybe eight hours, and I felt like I had come home.

It's a wonderful, wonderful place to come and shoot because it just gets our crew and our cast so involved in the city itself, because they feel like they're part of it.

- We hardly have to sell Kansas City anymore, because we have testimonial videos like that where one producer can talk to another producer.

Just such a wonderful project, turned out really well, so proud of it, and we still have relationships with those people.

- Being able to let you guys in as this transformed me.

I love you guys, man.

♪ Unbreakable ♪ (guitar strumming) ♪ I've been loving you ♪ ♪ Way, way too long ♪ ♪ And I can't stop now ♪ (brass instruments playing) ♪ I ♪ ♪ And you want to be free ♪ ♪ My love is growing stronger, stronger ♪ ♪ As you become a habit to me ♪ ♪ I've been loving you long ♪ ♪ Way, way too long ♪ ♪ But I can't stop now ♪ - Let's give it to 'em one more time ♪ With you, my life ♪ ♪ Has been so wonderful ♪ ♪ But I can't stop now ♪ (brass instruments playing) ♪ I ♪ ♪ And your love is growing cold ♪ ♪ My love is growing warmer, warmer ♪ ♪ As our affair grows old ♪ ♪ I've been loving you long ♪ ♪ Way, way too long ♪ ♪ And I can't stop now ♪ ♪ I been loving you ♪ ♪ Way, way too long ♪ ♪ And I can't stop now ♪ ♪ I can't stop loving you, baby ♪ ♪ Lord, I can't ♪ ♪ I can't stop loving you, darling ♪ ♪ I can't lie, I can't lie ♪ ♪ I can't stop loving ♪ ♪ I can't stop loving ♪ ♪ I can't stop loving ♪ ♪ Loving body, loving body ♪ ♪ I can't, Lord ♪ ♪ I can't, Lord ♪ ♪ I can't help ♪ ♪ I can't help ♪ ♪ ♪ I can't stop loving, Lord ♪ ♪ I can't help ♪