The Met development, a 75,000-square-foot mixed-use facility in Lexington’s East End, is intended to bring economic resources and opportunities to the area.
Despite more than three decades of helping marginalized, low-income individuals and communities with funding and programs for affordable housing and business creation, the Lexington-based nonprofit Community Ventures has not been widely known in its home city. That is until recently, when the high-profile MET development in Lexington’s East End helped raise its profile.
“We get so much business by word of mouth that sometimes we’re okay with not being the headliner,” said Kevin Smith, CEO of Community Ventures (CV).
The Community Action Council founded CV in 1982. That was around the time when Smith graduated from the University of Kentucky and then went to study at the London School of Economics in England, where he also wrote speeches for members of Parliament. He returned to Lexington and became president of CV just when micro-enterprise lending was catching on nationwide.
Community Ventures has offices in Lexington, Louisville, Millersburg, Campbellsville, Owensboro, Fulton, and Maysville. CV also supports large projects in the Appalachian regions of Tennessee and West Virginia. To date, the organization has supported nearly 9,000 entrepreneurs in starting or expanding businesses, helped create or retain about 15,200 jobs, and assisted more than 1,100 people in becoming homeowners. CV’s eHome program has gone national, educating more than a million homebuyers in navigating the homebuying process.
CV has also provided critical financial support for such projects as the LexTran Bus Station, the Pikeville College School of Osteopathic Medicine, and the rebuild of Magoffin County High School (following a devastating tornado hit in 2012). It also partners with the U.S. Small Business Administration to support the Women’s Business Center of Kentucky.
In April, Community Ventures received a funding award of $2.478 million through the Equitable Recovery Program, a federal initiative aimed at enhancing the capacity of community development nonprofit organizations to aid low- and moderate-income communities in their recovery from the pandemic and promote sustainable long-term prosperity. Smith has led CV to focus on more complex projects to revitalize whole communities.
The MET development is one of those projects. The MET includes a three-story mixed-use building at Midland Avenue and East Third Street. The 67,000-square-foot building has commercial space on the ground floor and apartments above.
Part of The MET development, and built first, is an 8,000-square-foot building that provides offices and art studios for Art Inc. Kentucky (AIK), a member organization of CV.
“That was a block that had a salvage yard and a bunch of empty buildings on it,” Smith said, speaking of the MET site. “But what it also had was a 35,000-car count that drove by that property every day.” Community Ventures began buying up properties in the area about 20 years ago, including an adjacent block with dilapidated housing, with an eye toward creating a mixed-use development that would benefit the local community.
What Community Ventures is all about, says Smith, is helping people achieve their dreams. And it was a dream that shaped what emerged on that piece of the East End.
Emily Giancarlo
Artist and entrepreneur Mark Lenn Johnson is a longtime employee of Community Ventures and president of Art Inc. Kentucky.
As Smith tells it, one day an employee came into his office requesting to take a week off. That employee was Mark Lenn Johnson, who had worked for CV as head of its lending department for nearly 20 years. When Smith learned that Johnson would be going to Florence, Italy, to receive an award for his photography, he was stunned. He didn’t know that Johnson was an artist. That was in 2017, when “ArtTour International” magazine named Johnson one of its Top 60 International Masters of Contemporary Art.
Around the same time, Lisa Adkins of the Blue Grass Community Foundation asked Smith if he had a use for a grant to fund a project combining art with community development. That grant became the seed money for the formation of Art Inc. Kentucky.
AIK is integral to the MET. It was also born of Johnson’s vision. Under the Community Ventures umbrella and with Johnson as president, AIK serves as a business and marketing incubator for artists and creatives. Johnson, who grew up on Fifth Street in the East End, has seen his dream flourish in his childhood neighborhood.
The AIK building, which opened in April 2021, includes space for 24 studios on its second floor. The nearby Artists’ Village, a related CV project, offers affordable housing with art studios that open onto a shared green space. The poet Frank X Walker and his family became the Village’s first residents. Johnson lives there, as well. A fifth house is under construction on the site, which has 13 lots in total.
Patrick Mitchell
Painter Kenneth Burney said Johnson and Art Inc. Kentucky are what encouraged him to become a full-time artist.
The $22 million MET development has also afforded new opportunities. The name, which stands for Midland East Third, was suggested by longtime East End resident Yvonne Giles and reflects CV’s commitment to engaging the local community in the project.
Rick Ekhoff, design principal with EOP Architects, was the lead architect on the project. He recalls meetings that included representatives of the community participating in discussions about designs for the project. Ekhoff said the project undertook to build in scale with the existing neighborhood, not to create a looming piece of “monolithic architecture” that would break with the “rhythm” of existing housing along Third Street.
The design included pedestrian-friendly walkways and interactive spaces, along with public art that celebrates the African American heritage of the East End. Frank X Walker’s poem “Ode to the East End” is displayed on the building’s facade.
The ground floor has 30,000 square feet of commercial space, and the upper floors have 43 apartments, including 13 designated as affordable housing. The apartments and commercial spaces were 100% occupied within 18 months of the MET’s opening in late 2021.
The MET houses a diverse range of retail businesses, including DV8 Kitchen and Manchester Coffee. AIK has also opened Art- House Kentucky, its retail gallery. Businesses owned by East End entrepreneurs, such as Carolyn’s Crown and Glory Hair Salon, are also in the building. East End residents with shops in the MET pay a discounted rate.
A federally qualified health center, Healthfirst Bluegrass Met, opened in April. The center is committed to providing health care to all individuals, regardless of their ability to pay.
Smith said the MET initially intended to house a grocery store, but the location doesn’t yet meet the parameters to support one. “That is one of the struggles of that neighborhood,” he said. “They have wanted a grocery store for years. I’m hoping at some point we can get one down there.”
CV owns a large open field at 201 Midland Avenue. Smith is optimistic that the site’s economic feasibility will attract a grocery store to be located in a mixed-use development. However, it will likely take up to two years to formulate a plan for the location.
As Lexington continues to develop its urban core, gentrification has become a recurring topic of discussion, as is the case in many growing cities. James Brown, an at-large member of the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council who also served as the 1st District council member for the East End from 2015 to 2022, has been involved in many of these conversations.
“The most important factor when we’re talking about gentrification and displacement is the intent of the developer and the property owner,” Brown said. “I think the MET is a good development. They were intentional, making sure they have mixed incomes in that development and [that] they’re actually inclusive of the neighborhood.”
Community Ventures didn’t first arrive in the East End with the MET project. “We have been helping people buy or renovate homes [in the neighborhood] for years, and our business trainers have been helping small businesses,” Smith said. More than 60 businesses supported by CV funding have opened in the East End.
“It’s about making dreams happen for small businesses and homeowners,” Smith said.
CV also has community development projects in the West End of Louisville, where it has built affordable housing and established Chef Space, a food business incubator and accelerator. CV also acquired the campus of the closed Millersburg Military Institute in rural Millersburg and renamed it Mustard Seed Hill. The campus is now a popular destination for holiday celebrations, weddings and other events.
“We call it comprehensive community development,” Smith said. “We ask ourselves ‘how can we take all these things we’ve learned over the past 30 years and put them into a community in a way that creates good stuff?’”