Cross-Lines Community Outreach helps the poor

Susila Jones, Executive Director of Cross-Lines Community Outreach, discusses their efforts to provide low-income individuals and families with services and opportunities that help them meet their needs today while helping build self-sufficiency. Cross-Lines has been doing this since 1963. Ms. Jones discusses their work with Radio Active Magazine regular Spencer Graves.

They have three main programs: basic needs, housing stabilization, and hunger relief. Housing stabilization includes rent and utility assistance. They operate a community “market” that works like a grocery store where people “pay” in “points” issued in proportion to household size. They believe that allowing people to select what they want this way may reduce waste compared to giving people a bag of randomly selected groceries.

This past winter they helped the Unified Government of Wyandotte County manage and operate a temporary Severe Cold Weather Overnight Shelter.

More information is available in a Wikipedia article on Cross-Lines.

HOW TO ACCESS JACKSON COUNTY, MISSOURI REASSESSMENT INFORMATION: The taxable value of real estate in Jackson County, Missouri, has reportedly increased 30 percent this year over last year, but the results are highly erratic.  The taxable value for some properties declined while others increased by more than a factor of 10.  Worse, the rationale for the changes is not available.  Fortunately, data on what the county thinks each property has been worth dating back to 2020 is available on the web.  This information can be accessed in two ways:

1. Go to “JacksonGov.org“, then click “Research a tax account” in the middle of that page.  There you can search for the name of a business or person who may own property, or by street address or by parcel number.
2. If that fails, do a web search for “parcel viewer for Jackson County, Missouri“. That should identify a site that gives you a map of Jackson County, and you can zoom into any place you want.  If you zoom in far enough, you should see individual parcels.  Clicking on most parcels will give you the square footage for the property as well as any buildings, plus what the county thinks is the market value, the assessed value and the taxable value each year between 2020 and 2023, and who owns it.  However, there have long been major differences between these numbers and the value of actual sales.  This fact has allowed the county to increase some values by more than double and still have values well below the sale price of comparable properties.  Some real estate belonging to a nonprofit had a taxable value of zero, which was canceled without explanation, leading to a huge increase in their tax bill.  This parcel viewer can be difficult to use for a condominium.  For that, it may be better to search by the name of the owner via “JacksonGov.org”, as mentioned above.

Copyright 2023 Susila Jones and Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license

Share This Episode