I’m quite pleased with the Lakeland Police Department’s response to my series of articles concerning the killing of Mario Acosta on Johnson Avenue last month — and a series of other unpleasant events in the previous year.
I’ve had long, productive discussions with Chief Larry Giddens and Asst. Chief Vic White. Giddens and White led a whole cadre of LPD personnel to a Lake Morton Neighborhood Association Meeting (LMNA) to answer questions and take some heat, which they did gracefully.
Of course, I’m pretty easy to please, really. I know there are great limits to what police — and government, in general — can do about neighborhood issues. Property rights in the United States are pretty sacred. They are arguably much more sacred than human rights. It’s one of the great tensions of our national experiment.
Rather, in my talks with Giddens and White, I’ve emphasized customer service skills — and the overall destructive futility of drug policies and enforcement. They can’t do a lot about the second at the local level. But I think they generally agree with me about the first. And I think they’re acting on it. Various texting, reverse 9-1-1-type programs are in development. I think they realized this was important before I complained. But again, I’m pretty easy to please. And I don’t matter very much. So time will tell, as they say.
Speaking of time and perception, that brings me to the actual hook of this post. In my second piece, I wrote:
As we always do, when talking to police, we pointed to the handful of trouble spots on our street, which is 92 percent awesome and 8 percent not awesome.
I perceived, when I wrote that, that the split toward awesome had grown significantly since the time my family moved here in 1999. But at the LMNA meeting, I think the general sentiment was the opposite — that things are getting worse on our street. I’m pretty sure that I heard it directly from one person who is a long time resident like me.
So, being the practical dork that I am, I decided to test these perceptions as scientifically as I could.
I took a little walk up and down Johnson Avenue with a notepad. And I classified each property as contributing, neutral, or not contributing. And then I marked down from memory the category of each property when we arrived in June 1999.
Here are my findings:
1999: 21 contributing; 9 neutral; 10 non-contributing
2015: 29 contributing; 8 neutral; 3 non-contributing;
The 2015 percentage breaks down to 92.5 percent contributing or neutral; 7.5 percent non-contributing. Boom.
As we always do, when talking to police, we pointed to the handful of trouble spots on our street, which is 92 percent awesome and 8 percent not awesome.
I would suggest this indicates my perceptions are pretty good. Of course, you can quibble with my cheeky use of “awesome” and my use of “neutral.” And the crazy quilt of different types of properties on our street means you may account for them somewhat differently than I did. I counted 40 properties.
But I think I’ve been very conservative in my assessments. Three examples:
1) I classified the brick apartments on the corner of Ballard and Johnson, which I’m told are used for Section 8 housing, as neutral. See below.
Image may be NSFW.
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They are pretty well kept. I see children playing there all the time happily. I see parents throwing baseballs in the little space they have to throw. I balance that against some chaotic parking (which is an issue for the whole street) and at least one generally pleasant guy who nonetheless spends a lot of time in the street hanging out in a rather suspicious way. I think one could argue these apartments, on the whole, contribute. I also think a number of people in our neighborhood consider the very existence of these apartments as non-contributing. So, I’ve compromised. They’re neutral in my count.
2) I’ve upgraded the two-story house on the other corner of Ballard and Johnson from non-contributing to neutral.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
It has been non-contributing for as long as I can remember. Part of it recently burned rather suspiciously. It has since been fixed. And I’m told by people who know that it’s much improved, both in terms of interior quality and quality of residents. I haven’t met them yet, but outwardly, it seems orderly and calm these days. You could argue it’s contributing. I’m keeping it parked at neutral, though.
3) In my perception, only one property on Johnson Avenue has noticeably deteriorated over the past 16 years. It happen to live next door to it. I included it in my non-contributing count. It’s also a fluke. It has a new owner, who is already making significant repairs. I expect within a month or so, it will contribute again. But it’s not contributing now. And I’m not going to speculatively credit it for what hasn’t happened yet.
Bottom line: even under my quite restrictive assessments, Johnson Avenue has 38 percent more contributing properties today than in 1999.
Or if you want look at from a negative angle, the number of crappy, non-contributing properties has dropped 70 percent since 1999.
In either case, you simply cannot argue with any data that Johnson Avenue is not a significantly “better” street than it was in 1999.
But data might not matter to you if you happen to live across the street from one of Johnson’s three non-contributing properties. I get it. (However, I will say that I live next door to one — and two houses away from another. The data still matters to me.)
And this question of contributing properties incompletely addresses the behavior of residents. You can have a nicely kept property and still act the fool. Back around 2004, I used to come home late at night from work to find dozens of drunk Florida Southern kids in the street in front of a nice nearby rental that housed some of them. To its credit, FSC’s expanded college-run housing for students within the neighborhood seems to have controlled that issue. It’s a good example of the college helping the neighborhood — as is the Frank Lloyd Wright center. The college gets criticized sometimes for heavy-handed neighborhood behavior. We should praise it when it deserves it.
This mismatch of property and behavior swings in the other direction, too. Listen to any sustained discussion of my neighborhood and you’re likely to hear “renters” discussed in roughly the same way people discuss lice. I see no evidence whatsoever today that renters pose a greater behavioral threat than homeowners. Plenty of good and bad examples of both; and I consider irresponsible property ownership as the number one neighborhood issue. It is also the most difficult to do anything about. Again, conservative American property rights means the government can do almost nothing to really affect a homesteaded property. There is no meaningful government stick to use against somebody who inherited a paid-for house they’ve homesteaded. Period. Fact. Don’t ask the police to fix it.
Rather than acknowledge that generational and political reality, it’s easier just to slag off on those Section 8 people, who we don’t even know are Section 8, who don’t seem to do much except live uneventfully.
Mostly my numbers should argue against sour fatalism or poor judgement about trends and direction. I really don’t understand the human tendency to indulge in the whole, “Oh everything’s going to hell” species of self-pity.
I especially don’t understand it from people who enjoy stable, prosperous situations. Through pressure, attention, money, relationships, patience, we’ve managed to keep this neighborhood moving forward through an historic state and national real estate downturn. We’re winning. We’re winning so much that I doubt anybody who wants to leave will have any trouble selling their place.
The question of property values came up quite a bit at our LMNA meeting with LPD. And I wanted to say, “Do you realize that a bunch of white men wearing ties and deploying bad lending algorithms did far more to harm your property value and mine than any criminal could ever do?”
Anyway, on-the-ground data makes the trajectory of Johnson Avenue, which is likely the trajectory of all Lake Morton, quite clear. I doubt you’ll find a better neighborhood trajectory anywhere in Polk County over the last 16 years. For what I want out of a neighborhood, I doubt I could find one. The incidents of crime and disorder of the last year probably stand out more because of the trajectory. But they do not change it. It was a bargain to buy here in 1999. If anything, it’s an even higher value bargain to live here today.