“Aren’t you scared?” people ask Terry Bilsland when they learn he lives in Wellington Heights.
They’ve got a mental image of his central Cedar Rapids neighborhood as a bullet-riddled war zone — not this tree-lined street where historic homes offer front porches like so many open arms.
“This is the majority of Wellington Heights,” Bilsland told me as we walked down Bever Avenue last week with Zuiko Redding of the Cedar Rapids Zen Center.
Some parts of the neighborhood are so transitional, people jokingly say it’s “moving day” on the first of every month. But as we walked, Redding pointed out the houses of neighbors who have lived here for decades.
Like every place, Wellington Heights is complicated. A lot of nice people live here, same as anywhere.
But when virtually every news story coming from this place is about crime, it paints a paper-thin picture in people’s minds.
Bilsland, president of the Wellington Heights Neighborhood Association, pointed out for-sale signs in front of several tidy-looking houses.
They are affordable homes — good for people who could help stabilize the neighborhood, he said. But they don’t sell because of the neighborhood’s reputation.
We here in the media cover crime because it happens. Because it’s what you want to read.
Part of it is probably salacious, sure. But not all of it. You also want to know how to keep yourself safe.
But how well do our stories help you do that? We focus so much on the unusual. So often the details aren’t available — the context, the contributing factors — that can help things make sense.
I wonder, do we spend too much time covering the who and what, at the expense of the why? And what does that mean, not just for the folks of Wellington Heights, but for the way we see all our communities?
As we headed west on our walk last week, we passed more houses with seedy lawns, with broken-down porches. “A lot of folks, their steps look like this because they can’t afford to fix them,” Redding said.
Bilsland exchanged greetings with a man tinkering with a homemade motorbike. It was the third or fourth time he’d stopped to talk with someone he knew.
Over at the Wellington House, people were tending the community garden, where lettuce grew lush in raised beds. The picket fence was a riot of color — decorated years ago by neighborhood kids.
Isn’t that all part of the story?
[...] this must-read post by Jennifer Hemmingsen on her blog You Are Here, she takes a walk through Wellington Heights with [...]
Wellington Heights is a pretty large area – 1st Ave to Mt. Vernon Road, 10th Street to 19th Street. Most of it IS filled with nice-looking homes, old growth trees and everyday people. There are only a couple of areas where I have safety concerns – around 15th St & 14th St, in the area of 4th & 5th Avenues. We are wrong to give the impression that this whole area is a slum because that is clearly not the case.
To me, reporters have to report; “just the facts, miss.” I don’t think a reporter should be ascribing “the why” during the initial story. The “why” may come out down the road as the case is adjudicated. The Wellington Heights Assn has to take some image control, too, with putting out the uplifting stories that I’m sure the neighborhood is full of.