FRED VALLANCE-JONES, RICK HUGHES, AND CHERYL STEPAN

Lament for a Downtown

There’s a lot that ails Hamilton’s downtown.

When a team of reporters and editors at The Hamilton-Spectator began discussions in the summer of 2000 about what would become the series Lament for a Downtown (http://www.hamiltonspectator.com/ journalism/), a decision was made that would fundamentally shape the work to come.

This would not be just another feature on downtown Hamilton. Instead, the newspaper would marshall its resources to paint a definitive picture of the Steel City’s ailing core, what was right and what was wrong.

To give breadth and depth to the investigation, we documented almost every aspect of downtown life. It was a project tailor-made for computer assisted reporting (CAR).

The first thing we wanted to do was determine who owned downtown Hamilton? It was a question that no one had attempted to answer before. We quickly determined that we would not be able to obtain a ready-made database on property ownership.

So we decided to build one, which gave us the advantage of being able to determine what data we wanted, beginning with the most important source: Hamilton’s assessment roll.

Once we had designed the basic database, one of the paper’s part-timers was dispatched to city hall. She used a laptop to start filling in fields in the database for the owners and addresses of properties, the assessed value for taxes, and the taxation class.

Three days later, we had a detailed database, chronicling who owned what in the downtown core. We augmented this database with addresses of derelict or vacant properties.We built a separate database using this information, then matched the addresses with a property ownership database.We also obtained data on properties that were in arrears on their city taxes, and eventually obtained a comprehensive property assessment database ,albeit one without any owner names.

Our next job was to select a number of properties for further research. We were interested in a number of attributes, including whether a property was significantly in arrears on its taxes, whether it was one of several properties belonging to a single owner,whether it was derelict or vacant, and whether it contained a business such as porn outlets, strip clubs and pawn shops: establishments that some would see as detracting from the core’s good image.

Once we had selected a number of properties this way,we moved to detailed research, including double checking ownership at the land titles office, checking on financing and mortgage holders, and checking the individuals behind numbered companies. The resulting comprehensive picture formed the backbone of several stories.

We looked at the sky-high commercial vacancy rates in the core, the fact the city itself is the most significant landowner downtown (partly due to a profusion of tax sales of properties in arrears), the area’s large crop of vacant and derelict businesses, high taxes and plummeting property values,and how all of this was contributing to the downtown’s persisting image as a dangerous and unattractive place.

At the same time, the team obtained data on social conditions, fire department calls and crimes. Analysis of this data provided the backbone for compelling stories written by Cheryl Stepan.

Sometimes, the CAR work provided the leads for further investigation. This happened with our story on pornography entrepreneur Karsten Rumpf.

A database query showed that three properties were owned by companies, all with different names,that listed the same Montreal address. One of the properties, it turned out,was mortgaged to a bank in Liechtenstein. Further examination of the documents helped us unearth Rumpf ’s extensive additional property holdings. Much additional research allowed us to trace Rumpf ’s businesses in Hamilton and Montreal back to their roots, and trace the Rumpf ’s family businesses back to its roots in Germany. It made for a fascinating read.

Meantime,the land titles research pointed to another unexpected story: the banks were not issuing mortgages downtown. The problem had long been rumoured,but never documented.

To research the story, Rick Hughes obtained a listing of all commercial sales in the core and compared that information with land registry records to show that only one of 25 commercial property sales in the core in 2000 was backed by a bank.

Extensive interviews fleshed out the information generated from the databases and primary documents. Additional stories, not based on CAR, were written by other reporters. Gary Yokoyama, the photographer on the series, shot haunting portraits of a core in crisis. The result was the most definitive series ever written about downtown Hamilton.

Primary sources and data backed up every fact. From the moment Lament for a Downtown was launched on March 17, 2001, it generated tremendous response in the community. Some criticized it for being too frank.We were airing dirty laundry that some political and business leaders would have rather seen kept in a back closet. But the accuracy of the information was never questioned.

This was a testament to the exhaustive research upon which the series was based. Many in the community — some of them downtown business people — praised the Spectator for breaking the silence about the appalling conditions in the core. The problems identified by the series are deeply entrenched and will not be easy to solve.

However, since its publication there has been a new awareness of the need to deal with the problems of the core,a new downtown plan has been approved.About eight months after the series ran, mayor Bob Wade and his council approved a proposal to increase homeowners’ taxes to help struggling business owners.

Fred Vallance-Jones is a reporter with the Hamilton Spectator.