After a tenant was robbed at gunpoint at The Grove and the apartment complex didn’t notify its residents, questions asking why details weren’t shared with tenants started to be asked.
Most complexes didn’t have much of an answer.
The Columbia Police Department always notifies complexes of crimes on their properties, but different landlords have different policies about telling their tenants. Those who aren’t informing their residents leave it to news sources and word of mouth to tell residents.
It isn’t illegal for landlords to withhold that information, but taking another step and informing tenants would not be difficult for complexes. Tenants deserve to be informed of crimes in their own neighborhoods. Hiding it only hurts the landlords’ credibility.
What’s more, the landlords who aren’t informing their residents didn’t give The Maneater the reason behind their policies. Leaving residents in the dark is concerning as it is, but not having a rationale is even more troublesome.
Without any rationale, we could assume landlords aren’t sharing this information in the hopes tenants won’t hear about crimes in their neighborhoods, or simply because nothing requires them to. But when tenants do hear about crimes on their property from friends or news sources, it reflects poorly on landlords. Apartment complexes should be honest with their tenants. It’s best for everyone, tenants and landlords, if they tell residents upfront what’s happening on their property.
When tenants hear about crimes next door, they want to hear about it from their landlords. They want people with the power to prevent crimes from happening to take responsibility and work to keep them from happening again. Disclosing crimes can only help complexes — at first, it might affect their reputations, but in the long run they will gain credibility for being transparent with tenants and the community.
It’s simple: Students are going to hear about crimes in their neighborhoods. It’s best they hear about them from their landlords.
Students and potential residents know Columbia’s apartment complexes aren’t unsafe, and confronting rare crimes is an opportunity to remind students what landlords do to protect them. By being upfront about their reactions to crime, they would also encourage residents to report suspicious activity they see. Making crimes visible on a property can only decrease crime rates — resident awareness could act as a deterrent.
It might not be standard practice for apartment complexes to inform tenants of crimes, but student-focused apartment complexes in Columbia should be held to a higher standard. If they’re going to advertise themselves as “communities” and “student living,” they need to live up to those labels.
Residents of Columbia complexes are often students coming from residence halls, where hall coordinators are upfront with residents about almost everything going on in the building. Apartment complexes in the area have adopted the residence halls’ community feel but haven’t yet reached the Department of Residential Life’s level of transparency.
There’s no downside to being communicative with residents. Seeing landlords react to crimes on their properties will only encourage residents to participate in preventing more crime, and it will earn landlords credibility. Most residents would probably rather receive emails from their landlord about crimes than hear about them secondhand.
Apartment complexes missed an opportunity to address this proactively, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t implement a new policy now. It won’t take much to inform residents, and ultimately it won’t affect a complex’s reputation or the housing demand from students.
Ignorance isn’t bliss in this situation. Informing tenants will hold landlords accountable, act as an incentive to take action and make tenants feel safer knowing they’re not being kept in the dark. Columbia will never be rid of crimes, but with a little more transparency landlords could start to reduce them on their properties.