Talking crime with Corner landlord

On September 10, a UVA undergrad sat on the porch of his rented apartment on Wertland Street, chatting on his cellphone at 4am, when two men robbed him at gunpoint and shot him in the stomach. The crime remains unsolved, but several UVA-area landlords donated $1,000 each to increase the Crimestoppers reward for information leading to an arrest in the case.
    These property owners have a clear interest in getting such crimes resolved. But how are they taking the news? And are their tenants throwing fits?
    Wade Tremblay, whose primary tenants at Wade Apartments are students and whose office is located just a few doors down from the scene of the shooting, gave us his reactions.
“You’re talking about 18- to 22-year olds,” says Tremblay, a well-dressed man in his 50s who speaks with deliberate confidence. “I can vaguely remember those years—you’re invulnerable, ‘Nothing bad is going to happen to me.’”
    Tremblay says he doesn’t think it was the victim’s fault per se, but that he was having a late-night conversation “in an area that has a history of having some drug activity and related things that might give one the impression that some ne’er-do-goods could be in the neighborhood. In this case, the ne’er-do-goods were, and he was an obvious and easy target.”
    Certainly he’s concerned about people’s perceptions of safety in the wake of the incident. “I’m in the housing business,” says Tremblay. “No one wants to have the perception being that neighborhoods in which they own properties are unsafe.”
    But he doesn’t see this as part of a larger crime wave. “Each year will have pockets of this sort of thing go on,” Tremblay says. “It may not involve a shooting, but it may involve a theft and occasionally with a knife or a gun shown to frighten a person into giving a person whatever it is. It’s just too easy. How do you convince an 18- or 20-year-old you need to use a little common sense in your activity, particularly late at night?”
    He met last week with police and UVA officials to discuss what needs to be done in terms of safety. “One of things we talked about extensively is—we can walk up to an awful lot of my apartments right now and we can walk right in the door.”
    Despite the shooting, however, he hasn’t heard from a lot of worried tenants. “I think, again, it goes back to it-won’t-happen-to-me sort of syndrome.”