1998 Batten Award Winner – The Asbury Park Press, NJ
“House of Cards” and “What Ails Asbury: A City Searches for Solutions”
These two series powerfully demonstrate how getting out into the community and listening to citizens pays off. This determined effort stared with such civic reporting techniques as polling and extensive community conversations about crime, education, recreation and city management, but it quickly led reporters to a massive real estate fraud. By blending civic listening with investigative and computer-assisted reporting techniques, the newspaper uncovered the fraud just as it was unfolding rather than a year or two later-after it had already happened and the perpetrators had left the community. The Press gave readers a much fuller picture of what was going on in Asbury Park and that informed their conversations about the future of their community.
Asbury Park, N.J., is a beautiful seashore community that has fallen on hard times.
It has a mile of beach front, wide boulevards, beautiful Victorian buildings, a convention center and a history of pop culture that produced Bruce Springsteen. Then, race riots occurred in the 1970’s. Later came an influx of residents who were moved out of state institutions, and many people moved out of town. Even The Asbury Park Press had built handsome new quarters in nearby Neptune.
The Press set out to find out “What Ails Asbury?” using classic civic journalism techniques: listening to the citizens as they described the city’s problems and some possible solutions, and then reporting the facts with a lot of shoe leather.
Along the way, the paper stumbled onto one of the largest investigative projects in its history: a mortgage scam in which real estate speculators were making millions of dollars off fraudulent mortgages on the backs of some unwitting citizens. The swindle involved the speculators purchasing city homes then quickly “flipping,” or reselling them, to a straw buyer for many times the initial sale price — with fraudulent appraisals supporting the bigger mortgages.
Editors at The Press credited listening to the community for helping them both frame their “What Ails Asbury?” series and uncover the fraud that produced the accompanying “House of Cards” series. At the Batten Symposium in May, they also addressed the challenges the investigative series extracted.
“We did a real simple thing,” said Jody Calendar, the paper’s deputy editor who spearheaded the project. “We asked a question. What ailed Asbury Park? We sent a bunch of reporters around the community just to ask the question: What do you think is wrong with this town? What do you think its problems are? What do you think is holding it back, in terms of development? We didn’t load the questions. We didn’t seek an agenda.”
The paper held public forums throughout the city, and reporters heard about some obvious places to look, such as crime, including drug dealing; dismal educational test scores; and virtually no recreation for young people in town.
“What we found out from listening to the public was a blueprint of where to go and what to look for,” Calendar said. Then reporters talked to public housing tenants, to neighborhood groups, to police watch groups, to drug addicts, and to city officials.
In the process, the journalists heard about an unusual level of home purchases — with even more startling sales prices.
The paper eventually did two series: “What Ails Asbury?” examined the community problems, and “House of Cards” unraveled the mortgage fraud.
The Press used computer-assisted reporting, brought in handwriting experts, and hired independent appraisers to verify information. Ultimately, reporters established a fraudulent degree of complicity among speculators, appraisers, certain bankers and mortgage lenders that was happening not only in other parts of New Jersey, but in other states as well.
City residents reacted positively to the “What Ails Asbury?” reports because the paper was examining problems, presenting some solutions and inviting people to talk about it, said Robert Hordt, the business editor. But they viewed “House of Cards” as a negative story about the city.
“The bottom line… was that we knew that by working hard, by exposing what we were exposing, in the long run, Asbury Park would be a better place to live,” Hordt said.
“In its raw form, a bunch of real estate people were ripping off a mortgage company. So the question always was: Well, what does a guy in Asbury Park care if a mortgage company is being ripped off? The challenge to us was to explain how a bunch of real estate people ripping off a mortgage company was hurting the city.
“I remember getting a phone call one day from a resident of Asbury Park, who said, ‘I wanted to buy that house over there on Curtis Street. When I went over to buy it, two days after it went on the market, I found out that somebody else had bought it and paid an astronomical sum that I couldn’t match. I was going to buy that house. I was going to renovate and I was going to rent it out.’
“In other words, he was going to take an eyesore in the community and turn it into a habitable place to live, a place that would have contributed to the tax base of the town.” Hordt said. Instead, the speculator used it as part of the scheme to defraud the mortgage company.
“I think one of the things that helped us were the forums that we held. When the ‘House of Cards’ came up, we said: ‘Let’s do a forum about this.’ I think that went a long way in explaining to people why we were doing what we were doing. By the end of that night, a lot of people had a better understanding of why the newspaper was devoting so many resources to uncovering the mortgage scam,” Hordt said.
“House of Cards” has led to indictments and to the break-up of what would have been the largest merger of two mortgage companies in U.S. history. The “What Ails Asbury?” reports have shone the spotlight on a web of irregularities in city government and the Board of Education that is continuing to fuel reporting on the community.
Contact:
Jody Calendar
(Formerly Deputy Editor at The Asbury Park Press)
Managing Editor
Bergen Record
150 River Street
Hackensack, NJ 07601-7172
Phone: (201) 646-4284
Fax: (201) 646-4135
E-Mail: calendar@bergen.com
Bob Hordt
Business Editor
The Asbury Park Press
3601 Highway 66
Neptune, NJ 07754
Phone: (732) 922-6000
Fax: (732) 922-4818
E-Mail:business@injersey.com
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