Behind The Beacon: Records requests and equity-first reporting with Celisa Calacal
A Kansas City economics reporter talks about her recent investigation into blighted buildings.
This month, we’re going behind The Beacon with economics reporter Celisa Calacal, who recently completed an investigation into Kansas City’s 363 listed dangerous buildings. The story explored a confounding system that leaves blighted buildings standing in disinvested neighborhoods.
In a conversation with The Beacon’s audience development manager, Jennifer Hack Wolf, Celisa described the “treasure trove” of documents she uncovered through a public records request and reflected on her experience as a reporter in Kansas City.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Let’s talk about the story you did recently on Kansas City’s dangerous buildings. How did the story come about? Was it just a curiosity about the pink building?
Back in December or maybe January, Kelsey, my editor, sent me this Facebook post from a local business owner talking about how the Splash of Life building — some people call it the pink building — had caught fire. He was basically venting about how he was located next to a building that’s dilapidated and saying it can attract illicit activity.
Kelsey said this could be a story about accountability, if this building is dangerous or a public nuisance. And I said, OK. So then I was doing some Googling around and I noticed the City has a Dangerous Buildings department under the Neighborhood and Housing Services.
And then I found out that on Open Data KC, they actually have a map of all the dangerous buildings in Kansas City. I typed in the address of the building that caught fire and it was on the list. When I clicked on the little dot on the map, it said that a case was opened in 2008. I put two and two together and realized this building has been considered dangerous for 13 years. So my question was: Why is the city letting this building stand and why are there so many dangerous buildings in Kansas City?
I downloaded the data and was looking through it and looking at the map. Visually it’s really striking because, something that people familiar with the racial geography and demographics of the city will notice, most of these buildings are concentrated east of Troost Ave., which a lot of people consider a historical racial and economic dividing line. There’s clearly something going on when you have dilapidated buildings concentrated in the poorest part of the city. To me, that sounds like a problem that I should look into and ask why this is happening.
There’s these layers of income inequality, racial inequality, and crime and poverty all coalescing around blighted buildings and dangerous buildings. So that was the genesis of the story. It started out as, “Maybe this can be a quick thing?” and it turned out not to be a quick thing.
This equity lens is something you’ve really carried into the economics beat. What’s it been like digging into your career as a journalist at a time when these conversations around race and inequity are so central? Does it change how you approach a story?
More journalists like myself are looking at the economy not just as money and dollar figures but as the actual material conditions that shape our lives. Because if you think about it, the way we live our lives is dictated by economic conditions, and a lot of that is tied into infrastructure, roads, buildings … it all impacts the way that we’re able to build community and live our lives.
For me personally I think I’ve always had this interest in equity and the intersections between race and class, and race and economic conditions. So shaping this beat, I have made that a central quality of my work. Anytime I do an economics story, I want to consider who is being hurt by a program and who benefits. One thing you can derive from history is that certain policies disproportionately hurt certain communities. And a lot of times that’s Black and brown communities, immigrant communities who are negatively impacted. And on the flip side, there’s people who disproportionately benefit.
Some newsrooms try to create a “race beat” but in reality, race impacts every single beat you do. It impacts health care, the economy, education… So I think it’s best for journalists to come into their beat with an equity lens.
Talk to me about the records requests that went into this story. Was there anything unusual there?
I didn’t have a lot of experience doing records requests when I started this job at The Beacon. It was always something I wanted to do more of, but it was a little intimidating. But, really, the most challenging part of doing a records request is actually doing the records request.
I did a sunshine records request for all the records associated with the Splash of Life building since it had been put on the dangerous buildings list. About a week later, I got three different PDFs, all over 100 pages each. Because the building has been on the list for so long, there’s a very long history of the building including inspection documents, permit documents, all the communications the city sent to the building owner, all of the copies of demolition orders, court documents, emails, photos of the building from inspections and comments on the structural soundness of the building. A huge treasure trove of documents.
As I was gathering a lot of string and talking to a lot of people, I had so much info that one challenge was figuring out what information I actually needed. Something that Kelsey tells me that I take to heart is that in a story, it’s better to go really deep than really wide.
Better to go five miles deep in a story than 10 miles wide.
What’s next for this story?
I am going to do a story on the solutions aspect, doing a deeper dive into some of the ways that neighborhoods… acquire ownership from absentee owners who maybe don’t even live in Kansas City, are unresponsive, and aren’t fixing condemned properties.
What other stories do you have in the pipeline? Anything you’re excited about?
I’m really excited to do more around police accountability. We did police reporting last summer when a lot of the George Floyd protests were going on around the city and around the country and now I’m excited to see where we are a year later, with another of those five mile deep dives.
Outside of work, what is keeping you inspired these days to keep you coming back to do the good work at The Beacon?
My dog keeps me going! And definitely my boyfriend.
Doing this kind of local journalism makes me want to be a more active participant in my community. For example, I did that story about bikes a couple of weeks ago, how more people are biking, and that weekend I felt so inspired, I got on a bike — one of those RideKC bikes — to see what all the excitement is about and it made me fall in love with biking again.
Getting to do this work makes me more passionate about living in Kansas City. It makes me want to support local businesses, it makes me want to explore the city more. And that helps me as a journalist and helps me love Kansas City more.
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