Who Are The People In Your Neighborhood? WJON Looks For Answers [AUDIO]

ST. CLOUD - Moving to a new place is never easy - especially when you do it all by yourself. Last November, I packed up my tiny car and headed north to St. Cloud for my new job here at WJON.

Everything happened really quickly, and my first and most urgent concern was, naturally, where am I going to live?

My basic criterion was simple – cheap, small and close to work. I also wanted to find an old fashioned place with good design and old wooden floors. I like things like that.

I trolled craiglist and before too long had a meeting with a guy who claimed to have the perfect apartment for me. He was right, and in I moved.

For context - I live in the St. John’s Cantius neighborhood here in St. Cloud. It’s an older neighborhood, full of single-family homes that look a lot like mine. According to city data, half of these homes are rented. The majority of these renters are adults, ages 25-45, with children between the ages of 5 and 14. This average household makes about $3,000 less annually than the general St. Cloud average.

My conclusion is simple - these are busy people who work hard to support families on limited incomes. Do they even care to get to know their neighbors? Does it even matter to them who lives next door?

I decided to get some answers. Now, I don’t have any relationships with my neighbors at all, so I took the old fashioned route last week; I knocked on their doors. I didn’t know what to expect, but this is what I got – a bunch of non-answers and a couple of slammed doors.

Basically, after several mornings and afternoons of doing this, I determined that none of my neighbors have any interest in getting to know me.

Well, almost none...