Interpreting the James Holmes Poll

Would you live in the old James Holmes apartment?

I was browsing TMZ today (I have no original posts and work is completely dead) and came across this James Holmes story about his apartment being put back up for rent. My initial thought before I clicked on the result was that 95% of the people are going to say they definitely wouldn’t live there. To my surprise, most people say it’s not even a big deal that a mass murderer lived there previously. I truly believed that would be off putting to most people but a sample size of 48k is fairly conclusive. The more I thought about it, what are the landlords expected to do? Tearing the entire building down seems ridiculous and other than renovating it, it’s not like they have a whole lot of options in an investment property. Here is a quote from the families which give you an idea of their feeling on the subject matter.

[blockquote source=”TMZ”]”We spoke with a number of families after breaking the story that the apartment — which Holmes booby trapped with 30 grenades and 10 gallons of gasoline with the intent of killing cops — is on the market, and they feel victimized again and disrespected.”[/blockquote]

I’m not sure I side with the victims here because they are feeling “victimized again and disrespected?” If some other person wants to live in that apartment, are these victims going to feel some sort of uneasiness because of its past tenant? It really makes no sense whatsoever. What I concluded was that I personally would never live in that apartment but wouldn’t think it was weird if someone else wanted to. If I owned that apartment, I’m certainly not leaving it vacant or tearing my building down because some madmen rented it previously. Just a bad situation all around that you have to be practical about and not let a stigma ruin it.