At 31 and 32, respectively, Lyndsay Sheets and Raul Perez embody the type of highly invested neighborhood involvement you might expect of residents twice their age.
Sheets is serving in her first year as president of the historic Williams Woodland Park neighborhood association just south of downtown Fort Wayne, where she shares a home with Perez. Together, the pair run the Williams Woodland Park
website and
Instagram account that have taken the South Side social media scene by storm. With photos of smiling faces, arts and culture, and historic homes, they have helped the South Side present a fresh image online.
But as involved as they are in leading the community, you might be surprised to learn that Sheets and Perez didn't initially plan on living in the 46807 at all.
Young professionals who initially wanted to live downtown, these two discovered a historic treasure in the Williams Woodland Park area, which got its name from a public park that was divided into private properties in the late 1800s. Homes there range from that era to the early 1920s.
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Historic homes in the Williams Woodland Park neighborhood were built between the late 19th century and the early 1920s.
The pair bought and restored their 1911 home in the 300 block of West Suttenfield Street in 2012. In 2016, they started attending neighborhood association meetings. Now, they're sharing their enthusiasm on social media and with everyone they meet, attracting residents as a far as Portland to make the move to Fort Wayne just to see what Williams Woodland Park is all about.
Input Fort Wayne sat down with Sheets and Perez to find out more about why the South Side is so special to them.
IFW: You have a beautiful historic home. How did you find it?
Sheets: We knew we wanted an urban setting for sure. We checked West Central, and it was out of our budget, so we expanded our search, and found that the same kind of vibe was going on here. Raul grew up just down the street on Hoagland, so when we were dating, one thing we liked to do was bike around this area. There are a ton of great parks here, so we would always bike through this neighborhood just because we loved looking at the gorgeous architecture of these homes, and we eventually found this house with a For Sale sign on it.
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Sheets and Perez use Williams Woodland Park's social media to encourage residents to participate in community events.
IFW: What are some of your favorite things to do around your neighborhood?
Sheets:We have dogs, so a lot of it is focused on walking them places. We love that Lutheran Park is so close.There have been times we’ve walked from home to CS3, or to the Dash-In. It’s super doable.
Perez: And then with all the businesses coming in. You know, we just got West Coast Grille and a Mexican Restaurant, Mi Tierra. Those places were empty buildings for a long time, so stuff is starting to come back. There’s also Bahn Mi Pho Shop. We have a lot of ethnic, different places around here. The diversity is one of our main assets. It’s not so cookie cutter here. We see lots of different people all the time.
IFW: Raul, you grew up in this area. How is it different from what you remember as a kid?
Perez:I grew up four blocks from here, and never knew my neighbors. Then coming here, it was like you see in the movies. Neighbors would say “hi” to me, and at first, I was like, “Wait, do they know me?” But they were just being friendly. Now that’s me. When I see a stranger or another neighbor, the first thing I say is, “Hi, how are you doing?” It’s just how this neighborhood works.
Sheets: There’s a built-in support system here. I thought this was going to be our starter home. But now, it’s like, we don’t want to leave. (laughs) We’re trying to make the starter home fit the long-term because we don’t want to leave the neighborhood.
IFW: How did you get involved in your neighborhood association?
Sheets: It seemed like the first few years we weren’t very active on the board or at meetings. Our main focus was getting the house the way we wanted it.
Perez: Then we decided to start going to neighborhood meetings, and we realized we could get involved.
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When Williams Woodland Park started inviting guest speakers to their neighborhood association meetings, attendance doubled.
Sheets: One thing that the neighborhood started doing was a "Value Add" meeting. Instead of just doing a meeting about our finances or our crime report, we started having a speaker come in each month to teach us something positive about the community.
Something about a business that’s around here or services around here. Someone who could bring something for us to learn or experience, and then we’d get to have social time afterwards.
Perez: Right away, we noticed the turnout doubled. Bringing in guests and talking about development really brings the morale up.
Another way we’ve increased attendance is the way we market things. We’ll make a cleanup sound fun. You know, “Come out, we’ll have donuts; we’ll have water, and hey, this is a chance for you to get to see all your other neighbors.” Then we’ll have like a quarter of the neighborhood show up and have fun.
IFW: It sounds like focusing on the positive parts of your community has increased the energy there. Tell us more about the energy on the South Side?
Sheets:The energy down here is amazing, especially with these projects, like the GE project, that continue to develop. It makes it feel like everything’s worth it. We have a lot of great leaders in this neighborhood who have jumped in and are on board with our mission, making this a great place to live your whole life. There’s so many neighbors here who have talked about living in the same house. They can’t wait to see what it looks like in 30 years. That’s a common comment.
IFW: What are some of the stereotypes about your neighborhood?
Sheets:Some people think it’s an unsafe area or a violent area. I hear the statistics every month. It’s part of my job as president, and one thing that our quadrant police officer tells us is that it’s not happening just right here. It’s happening all over town. This is definitely urban living. But I never feel unsafe. We’ve done a great job of building up this local support system. If something happened, people would know about it immediately.
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Sheets and Perez feature their neighbors and local businesses on the Williams Woodland Park instagram.
IFW: What projects are you working on with the neighborhood association?
Sheets: One of the things we’ve been having trouble with is you can see a marked difference between the beautification of this area versus the new developments out on the north end of town. I don’t know that a lot of city investment has gone into maintaining this infrastructure down here. What we’ve found in doing our own research on how can we make this community even safer is that once you beautify an area, like sidewalks and alleys, the crime rate goes down because you’ve claimed that space.
In this neighborhood, specifically, there are still properties here that need renovation, and they’re super-affordable. We want to market ourselves and show people what we’re doing. Millennials are our target audience right now because they fit the right income bracket. We want to say, "Hey, you can do this too." We want to get those houses turned around and occupied.
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The Williams Woodland Park instagram showcases community projects like a neighborhood cleanup.
IFW: What are some of the things you tell people about your neighborhood that pique their interest?
Sheets: We’re so blessed to have downtown so close. There’s so much going on. We just had friends over from California over this weekend, so we hit up all the cool shops there, and we also took a walk in Foster Park, even though it’s December.
We definitely tell them to eat the local eateries and hangouts, too. In fact, there was a couple that was going to move here from Portland, OR, and I feel like I had a small part in telling them about how cool this neighborhood was. They eventually did move here and bought a house in the neighborhood.
We always try to rep the 07 whenever we can. That’s a been a conscious effort with our Instagram account and website.
Perez: We sound like people who’ve just done Crossfit, and that’s all we talk about. (laughs) But it is exciting. I mean, I was never that involved growing up in the community, and then, you hear all these things in the news, right? How bad things are happening. But then you see this little micro example that you can change your community in such a small way, and have a big impact.
The things we do in this neighborhood, it changes neighbors. It’s cool to see. We’re excited, and we just want to keep going forward.