West End residents say it's 'time to let up' on low-income housing

For three generations Christopher Griffin’s family called the West End home. But now, he has to visit his 71-year-old father in Roselawn.

Ironically, it wasn’t the new development brought in by FC Cincinnati that led to his father being kicked out of his beloved neighborhood. It was a massive expansion of low-income housing.

Melvin Griffin was among more than two dozen people who were displaced from Arts Apartments at Music Hall. He left after 27 years because the income threshold for tenants dropped when the 21-building complex underwent a $30 million renovation, enabled by $3 million in city subsidies and $10.5 million in low-income housing tax credits over 10 years.

Both Griffins are two of 10 people who filed a discrimination complaint against the city of Cincinnati that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development accepted May 3 and will investigate.

“We want to integrate some market rate into our neighborhood you know, something new. But we’re not getting it because the city continues to not listen to its residents,” said the younger Griffin. “We don’t have the voice that a lot of these other communities have. We don’t have voting power, we don’t have the turnout.”

The complaint illustrates one of the biggest questions in housing policy today – what is the tipping point for when low-income housing stops improving a community, and starts to drag it down?

“Cincinnati is heavily segregated and the amount of federally subsidized housing that (continues) to be concentrated into specific Black neighborhoods is extreme,” said Laura Beshara, a Dallas attorney who represents West End residents in the HUD complaint.

It claims the city of Cincinnati is violating both the Civil Rights Act and Fair Housing Act by “steering” low-income housing tax credits and “federal housing funds into Black neighborhoods already concentrated with assisted low-income housing.”

Over-the-Rhine Community Housing says the complaint is off base. The 36-year-old nonprofit was a co-developer of Arts Apartments. And it’s Cincinnati’s most active user of low-income housing tax credits, based on a WCPO 9 I-Team analysis of public records from the Ohio Housing Finance Agency.

“With a deficit of over 20,000 affordable housing units in Cincinnati, to attack those providing professionally managed and permanent supportive housing is particularly irresponsible,” the nonprofit said in a prepared statement. “The complainants are corrupting the Fair Housing Act in this instance to support pro-gentrification and ‘Not In My Back Yard’ interests.”

This is not a new problem

The I-Team has been looking into the HUD complaint because it raises problems Cincinnati has been trying to solve for decades.

“Simply too much of Cincinnati is currently designed to concentrate poverty and stifle vibrant neighborhoods,” Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval said in his state-of-the city address last November. “To grow equitably in every corner of our city, we have to change that.”

Pureval’s answer is the Connected Communities proposal, which would alter zoning to allow for smaller apartment buildings along transit lines and neighborhood business districts.

“It will lower the barriers to getting housing built while incentivizing the creation of affordable housing,” Pureval said.

The plan is hotly contested by neighborhood leaders who are expected to urge the Cincinnati Planning Commission to reject the proposal this week.

Former Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley confronted the same issue in his first term on city council in 2001.

“The city’s high concentration of low-income residents (is) creating a domino effect of declining property values relative to inflation and increasing social ills,” Cranley wrote in a motion proposing a “housing impaction” ordinance.

It established a city policy to “oppose the construction of new publicly assisted low-income rental units unless the construction reduces the concentration of poverty or are intended for occupancy by the elderly.”

The housing impaction ordinance is still on the books. But it didn’t keep the West End from doubling its number of low-income housing tax credit units to 1,750 between 2005 and 2021, according to the HUD complaint. By contrast, only 623 units exist in all city neighborhoods with a population that’s at least 75% white.

“Go ask the people in Hyde Park what they would do if the city proposed allowing a low-income housing tax credit project in their community,” said Dallas attorney Mike Daniels, who working with Beshara on the HUD complaint.

Daniels and Beshara won a precedent-setting 2015 Supreme Court ruling that made it easier for fair housing advocates to pursue lawsuits aimed at desegregating low-income housing in U.S. cities.

Griffin reached out to Daniels and Beshara because he felt ignored when he asked the mayor and city council to stop approving low-income developments in his neighborhood.

“We have open-air drug markets,” Griffin said. “We’ve been in the top five for homicides in the past five or six years. Shootings, I think, we’ve been number one. It’s time to let up.”

But instead of letting up, developers pumped $52 million in new low-income housing investments into the West End’s poorest census tract in the last seven years – displacing Griffin’s father in the process.

“I think they’re garbage,” Griffin said of the low-income developers who renovated Arts Apartments on Ezzard Charles Drive and built two new housing options - 821 Flats and Slater Hall - to serve homeless adults recovering from mental illness. “If you had watched the data, you would know this didn’t fit in this census tract. But you can’t stop the power players behind this stuff. It’s hard to stop that.”

Ray Pfeffer

Tale of two neighborhoods

Mary Burke Rivers is one of those power players. And she’s heard that kind of criticism before.

As executive director of Over-the-Rhine Community Housing, she has overseen the development of more than 500 affordable housing units since 1993, including Arts Apartments, 821 Flats and Slater Hall.

Burke Rivers said all three projects were needed to replace thousands of low-income units lost in the West End with the demolition of two public housing communities in the early 2000s.

She believes the West End can develop as a mixed-income community in the same way Over-the-Rhine did - if city and neighborhood leaders embrace all kinds of housing investments.

“Affordable housing does not block other development,” Burke Rivers said. “We’ve lived it. We know it. We’ve got concrete experiences that we can share with people.”

The West End and Over-the-Rhine confronted the issue of poverty concentration more directly than all other Cincinnati neighborhoods in the last 20 years – with widely different results.

The Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority led the West End effort with City West, a $200 million HUD-financed development that aimed to replace 1,800 units of public housing with 250 new homes and a mix of 800 subsidized and market-rate apartments. Over-the-Rhine’s redevelopment was led by the private sector, fueled by tax-increment financing subsidies and the corporate-backed Cincinnati Center City Development Corp.

Both neighborhoods lost residents since 2000, but Over-the-Rhine grew richer and more racially diverse. Census data compiled by the city shows the West End population declined 16% to 6,824 in 2020, when 78% of residents were black and the median household income was $19,499. Over-the-Rhine lost more than 2,000 residents. While its percentage of Black residents declined from 77% to 42% over 20 years, its median household income rose to $64,695.

Griffin was a teenager when City West began. And he watched with dismay as only 18 of the 250 planned homes were built at City West while its retail space remained empty for decades. In the last year, CMHA hired new developers to restart the home ownership effort, while FC Cincinnati proposed a $300 million entertainment district that includes market-rate apartments. But that’s too little, too late for Griffin.

“Up and down Linn Street we had a lot of stores, mom and pop stores,” Griffin recalls. “We had a Walgreens. We had a lot of things that eventually left because the city decided to continue to dump low income in here and businesses couldn’t sustain. So, a lot of people and businesses moved out.”

Over-the-Rhine’s revitalization caused its own set of problems, as low-income residents who might have benefited from the new jobs created its trendy restaurants and retail stores found they couldn’t afford to live there.

“Our city is experiencing an affordable housing crisis where our neighbors – some vulnerable, some seniors, and children – are living on the edge,” Burke River said. “And it’s people that we see every day, working as cashiers, working in daycare centers, driving school buses … who don’t have a place to live.”

How will this end?

Both neighborhoods are examples of the tension that makes housing policy questions so difficult to answer, said Gary Painter, academic director of the University of Cincinnati’s Real Estate Program.

“Cities want to help as many people as possible who have low incomes,” Painter said. “In order to do that you want to build as much subsidized housing as is allowed. And it typically is the case that in higher poverty areas, the land is less expensive.”

But that approach causes its own set of problems when low-income units exceed 30 to 40 percent of a neighborhood’s housing units.

“For children in particular, (there are) worse outcomes in school and ultimately more exposure to violence and crime, and a whole set of outcomes that decrease the likelihood that you’ll have a living wage career,” Painter said.

That’s why Painter thinks the HUD complaint could ultimately be a good thing for Cincinnati.

“Sometimes lawsuits are opportunities to listen to each other differently, it forces that,” Painter said. “There’s a reason why people are upset and simply listening but not taking action based on what people are saying will likely lead to more conflict.”

What the data says

The I-Team analyzed the last four years applications to Ohio’s Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program. Here’s a summary of what we learned:

• From 2020 to 2023, developers sought an average of $75 million per year in tax credits statewide to finance more than $3 billion in proposed new investments.
• The Ohio Housing Finance Authority approved about 30% of all requests in the four years ending in 2023, leading to affordable housing investments of about $1.3 billion statewide.
• Approved projects in Hamilton County totaled $184 million from 2020 to 2023. Eight of the 15 projects were in census tracts where less than half of the population is white. Seven were in census tracts where at least half of households make less than $30,000 a year.
• Over-the-Rhine Community Housing was by far the most successful applicant of the 13 local organizations that applied for tax credits between 2020 and 2023. It won state funding in six of its eight attempts. Those wins led to 279 new units of low-income housing in downtown, Over-the-Rhine, Lower Price Hill, Northside and the West End.

The I-Team also searched Cincinnati city council records for projects that were awarded state credits in the last five years.
Seven of the 15 projects got a combined $9.3 million in additional subsidies from the city, including property tax abatements and direct payments from the city’s TIF districts, Affordable Housing Trust Fund and federal allocations of block grants.

As with state tax credits, Over-the-Rhine Community Housing dominates the local competition in its pursuit of city subsidies. Four of its six winning projects got a combined $5.8 million in city assistance.