CINCINNATI — More than 10,000 — 13,661 to be exact. That's how many eviction filings have been entered into the Hamilton County Municipal Court in the past year.
Data shows there have been 1,224 eviction filings across the Cincinnati area in the past month, according to national eviction tracker Eviction Lab.
A report compiled between March 31, 2023, and February 29, 2024, details the 10 eviction filing hotspots in Hamilton County. At No. 1 on that list is the Views of Mt. Airy apartment complex with 285 filings.
That number is more than double the second-biggest hotspot. Vantage Pointe West Apartments in Westwood filed 106 evictions.
The Views of Mt. Airy is owned by REM Capital, a Florida-based property management company, that owns five apartment complexes in Cincinnati. In May, the City of Cincinnati sued the company for maintaining substandard living conditions. The lawsuit was filed by the Quality of Life Division of the City Solicitor’s Office.
Nationwide Housing Crisis Hits Home
The number of eviction filings in the Cincinnati area are at 107% of an average year before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Eviction Lab. To put that simply: eviction filings are 7% higher than pre-pandemic averages.
February saw an even large increase, when the numbers were 50% above pre-pandemic data.
Attorney Nick Zingarelli said as rents go up and housing availability goes down, tenants are struggling to keep a roof over their heads.
"Eviction is the biggest issue that we are facing here where we are really starting to see a shift, where we're really starting to see an impact because more people are paying attention to what's happening," Zingarelli said.
Zingarelli is the director and chief attorney at the Hamilton County Clerk of Courts Help Center, which is located in Room 113 in the county courthouse.
While Zingarelli assumed their role last year, the Help Center opened in 2017 with a main goal in mind: to increase access to justice by providing self-represented people with education, information and limited legal advice.
Hamilton County Clerk Pavan Parikh said the center is open to people who do not have attorneys to represent them during hearings in Hamilton County Municipal Civil Court or Hamilton County Juvenile Court.
"The idea was, can we build something where someone can get at least a little bit of legal advice, a little bit of help before going into a courtroom and try to plead their case?" Parikh said.
The Help Center provides general information and, in some instances, limited legal advice consultations on areas including, small claims, landlord/tenant, evictions, debt collection cases and custody issues.
Most people seeking help in the past year are facing housing issues, Zingarelli said.
"I would say, probably 60 to 70% housing and 30 to 40% debt, but you know it varies depending upon what's happening out there," he said.
Parikh said while most people who walk through the center's doors seeking advice on housing issues are tenants, the advice does not extend solely to them.
"It's not just tenants — small mom-and-pop landlords that need to know what their rights are as they move forward with an eviction," he said.
And housing issues are not exclusively evictions. They can also be rent escrow cases.
We spoke on Tuesday with a woman in Blue Ash who has been putting her rent in escrow since February because of an ongoing legal battle with her landlord. She recently reached out to the Help Center for advice and now plans on consulting an outside attorney as her case proceeds.
"It seems simple enough that you come down here and you start paying your money to the court, but what happens when your landlord sues you back as part of the rent escrow process?" Zingarelli said. "The landlords will filed rent escrow complaints — people don't necessarily know that they have to file an answer to that or else they may lose their rent escrow case that has all these fantastic grounds for it."
Like eviction cases, Zingarelli said rent escrow cases are a product of the heated national housing crisis impacting our local communities.
"Sadly I think we haven't seen the worst and a lot of the reason why is rental assistance has largely dried up," he said. "There are going to continue to be people that get sick, that lose their jobs, that have some unexpected life event happen that will interrupt their ability to pay rent. Throwing people out of their homes is not going to solve any of our problems. It hurts the tenants. It hurts the landlords. It hurts everybody. We need to have that safety net there as an ongoing basis and that's not something that exists right now."
Record-Breaking Assistance
The Hamilton County Clerk of Courts Help Center is on track to assist more than 20,000 people by the end of the year, Parikh said.
About 9,700 people sought help in 2023. So far this year, more than 11,000 people have either called, walked in or scheduled an appointment.
"I usually have two to four appointments per day," Zingarelli said.
And that's just their schedule. Zingarelli is one of five attorneys — paid and volunteer — who work at the center. There are also paralegals, social workers and college students who dedicate their time to the center as well.
Every attorney is an employee with the University of Cincinnati College of Law, as part of a partnership between the Hamilton County Clerk of Courts, Municipal Court, Juvenile Court and the County Commission.
"That allows us to be able to provide advice to the public without there being any type of a conflict of interest, which allows us to be able to provide more service than maybe a help center which can only disperse information, which is the case if there isn't that partnership that's there," said Zingarelli.
