CINCINNATI — The historic Mohawk Place neighborhood in Over-the-Rhine is filled with 19th-century brick row houses, Italianate architecture, old breweries and the Imperial Theatre.
It’s also filled with graffiti on vacant buildings, and drug dealers and prostitutes who walk the streets day and night, residents say.
Those who live and work in this historic neighborhood accuse Cincinnati officials of ignoring their pleas for help. They want action taken against vacant building owners who they say are contributing to crime and deterioration.
“Vacant buildings in urban neighborhoods are a curse if left unattended,” Bob Sehlhorst, a retired school administrator who is renovating a home on West McMicken Avenue that was built in 1875 and still has its original metal fireplace surrounds, light fixtures, first-growth pine beams and brick walls.
“We have owners who have owned buildings — sometimes for decades — where they are deteriorating and they do nothing. So what happens? Blight, graffiti, destruction of historic property,” Sehlhorst said.
Over-the-Rhine Community Council President John Wulsin sent a letter to the city’s directors of community and economic development and building and inspections departments in November asking for help.
Nearly four months later, community council officials say they never got a response.
“Prostitution, human trafficking, drug dealing, litter, dangerous traffic offenses, graffiti and general lawlessness all are present 24/7 along this corridor,” Wulsin wrote, asking for enforcement of the existing vacant building maintenance license law.
By charging these annual license fees, community leaders hope to encourage vacant building owners “to either invest in them by putting them back into productive use or sell them to an entity that will,” according to the letter.
“I just feel like the community council deserves feedback on our specific request. Why the vacant building maintenance license, which is an incredible tool, isn’t being enforced,” said OTR Community Council Secretary and neighborhood resident John Walter.
Walter took WCPO on a tour of the hillside neighborhood in the northwest corner of Over-the-Rhine, a short walk from Findlay Market and TQL Stadium.
“There are a couple of buildings here that have been redone,” Walter said. “If you could imagine what the whole street would look like if every building was redone. It would be incredible for the neighborhood, for the city.”
The National Register of Historic Places recognized the Mohawk Place neighborhood in 2015, naming it a national historic district. It is also a local historic district, where sidewalks are lined with three- and four-story brick row buildings with intact storefronts that once housed pharmacies, bakeries, butchers, hardware stores and shoe repair shops in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
“I do meet people from time to time in our shop who grew up in this neighborhood and talk about the drugstore, the laundromat, the bar,” said Deb Johnson, who owns Robin Imaging on Central Parkway with her husband. “It was a very lively community and there’s people in their seventies who will talk about it like that.”
Robin Imaging is one of the few remaining businesses in the neighborhood, along with a corner market, a barber shop, brewery and the Imperial Theater which is being restored.
“We have a lot to offer, we’re just struggling to get people to work on what they’ve purchased, and others who might own properties, to sell them instead of just holding onto them and letting them waste away,” said Johnson, who routinely sees prostitutes walking the streets and drug deals disguised as handshakes.
Her customers ask about the deteriorating state of the building next to her business parking lot on Central Parkway, which has open holes, walls of graffiti, and planks of wood siding falling off.
“The city responds however I’m not sure they are enforcing as much as they could,” Johnson said. “I would like to see owners take responsibility … maybe we need some adjustment in the law.”
Walter wants the city to enforce the vacant building maintenance licenses, which cost $900 to $3,500 per year. The longer the building sits vacant, the higher the fee. Walter also wants the city to raise the fees, to account for inflation.
He's hoping this will prevent out-of-town landlords from stockpiling the vacant buildings and waiting for real estate prices to rise. Already many vacant buildings near Findlay Market are being renovated.
“If you do a study of the vacant building maintenance license in this whole Mohawk area, I don’t think there’s one that’s been enforced,” Walter said.
WCPO asked the city about why officials never responded to the Over-the-Rhine Community Council, or if the vacant building maintenance license was being enforced there.
City spokesperson Mollie Lair said, “The city continues to invest in the Buildings and Inspections Department, even including a special code enforcement unit in the (fiscal year 2024 budget) … Separately, the department has just launched an innovative academy to train new inspectors which will help fill vacancies.”
The new unit will add 9 full-time positions to the department, to help with litter and blight enforcement, nuisance abatement, inspections and tenant protections, according to the city budget.
“We’re working with our communications team right now so that we can start doing some outreach to many of the neighborhoods that we serve the most,” said Art Dahlberg, director of the city’s buildings and inspections department, during a Feb. 27 presentation to council’s Equitable Growth and Housing Committee.
“The way that I would kind of see this is asking the community to tell us — where do you see your largest challenges and let’s work together on those challenges,” Dahlberg said.
The city got 6,588 citizen property maintenance complaints in 2023, the highest number in at least the past five years, according to the presentation data.
Dahlberg admitted at the meeting that “nearly all code enforcement work is complaint-driven.”
That puts neighborhoods with large numbers of vacant buildings, and fewer residents, at a disadvantage, Walter said.
“Since there are no eyes on the street, because there are not too many residents living here, it’s a good place to get away with bad things,” Johnson said.
Some historic buildings might look structurally sound from the sidewalk, but Sehlhorst said many don’t have roofs and suffer from massive water damage.
“Which undermines the roofs, the masonry, the joists that hold these buildings up, and that undermines the integrity of these historic buildings and creates health hazards and safety issues for neighbors,” Selhorst said. “If you leave them exposed to the elements, they will get to the point that they have no value whatsoever and they will be torn down.”
Walter showed WCPO a small house in the 400 block of West McMicken Avenue that has a caved-in roof, missing walls and windows and a collapsed floor.
“This is as bad as it gets,” Walter said. “This is what water does to a building if left unattended long enough.”
County auditor records show a St. Petersburg, Florida resident bought the house built in 1900 in late 2016 at an online auction for $780. The owner has been delinquent on paying property taxes since 2017 and owes nearly $7,000.
That house is on the same block where Selhorst is renovating his Italianate-style home, and where he is under contract to buy a second building – a brick row house.
“I came from the West Side of Cincinnati in Delhi, in Green Township, and they wouldn’t put up with this stuff in 10,000 years - people letting properties just deteriorate,” Sehlhorst said. “Why do we as homeowners and business owners and residents of the City of Cincinnati in the Mohawk neighborhood, have to put up with that?”
Tarik Abdelazim, a vice president at the nonprofit Center for Community Progress, said there is a deep concentration of vacant buildings in legacy cities that experienced population decline from 1950 to 2010, such as Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Baltimore and Cincinnati. But some of those population trends are now reversing.
Abdelazim was familiar with Cincinnati because of the city’s work in using The Port to acquire a portfolio of distressed properties.
“That's something that was truly an innovative practice that we don't see many communities doing across the country,” Abdelazim said. “It certainly raised the profile of Cincinnati and the more we learned about some of their work, they are doing good things.”
But there are always areas to improve, Abdelazim said.
“They could probably do a better job at collaborating between the county, the city and across sectors also really engaging the community residents, particularly those most impacted,” he said.
While data should drive where communities spend their limited budget resources, Abdelazim also said that every neighborhood that is asking for help deserves a ‘yes.’
“If there are vacant properties that are presenting harms to neighbors and neighborhoods, then the city needs to allocate those resources to abate them and address them,” Abdelazim said.
However, if the vacant properties are code compliant and the owners are paying taxes, it’s difficult for the city to get involved simply because residents want the buildings sold to new owners, he said.
The Center for Community Progress just awarded Cincinnati a technical assistance scholarship, worth $50,000, after city officials attended their Vacant Property Leadership Institute. The center will be working with city officials over the next few months on a community education project.
When Abdelazim is in Cincinnati, he said he’d like to see the Mohawk Place neighborhood for himself.
“We will be in Cincinnati and always both like to walk in the neighborhood and meet with the residents,” Abdelazim said.
