Budget - Preserving our Neighborhoods

By Kevin Flynn

• Solve the Crisis.
• Stop Blight early and efficiently
• Outsource to our Community Councils
• Use existing laws to put a stop to nuisances.

Neighborhood blight is a problem across our city. When one house becomes overgrown with weeds, or has broken windows, or drainpipes falling off of the eaves of the roof, that house is suffering, but, just as certainly, so is the entire street where that house is located. We need to find new solutions. Doing nothing is not an option. Let's start preserving our neighborhoods with some simple, direct, solutions. The budget for Private Lot Abatement (the process by which the city of Cincinnati goes on to privately owned property and cleans up nuisances of weeds and litter) has been cut significantly over the past few years and was cut again in the city's 2014 Budget. I recommend that Community Councils (whose funding was also cut in the 2014 Budget) be contracted with to do the work. The communities adversely affected by the blighted properties have a vested interest in seeing them cleaned up. The costs incurred by the Community Councils in abating the public nuisances would be recouped from liens and assessments placed on the properties. The Community Councils obtain a source of funds to aid their communities, the properties get cleaned up preserving neighborhood property values, and the city stops spending money it doesn't have. My guess is most Community Councils, if not all, would leap at the opportunity to clean up their neighborhoods and garner funding for other community projects.

We need to enforce our existing laws concerning public nuisances. As a city, we must abate these nuisances immediately, before the properties drag down the entire neighborhood, taking property values down with them, and eventually costing the city and its citizens even more. Even if the properties are abandoned or foreclosed upon, someone owns those properties. The owner must be made accountable, whether that owner is a bank, an out of town landlord, or an individual (it doesn't cost anything to pick up your own trash from the ground).

Over the past few years, the city has spent millions of dollars tearing down structures that had become so decrepit that they couldn't be saved. Isn't it better for our city if we stop the problems before they become so huge that the only solution is to tear down the building, losing tax revenue along with some great neighborhood assets? Of course it is.

For nuisance abatement that is too extensive for Community Councils to take on, Ohio law provides a tremendous resource to correcting public nuisances and preserving the deteriorating properties, thereby enhancing the value of the entire neighborhood. One of the great remedies that State Law provides in successful nuisance actions is a priority lien for the cost of abating the nuisance, that gets paid before the existing mortgages. This resource can be used and should be used to protect our city and our neighborhoods from decline.

Cincinnati, in addition to being a city of great neighborhoods, is also a city of volunteers. We have tremendous assets in our University of Cincinnati College of Law (where I have taught Property Law for 20 years) and in the Cincinnati Bar Association. I have volunteered to take on the coordination of volunteers from these institutions, to work with the City Solicitor's office to pursue public nuisance lawsuits at no cost to the city. Each neighborhood has its own strengths. We need to harness those strengths and work together with the private sector so that each one of our neighborhoods is a desirable place to live, work, and play. It all starts with preserving and protecting our homes, our streets, our neighborhoods.