Cincinnati housing practices are undergoing some of the most sweeping changes in three decades — potentially remaking neighborhoods from the city to the suburbs.

        Thousands of old apartments near downtown no longer have to rent just to low-income tenants. Poor people are moving out with new government help and new choices about where to live.

        Middle-income neighborhoods are becoming more economically mixed. And today's low-rent districts are fast becoming prime prospects for tomorrow's upscale homes.

        Not since the 1970s, when Section 8 housing began helping poor people pay rent, has the nation seen such fundamental housing shifts. In place of old policies that clustered low-income housing in the inner city, new programs aim to disperse the poor throughout the region.

At their West Chester apartment, Vicky Tait and daughter Ziara Allman, 2, read a book. They spent their first Christmas in a quiet, new home after moving with help from government housing vouchers. | ZOOM |

        “We're losing population, we're losing tax base, and we have to do everything we can to save it,” says Cincinnati City Councilman John Cranley, who's pushed for changes in housing policies. “Hopefully, this will make a difference.”

        Slowly but surely, change already is taking place.

        An Enquirer examination of 10 years of federal and county housing records, and a review of city housing patterns, finds that:

        • Landlords of nearly 1,700 apartments have quit the federal Section 8 housing program in the past four years. The apartments, many of them in dilapidated houses or rows of dismal buildings, are mostly near downtown. In Hamilton County, one of every four Section 8 family units has disappeared since 1998.

        • Since 1996, more than 4,000 poor people have received new federal rent vouchers to move into apartments anywhere they choose. They're leaving Over-the-Rhine and the West End for new apartments in Westwood and Avondale and dozens of other communities outside downtown.

        • More than 200 apartment buildings and 99 vacant properties in Over-the-Rhine are up for sale. Developers envision turning the city's poorest neighborhood into a thriving center of eclectic housing and commerce.

        New housing programs for the poor are behind much of the change. But the ripple effects are being felt in neighborhoods beyond those well-known for poverty.

        Solid, working-class neighborhoods such as Westwood and East Price Hill already are complaining that an influx of tenants with government rent vouchers threatens to move the slums into their backyards.

        “Until Oakley, Hyde Park and Green Township have as (many vouchers) as we have, I don't want to hear it,” says Mary Kuhl, co-founder of Westwood Concern, a citizens group. “Why should the government be working hand in hand helping to destroy our neighborhoods?”
       

Minus 8

        The gradual demise of Section 8 housing is spurring much of the change.

INFOGRAPHIC

• How Section 8 housing has changed

        For 30 years, the government has reimbursed landlords who own apartment buildings that rent to poor people. While designated housing for the poor once was viewed as an innovative housing solution, its troubles have become infamous over time.

        Critics point to Over-the-Rhine, Cincinnati's poorest neighborhood and home to the biggest chunk of the region's Section 8 housing. It's the most violent neighborhood in the city. Streets are full of vacant buildings with broken windows. And despite years of work by social service agencies and millions of dollars in public and private investment, the median income for the nearly 8,000 residents is only $7,620 a year.

        Today, the idea is to break up that blight. Section 8 project subsidies are being replaced with government vouchers that help pay people's rents — no matter where they want to live.

        It's a dramatic shift in policy — with mammoth ramifications.

        In Hamilton County, 1,685 family apartments have dropped out of Section 8 since 1998. More than half were in Over-the-Rhine, and most of the rest were in other near-downtown neighborhoods.

        Landlords of another 1,300 apartments could drop out of Section 8 in the next two years as new federal rules make the program less attractive.

        Vicky Tait's old apartment in Mount Airy dropped out of the Section 8 program, and she got a voucher last year. Now, she lives in West Chester in Butler County, in an apartment she always dreamed of, in a neighborhood that's peaceful and quiet.

        “You don't see police when you come home from work. You don't see people standing in front of your door,” says Ms. Tait, 27, a medical clerk and the mother of a 2-year-old.

        “It's a better place to raise my daughter,” she says. “It's a fresh start and a better start.”

        The Cincinnati City Council has backed the idea of dispersing the poor by banning construction of most new, low-income housing in the city.

        At the same time, public housing projects in the West End, some of the oldest and most notorious in the city, are being demolished.

        And in one of the most significant housing events of the past year, Tom Denhart, who controls hundreds of low-income apartments, put most of his properties up for sale, which could bring new market-rate housing to Over-the-Rhine.
       

Vouchers spreading

        If housing projects were the experiment of the '60s and '70s, vouchers are the experiment of this decade.

        From 1996 to 2001, the number of vouchers in Hamilton County has spiked 79 percent, to 9,469, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

        While an estimated 60 percent of new voucher holders stayed in their old neighborhoods, others moved out, often to next-rung neighborhoods where rental units are plentiful and moderately priced.

        The Enquirer's analysis shows that voucher holders now live in all but seven of Hamilton County's 92 neighborhoods.

        Some neighborhoods, especially those on the city's west side, have seen significant increases in voucher holders since 1996.

        Voucher use jumped 69 percent in Avondale, 74 percent in Bond Hill and 129 percent in East Price Hill.

        A 44 percent increase in Cincinnati's biggest neighborhood, Westwood, spurred residents to form a community group.

        Ms. Kuhl insists no one could pick out the house on her Westwood street where vouchers are accepted.

        “But that's not always the case,” says Ms. Kuhl, who co-founded Westwood Concern. “When (residents) see two women coming out with six or seven or eight kids in a junky car with stuff all over the dashboard, they're afraid.”

        In 2002, Westwood leads the county in number of vouchers, with 740. It also has twice as many rental units as any city neighborhood.

        “When you direct a large proportion of low-income people into a neighborhood, you're going to destroy the neighborhood,” Ms. Kuhl says. “We are saying, "Not in Westwood. We've had enough.'”
       

Theory vs. practice

        Voucher supporters insist that poverty will be dispersed — not merely reconcentrated someplace else.

        But theory doesn't always work perfectly.

        Rents in some areas are too high for voucher holders. Residents pay 30 percent of their incomes, and public money subsidizes the rest up to a maximum allowable rent that varies by neighborhood. In Westwood, the rent and utility ceiling is $776 a month for a three-bedroom apartment. In Forest Park, it's $935.

        But in places like Mason and Symmes Township, the average rent for a three-bedroom apartment runs about $1,184a month, putting it outside the limits of government aid.

        In addition, housing experts say only 20 percent to 30 percent of Greater Cincinnati landlords accept vouchers. While landlords have to abide by laws prohibiting discrimination based on race, disability and gender, they're free to take vouchers — or not.

        “There is a lot of resistance by landlords,” says Karla Irvine, executive director of Housing Opportunities Made Equal, an agency that works to end housing discrimination.“Some is racial bias. Some is just ignorance.”

        Her agency coordinates a program that encourages people with vouchers to move to neighborhoods with less than 15 percent poverty. Funded by a $1.2 million federal grant, the program recruits willing landlords and helps poor people with the apartment search.

        When people move to nicer areas, they “tend to get better jobs. They like where they move because it is safe, and their kids do better in school,” Ms. Irvine says.

        “If you don't have to worry about your child being preyed upon by drug dealers or people shooting them, you can kind of pull the rest of things in your life together.”
       

Drawing people in

        Many long-time city dwellers also are starting to feel the pull of a related housing shift: plans by developers to turn Over-the-Rhine and the West End into thriving neighborhoods where upscale homes, lower-income apartments and commerce coexist.

        The comeback of the American city hinges on the desire of people to return to the central neighborhoods, city housing experts say.

        And Mayor Charlie Luken listed redevelopment on Vine Street as one of his top goals for 2002, calling the 1 1/2-mile stretch in Over-the-Rhine the most important street in the city.

        Thirty-year-old Tony Tiefenbach is just the sort of new homeowner developers are seeking. He cut his 20-minute commute to 12 blocks this month when he bought a three-story townhouse in City West. The West End development is an experiment in mixed-income living: Market-rate homes are next door to identical homes that are being rented to the poor with government aid.

        At City West, Mr. Tiefenbach could buy more house for his money, take advantage of tax abatements and lower association fees and get a view of downtown.

        And, as an industrial real estate agent, Mr. Tiefenbach saw an opportunity.

        “Any good investment doesn't look good on the front end or else everyone would jump on it,” he says of his home, built on the site of the old Lincoln Court, one of the city's largest housing projects. “In the next five or 10 years, everybody will be talking about how it was a good move.”
       

Uncertain results

        Because all the changes are so new, no one knows exactly what they will mean for residents and neighborhoods.

        Supporters say everyone will benefit from programs to disperse the poor and remake neighborhoods near downtown. Race relations might improve as people of different colors and incomes live side by side, and economic development will be spurred by a revitalized downtown.

        Others see the changes as an insidious way to move poor, African-Americans out of prime downtown real estate — property that developers have only now come to covet.

        “It's pushing everybody down there, people who grew up there, from their habitat,” says Tamaris Bowden, 22. “I don't think that's right.”

        Still, Ms. Bowden acknowledges that vouchers give some people more opportunities. She used one in June to move from a Section 8 apartment in Over-the-Rhine to Price Hill. She wanted a better, safer place to raise her 1-year-old son.

        “When I look out my window, I see the trees. There's fresh air. It's quieter,” she says. “When I woke up downtown, I'd hear a bunch of sirens. Now I just hear birds and cars.”

        Others see changing housing strategies as an assault on the suburbs, places where people have worked hard for what they've got and want to keep.

        They cite the city's ban on most new low-income housing.

        The ban only works “to displace people into the suburbs and let them worry about it,” says Ann Langdon, a Delhi Township trustee. “It's a cowardly way to deal with the problem they've created in the city.”

        The ban also irks some housing advocates, who say the ban fails to provide concrete ways to get outlying areas involved.

        ReStoc, a nonprofit, low-income housing developer, has been criticized for stockpiling older buildings in Over-the-Rhine to prevent an influx of middle- and high-income residents.

        ReStoc coordinator Jennifer Summers says the group just wants to make sure low-income people have affordable housing choices, whether they're downtown or in the suburbs.

        Her worry: “We're "Tear it down and worry about the rest later.' But later never comes.”

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