After nearly four years, a group of Black Cincinnati residents and the city’s officials have settled a federal lawsuit in which the residents accused the Ohio city of intentionally favoring white homeowners through the way it operated its residential tax abatement program.
The lawsuit filed in July 2020 claimed the city operated the program in a “racially discriminatory way” that worsened Cincinnati’s racially segregated residency pattern.
The recent settlement will allow the program to continue, provided that city officials make efforts to increase the number of Black residents participating, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported.
The Cincinnati Tax Abatement Program, administered by the city’s Department of Community and Economic Development, was designed to allow property owners to apply “to pay property taxes on the pre-improvement value of their property for 10-15 years,” the lawsuit stated.
The program required a minimum of $5,000 in renovation costs to be eligible for the tax reduction, and the lawsuit claimed that this disqualified lower-income homeowners who wanted to make modest renovations totaling less than that.
“Nowhere in the application or approval process is there any consideration by the City of Cincinnati of the degree to which the granting of tax abatements will have a racially segregative effect on the residency pattern” in the city, the lawsuit said.
The city is made up of 50.4 percent white residents and 39.6 percent Black residents, according to 2022 United States Census Bureau data.
The suit also claimed the program made Black residents poorer as it favored white homeowners applying for tax breaks to offset home repairs, the Enquirer reported. According to the news outlet, although the city overhauled the program last year, Black homeowners involved in the suit still accused the new system of discrimination.
City records showed that Cincinnati granted 2,640 residential tax abatements for $183 million by the time the lawsuit was filed in 2020, according to the residents’ attorney, Robert Newman.
He previously said, according to the Enquirer, that more than $53 million of those funds went to one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, which is also predominantly white.
The Enquirer’s staff reviewed a five-year period of city data between 2014 and 2018 to find that two of Cincinnati’s majority-Black neighborhoods received less than $1 million in tax abatements during that time.
The recent settlement, signed on Feb. 8, means the city will have to expand its outreach about the tax abatement program to areas of Cincinnati that are home to larger numbers of poorer residents and Black residents, monitor the program for racial iniquities and make the application process and its website more accessible, the Enquire reported.
As part of the settlement, the city will also have to pay $110,000 to the homeowners who sued the city.
“Since taking office, we’ve worked to make our residential abatement program more impactful and accessible to the folks who need it the most. I’m proud of our administration’s steps to bring more incentives, an easier process and information about other home improvement resources to our underinvested communities,” Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval told Atlanta Black Star in a statement.
“As we move forward, those goals will continue to be our guiding light,” Pureval said.
