Eye on Ohio (https://eyeonohio.com/)
The couple who put their blood, sweat, and tears into building a home to care for their elderly parents and others. The millionaires next door who made it clear they were not welcome. And the dream that mysteriously went up in smoke. This article provided by Eye on Ohio, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Ohio Center for Journalism. Please join Eye on Ohio's free mailing list as this helps provide more public service reporting to the community. When Scott and his wife Priscila Hamilton tried to start a family business, they looked far and wide for a property they could convert to an elderly care home.
Not only was the demand overwhelming in Ohio, which has often experienced severe shortages of medical care, but it was also going to be a labor of love: Scott’s elderly parents, aged 85 and 92, needed full time care now. Especially after his father Jim Hamilton, a World War II Navy veteran and retired OSU professor, recently suffered a heart attack.
“We could never imagine placing our own parents in big facilities that look and feel like institutions. We wanted them to be at home, feeling safe and enjoying our family environment as they aged and struggled with new realities,” Priscila Hamilton said. “That’s when we realized the importance of having family-style homes to care for elders who can’t fully take care of themselves, just like our parents can’t.”
So they bought a house and were almost done fixing it up to make it a small group home. But no senior ever moved into it.
Neighbors sued the Hamiltons to stop their building permit. Just as the suit was about to be lost, in the dead of the night on February 9, 2021, someone broke into the house and torched it.
Exploring what can be done to help cities’ poorest residents who struggle with water debt
This is part two of a three-part series looking at the state of water affordability in Cleveland, Philadelphia and beyond, authored by the Northeast Ohio Solutions Journalism Collaborative in partnership with Resolve Philly in Philadelphia. You can find Part 1 here. Robert Ballenger’s office in Center City Philadelphia is filled to the brim with stacks of paperwork. It’s just one small sign of the complexity of the assistance programs his low-income clients need.
If Kevina Chapolini-Renwrick couldn’t pay the $15,000 water bill, she’d lose her home. The South Philadelphia resident began to panic when she saw the city had tacked a notice on her door threatening her with legal action, back in the summer of 2021. Her husband had inherited the property from his parents in 2007, and with it, their unpaid water bill debt. Tears traced the retired social worker’s cheeks as she recalled the memories tied to the simple rowhouse with beige siding, snugly tucked between its neighbors on a peaceful side street in the Newbold neighborhood.
Across the U.S., the cost of water and sewer has only gotten more expensive over the last several decades, with the average water bill increasing by 30% between 2012 and 2019, according to a utility bill index conducted by Bluefield Research.
As of 2019, low-income households spent an average of almost 10% of their disposable income each month to pay for basic monthly water and sewer services, according to a study out of Texas A&M University.
And in both Cleveland and Philadelphia, the pandemic and the cities’ high poverty rates mean there are thousands of people behind on their water bills. As of November 2021, almost 10% of all Cleveland Water customers – about 40,000 customers – were behind on their water and sewer bills by six months or more, a rate that’s far higher than non-pandemic years. More than 1 in 4 Cleveland Water customers were behind on at least one bill that month, and in Philadelphia, nearly a third of customers were at least one bill behind in March 2021. Despite a significant difference in population size, the city of Cleveland isn’t so different from Philadelphia.
Al Jenkins outside of his Cleveland home. This project was funded by a grant from the Pulitzer Center and provided by Eye on Ohio, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Ohio Center for Journalism.