This project was funded by a grant from the Pulitzer Center and provided by Eye on Ohio, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Ohio Center for Journalism. Please join the free mailing lists for Eye on Ohio as this helps provide more public service reporting. Shortly after Athens County started a land bank in 2018, Matt Bunting put in a land bank application for an abandoned church next to his property. Neighbors had taken turns cutting the grass, but overgrown trees had fallen on a house, garage, and car.
After waiting years, Bunting had given up hope. He said land bank officials offered the property to the Buchtel Village Council.
This article provided by Eye on Ohio, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Ohio Center for Journalism. Please join our free mailing list as this helps us provide more public service reporting. Miracle M. wrapped her arms around herself and rocked back and forth as she retold the story of her premature daughter’s death. Her daughter was born at 22 weeks, weighed nearly four pounds, and died in 12 hours.
“Even after she died, I held her for two more days. I could not let her go,” said Miracle.
This article provided by Eye on Ohio, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Ohio Center for Journalism . Please join our free mailing list as this helps us provide more public service reporting. Tenants facing eviction in Cleveland Housing Court can access a temporary measure of relief through the current federal moratorium on evictions, and through the city and county’s rental aid programs. But, they’re no silver bullet. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) eviction moratorium, started on Sept. 1, was meant to pause pandemic-related eviction cases against tenants, to provide a measure of relief during these challenging times.
This article provided by Eye on Ohio, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Ohio Center for Journalism in partnership with the nonprofit newsroom, The Fuller Project. Please join Eye on Ohio’s free mailing list or the mailing list for the Fuller Project as this helps us provide more public service reporting. CHESAPEAKE, Ohio — The children at Stephanie Geneseo’s home-based child care center dart around in astronaut helmets while they battle green googly-eyed COVID alien germs, using play to learn about hand washing in a pandemic that shows no signs of letting up. “I want to make it fun so that it didn’t seem like something bad or weird to them,” Geneseo says. “We’ve done everything we can to make it as normal to their day as it could be,” she said in July after she reopened All Nestled Inn, her center in Chesapeake, Ohio.
The return to caring for children after a 10-week coronavirus shutdown was anything but normal for the 51-year-old, known as Mrs. Steffy to the families she serves.
Keeping her young charges healthy weighs on Geneseo as she works 18-hour days, watching children from early morning to midnight, to keep the business she spent 22 years building afloat.
Ohio, like many places across the country, didn’t have enough child care options before coronavirus struck.
One group succeeds with holistic approach; demand still exceeds supply
Sylvia Rucker has been a caretaker most of her life. As the head cook at Hannah Gibbons Elementary School in Collinwood, she prepares meals for approximately 250 students daily, and has four adult children of her own. But when her oldest daughter died unexpectedly in the summer of 2019, Rucker was suddenly thrust into the role of parent once again. “My daughter went into the hospital with a toothache. She passed away a week later, and left behind three kids,” says Rucker.
This article provided by Eye on Ohio, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Ohio Center for Journalism. Please join our free mailing list as this helps us provide more public service reporting. When Ohio Governor Mike DeWine issued the statewide coronavirus stay-at-home order in mid-March, Selina Pagan and other Latino leaders in Cleveland were worried.
They’d been planning in-person events to get more people to participate in the 2020 census – historically, Hispanics have been undercounted, resulting in a loss of federal funds and voting power at the local level. But, when everything was canceled, months and years of planning were suddenly tossed out the window. Pagan, who is president of the Young Latino Network in Cleveland, came up with a new idea when she came across a video online: “I saw a Puerto Rican pickup truck with a speaker strapped onto the back playing a loop announcing the stay-at-home order, and I thought, ‘That’s a pretty cool way to get your message across – how do we do that in our community?’”
She pitched the idea of doing something similar locally on a phone call with other voting and census outreach organizers, and the Cleveland Caravan (or La Caravana) was born.
At the inaugural caravan, held the first week in April, a pickup truck followed by dozens of cars wove through the densely-built streets of the Clark-Fulton neighborhood on Cleveland’s near West Side, which has a large Latino population.
In 2019, Taxpayers lost at least $11.25 million, While Homeowners and Banks lost up to $77 Million, But Title to Revamped Houses Remains Sound
This article provided by Eye on Ohio, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Ohio Center for Journalism. Please join our free mailing list as this helps us provide more public service reporting. The Ohio Supreme Court has ruled that an unusual foreclosure process that can result in people’s homes being sold without compensation for their equity should remain legal in the Buckeye State. However, in a recently released opinion the state justices couldn’t agree on the reasoning behind it.
Justice Judith French authored the lead opinion, joined by Justices Michael Donnelly and Robert Hendrickson. (Justice Robert A. Hendrickson, of the Twelfth District Court of Appeals, replaced Justice Melody Stewart.) They declined to comment on the constitutional issues presented by the case involving what are called “administrative foreclosures,” saying that they would not stop the process because the law governing these procedures was not “patently and unambiguously” unconstitutional.
Not to be confused with expedited foreclosures, administrative foreclosures send abandoned properties to a county’s board of revision, a committee that usually considers home values for property owners wanting to contest their taxes.
Ohio's digital divide hurts those who can't afford high-speed internet
Computer trainer and former library aide Shenee King has a bird’s eye view when it comes to digital inequity.
She’s seen students fail assignments because they lack a home computer — and the assignment is in Google classroom. She’s seen middle schoolers fail standardized essay tests because they weren’t taught keyboarding — so they write the test longhand and struggle to type it before their time is up.
The youngsters are victims of a problem that affects residents throughout Ohio, but the issue is particularly acute in Cleveland. Digital exclusion consists of a combination of deficiencies: lack of access to affordable networks and hardware; lack of literacy or skills to navigate, consume, and produce content in the digital sphere; and finally lack of access to troubleshooting support when broadband or devices break. The reality of digital exclusion means many, are isolated at a time when the Internet enables daily life. From GPS-enabled cars, to Bluetooth kitchen appliances to virtual medical consultations, digital access determines tasks from the mundane to the crucial.
The Fairfax Neighborhood where Digital C has aimed their project. (Photo Credit: Eye on Ohio)
“Everything is going digital now, as far as resources for help,” said King, who works with the Cleveland Housing Network.
