What a concerned citizen on OTR saw today
Around 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, a photo taken in Walnut Hills started making the rounds.
It shows a white Range Rover with POAH branding on it — a clean, high-end SUV tied to a nonprofit currently under heavy scrutiny from tenants and the city. On its own, it’s just a car. But in context, it doesn’t feel like just a car. Because this isn’t happening in a vacuum.
The conditions tenants say they’re living in
Across Over-the-Rhine, the West End, Pendleton, and Lower Price Hill, tenants have been describing the same pattern for months:
- Rats inside units
- Sewage backing up into living spaces
- Mold spreading across walls
- Broken appliances and no hot water
- Buildings that don’t lock properly
Some of those complaints go back more than a year. Others are still unresolved right now. And it’s not just word of mouth. Local reporting and city inspections have already confirmed a long list of violations tied to these properties.
At one point, the city stepped in and put the entire portfolio under heightened inspection. That doesn’t happen casually.
Then the city wrote the check anyway
City officials called it necessary. The buildings are old, they said. Keeping the units affordable matters. Big repairs cost real money. And on paper, all of that checks out. But this is where a lot of Cincinnatians started shaking their heads. If the living conditions were already so bad that the city itself described them as “unacceptable” and “dire,” why was writing another big check the first move—before real, visible accountability was locked in?
That question hasn’t faded. If anything, the tension around it has only gotten sharper.
Why that Range Rover photo hit a nerve
The Range Rover isn’t proof of wrongdoing. It doesn’t tell you where the money went or who approved what. But optics matter — especially in a situation like this…