By Andrew Flynn & Madison Plank
This story is a part of the Cincinnati’s Storytelling of Journalism project, which represents a collaboration between Northern Kentucky University (NKU) journalism students, the NKU Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Greater Cincinnati Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Students interviewed seven professional journalist winners and finalists from the Greater Cincinnati SPJ Chapter’s 2021 Excellence in Journalism Awards to create these Nieman Storyboard Annotations-inspired Q&As and story annotations that analyze and celebrate our region’s award-winning works of journalism.
2021 Excellence in Journalism Award: Best Government/Community Issues Reporting
Winning Journalist: Dan Horn, The Cincinnati Enquirer
Winning Story: This mom needs to keep a roof over her kids' heads. In Cincinnati, it gets harder every day
The line at Hamilton County Courthouse is growing longer the closer it gets to opening time. Throughout the queue stand the many residents of Cincinnati who may soon be evicted from their homes. Among them? A single mom of three from Westwood named Page Berry whose full-time job making $17 an hour just wasn’t cutting it to keep up with her bills.
Dan Horn, an investigative reporter for the The Cincinnati Enquirer met Berry on this day while looking to capture the story of someone suffering from potential eviction. Throughout his nearly six-month process of interviewing Berry, different lawyers involved in her case and those who worked in the government assistance building, Horn was able to capture the persisting and haunting problem following people like Berry: unaffordable housing and the simple fact that being poor is expensive.
Throughout Horn’s time with the Cincinnati Enquirer—in which he’s spent nearly 23 years reporting for—he has found these court cases are the norm for Cincinnati residents. Horn notes in his story that every month in Cincinnati, nearly one in three residents (88,000) are in danger of losing their homes and about 4,500 residents are forced out by eviction every year.
Berry was one of the luckier ones when it came to her eviction court case back in the winter months of late 2019, where the judge allowed her an extension on paying her rent. Though the fees were hefty, totaling up to nearly $315 on top of her $649 rent.
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| Dan Horn |
In a question and answer session with Dan Horn, NKU students Amari Brandy, Andrew Flynn and Madison Plank asked Horn about everything from his interviewing style to his biggest takeaway from working on this story. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.and will be followed by the annotated story.
How would you describe your interviewing style—especially for a more narrative story like this?
I like to listen more than I like to talk. I tend to—for a story like this—to ask very open-ended questions. The basics you have to get out of the way initially of course. I like to observe, and record, and watch, and let things happen in front of me more than I like to interject. That's why I like narrative so much because once you establish that relationship you can just be present and that allows you to see how people live, work, and do the things that they do, and deal with the problems that they deal with.
What was your biggest obstacle in working on this story?
My biggest headache was the data. That's not where my heart is, but it was necessary. Once we settled in with Berry, I felt good that we were gonna get where we wanted to go. I felt comfortable that the project was going to be completed. The writing was not easy. Narratives can be tricky: You have to have structure that works and think about voice, theme, and consistency. I struggled early figuring out how to get where I needed to get because the story had some heft to it in terms of data and findings.
How personal or people-focused was this story in comparison to other stories you have done?
Compared to day-to-day stories these are more personal. There are aspects of all jobs people are more compassionate about than others. As hard as they are, I just really like narratives and spending time with people who are trying to figure something out, or trying to solve a problem, or trying to get from point A to point B. I went out to a county in Indiana that had the lowest vaccination rate to spend time with a health professional trying to get people to get vaccinated in a town where people don't want to be vaccinated. Those stories are interesting to me because they're human.
What was your biggest takeaway from working on this story?
I wasn’t surprised by a lot of stuff. The data might have been more stark than expected, but there are a lot of Page Berrys in Cincinnati in the sense that there are a lot of single parents in Cincinnati that have a hard time paying rent. I have grown to appreciate what that’s like. It’s been a long time since I have had to worry about something like that. It's good for me and readers to see that there are thousands of people struggling to do that basic, fundamental thing.
This mom needs to keep a roof over her kids' heads. In Cincinnati, it gets harder every day
By Dan Horn, The Cincinnati Enquirer
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| Meg Vogel / The Enquirer |
They begin lining up in the cold outside the Hamilton County Courthouse around 8:30 a.m., men, women and children bundled in winter coats, all shuffling slowly toward the same heavy glass doors.
Once inside, they empty their pockets into plastic containers at the metal detectors and walk across the lobby to Room 121, where they pause to find their names on a computer printout taped to a wall.
At the top of the page, in bold capital letters, is the reason everyone is here.
“EVICTIONS.”
Question: How did you hear about these court cases?
Horn: Eviction cases are there every day. Well, not during the pandemic of course since everything is shut down. So, I’d always been aware of them. I’d heard about housing and eviction in the past, and when you cover courts, you’re in the building and see people line up, and I think in this case, that became a logical way to get into this story.
It’s a Tuesday in late January and eviction court is getting crowded. Some people pace the back of the room alone. Some sit on wooden benches with a husband or wife, or with kids whose feet don’t reach the floor. All are about to confront the same cruel irony:
Question: Did you choose to kind of come back around to the lede of your story on purpose?
Horn: I looked at about a month and a half of data work to understand what the renter situation was like in Cincinnati, there’s all kind of Census data out there, and you have to cross reference income data with housing data with other stuff. You have to do it at the city level, track level to get the neighborhood pieces of it. We spent a lot of time doing that. Once we did that, we knew that this was going to be a starting point, not necessarily the starting point of the story, but it would be a starting point to find people or a person ideally which was the goal to kind of illustrate and tell the story through what we learned from all of this data that would humanize that in a way that the data doesn’t. I guess I knew it would form some of the work early on and it was a place I knew we would be at some point.
Cincinnati is a city of renters.
Cincinnati is a hard place to be a renter.
The court docket lists 48 people who are days away from losing their homes, most for failing to pay the rent. One is a single mother from Westwood named Page Berry.
Question: How much time did you spend at the Hamilton County Courthouse to capture the above descriptive scenes?
Horn: I spent a full day at the courthouse. I got there when the courthouse open and there were people already at the door. I sat through different mixing courts and so I spent an entire morning (five hours). Like I said I covered court cases for years so I knew how the system worked and I had that kind of information stored. I just needed to be there for a day and be able to describe that day and like I said it worked out because that was also the day that the person whose narrative story I was telling was also on the docket. So that was basically just the better part of the day, but for the most part I was informed by about eight years of prior court cases.
Berry is 27 and works nights at the airport, five days a week, loading and unloading freight from cargo planes. She makes $17 an hour, more than she’s ever made in her life, but some months it isn’t enough.
Question: How did you approach Berry in order to ask her questions initially in the court house?
Horn: For a story like this, you know I’ve done narratives where I follow people around for a year. You spend multiple times a week for weeks and weeks or months and months. Those kind of stories, sometimes you just join the course of covering other things, sometimes if you know you want to write about a subject, you can reach out to a person who can get you there, and in this case, that person was an attorney from Legal Aid that I had known for years through previous coverage. I called Nick and said this is what I’m doing, I’ve got this idea and this is the data, and I need a follow-up person who is representative of Cincinnati being a city full of renters where it’s a hard place to rents.
Two weeks before Christmas, Berry returned home from work in the morning to find an eviction notice taped to the door of the basement apartment she shares with her three daughters, ages 7, 8 and 9.
At first, Berry thought it was a mistake. She’d been late before with the $649 rent, but the building manager had always given her a few extra days in exchange for a $75 late fee.
She peeled the notice from the door and read it again in the early morning gloom, just to be sure.
“You are being asked to leave the premises.”
Now, weeks later, Berry is on the docket in Room 121, another struggling renter in a city filled with people struggling to pay the rent.
Ordered to leave, but fighting to stay
Berry receives no housing subsidy from the government and no child support from the father of her children. Other than the $100 in food stamps she gets each month, she and her girls are on their own.
Their lives are governed by the calculus of poverty. A car repair or the utility bill? Clothes or groceries? Berry makes concessions to her budget almost every day, and her decision last year to rent a small basement apartment in Westwood was one more.
The apartment building’s security door didn’t lock and the light in the hallway didn’t work. The girls’ bedroom was too cramped, the kitchen sink leaked and the ceiling over the shower was in the early stages of collapse.
But the apartment was clean, and the rent was the best Berry could find near her daughters’ school. She didn’t love the place, but she understood the difference between what she wanted and what she needed.
“This is not where I want to be,” she told herself before signing the lease in January 2019. “This is where I got to be.”
Cincinnati has one of the largest per capita populations of renters in America among big cities, with renters accounting for 62% of all households. Like Berry, almost half are considered burdened renters because they spend at least 30% of their income on housing.
What that means for the city is this: Every month, about 88,000 Cincinnatians – almost 1 of 3 city residents – are in danger of losing the roofs over their heads. And every year, about 4,500 are forced out by eviction.
Berry’s journey to Room 121 began in December. She knew the month would be a challenge because her biweekly paycheck wouldn’t arrive until after the rent was due. That happened sometimes, but this time other expenses popped up that put her in a deeper hole.
She’d spent $100 on winter clothes for the girls, who had outgrown the previous winter’s coats and sweaters, and $80 on two used tires for her used 2012 Toyota Camry, which barely survived an encounter with a guardrail after skidding on the ice a month earlier.
Something had to slide until her paycheck arrived. Berry couldn’t risk losing her car to repossession, because that would mean losing her only way to work every night, so she decided the rent was a better bet than her car payment.
Days later, she got the eviction notice, along with a demand for the $75 late fee, an $85 attorney’s fee and a $155 eviction filing fee. None of it made sense to Berry. If she didn’t have the full $649 for the rent, how was she going to come up with $964?
Question: Why did you decide to include this detail of all the fees that were due?
Horn: That was very intentional and that is a great question because that's one thing that always annoys me when we write about poverty and when we write about people struggling with affordable housing as well as issues, for example, like childcare. Too often, we don't explain how it personally relates to that individual’s life and include details like “What are the dollars?”, “How much do you make?” and “Why is it a problem?”. It’s easy to say someone is poor but it’s always more complicated than that and you’re doing a disservice to the people you’re talking to and also a disservice to the reader if you’re not explicit about how it affects people. I really wanted to talk down to the granular level about how much stuff costs, how much does the person make, what do you spend on the children’s clothing, what expenses are unexpected and why did this situation happen this month.
Standing in the hall that December morning, staring at the eviction notice, panic washed over her.
Without the apartment, she and the girls could fall back into the chaos of transient housing, relying, as they had in the past, on relatives with spare rooms or on hotels that collected rent by the week.
Despite its shortcomings, Berry and her daughters had found a measure of stability in their apartment. They’d made it into something more than just a place they were staying.
Berry decorated the door with decals of flowers and butterflies alongside the words “Jesus” and “home.” Her girls – Angelina, Ajaunae and Amariyonna – taped artwork to their bedroom walls and ate dinner on placemats adorned with “Frozen” characters.
Question: Why did you decide to include this detail of the decorations and artwork in this story?
Horn: Page Berry and her family are more than just poor people, they are people and they live lives and she loves her daughters and her children love her. I think it’s important that be a part of any story we write about this is in any kind of detail. You know, we’re not just talking about the numbers I got in the census data, we’re talking about moms that have kids and their kids like the movie Frozen, to decorate their home and have spaghetti for dinner. They are real people, and any opportunity you have to humanize these folks helps people understand why this stuff matters now.
And every weekday morning, the girls lined up together on the gray linoleum floor in the living room, backpacks slung over their shoulders, pink coats zipped to their chins, ready for the 15-minute drive to a school they loved.
“What are we going to do today?” Berry would ask when they arrived.
“Be great!” they’d say in unison. “And do great things!”
The eviction notice meant everything they’d done to build a life in their apartment was in jeopardy. A sudden move could cost her daughters their school and Berry her job. That was the trouble with affordable housing in Cincinnati. Berry had found it wasn’t always affordable for a single mom who made about $30,000 a year, after taxes, and it often wasn’t in a good location for parents trying to raise kids in a safe place near a decent school.
Berry wasn’t sure where they’d end up, but she knew it would be disruptive. She might even need to find someone to adopt the girls’ 4-month-old kitten, a black and white bundle of energy named Bobo, because so many apartments charged a fee for cats. Maybe, she thought, the girls would be OK with a guinea pig.
She didn’t like her options. So Berry decided to do something most renters don’t when facing eviction. She’d fight to stay.
She just wasn’t sure how.
Trying to catch up, with a little help
The clerk in Room 121 begins calling names on the docket soon after Magistrate Charles Thiemann takes his seat. Berry’s name is high on the list.
One after another, tenants make their way to the lectern and stand before Thiemann, who recites some variation of the same questions for each.
“Do you agree you’re behind on your rent?” Thiemann asks a middle-aged man.
“I do,” the man says.
“You plan on leaving?”
“I do,” he says. “I was just hoping for a few more days.”
Question: How did it feel to capture this conversation?
Horn: You know, I covered courts for a long time, and you know there’s a lot of interesting back and forth that you hear. Even in cases you’re not even covering, you’re just sitting around the courtroom and you often get little exchanges that are interesting between a judge and the defendant or plaintiffs that can be very poignant I think sometimes even if the next one is just the same. And this was a very typical exchange and I used it because it was typical.
Eviction cases tend to be straight-forward affairs when the rent is late. Landlords can file an eviction notice the day payment is missed and aren’t obligated to let someone stay even if they can pay in full after the due date.
About 5 of every 100 renters in Cincinnati are evicted each year, roughly twice the national rate, and unpaid rent is the most common reason. Most cases in eviction court take a minute or two. Some less.
Berry hopes her case will be different. A few weeks before the court hearing, she caught a break when a Legal Aid attorney, Nick DiNardo, agreed to help her, free of charge.
DiNardo, who’s been working with poor tenants for years, knows the odds are against renters facing eviction. As many as 3 of 4 poor people who qualify for a government housing subsidy don’t have one. And once they fall behind on rent, many don’t have the resources to catch up.
Question: What research did you do to learn more about Nick DiNardo?
Horn: Nick has been a legal aid for years. I’ve known him on and off for twenty years. We’re not friends outside of work, but he's always been helpful. He is very passionate about what he does. He's a source I can call and ask anything about the topic. He helps give leads as to who to talk to with any matter regarding legal aid. Doing beat work in this town you get to know people and keep your contact list updated.
But DiNardo thinks Berry’s case shows more promise than most. She has a steady job that gives her at least a chance to pay what she owes. Not everyone in the courtroom can say that.
He’s already discussed the possibility of a deal with the landlord’s lawyer, Ty Foster, and is so optimistic he told Berry she could skip the court hearing this morning.
That was welcome news to Berry, who needs to take her girls to school and get a few hours sleep after working through the night. Later, she’ll pick up the girls from school, make them dinner, take them to her stepmother’s place for the night and drive back to the airport for work.
It’s an exhausting schedule, but it’s one of the reasons DiNardo thinks he can make a deal to keep Berry and the girls in the apartment. A few days earlier, he told Foster that Berry’s work ethic makes her a good tenant who deserves another chance.
Foster was receptive. His New York-based client, like most landlords who hire him, usually is willing to work with tenants if there is a reasonable expectation the rent will be paid. After all, no one collects rent from a vacant apartment.
Foster checked and found no complaints about Berry. She appeared to be a model tenant in every way other than one of the most important ways: paying the rent on time.
He told DiNardo he’d try to work something out with him on Berry’s case. But as the day of the court hearing approached, Foster said his client needed something more tangible than good intentions. He needed $964 from Berry.
DiNardo said Berry could likely get the money with help from a new city rental assistance program run through the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. He just needed more time.
The last details of a settlement come together as DiNardo and Foster wait for the clerk to call Berry’s case in Room 121. Foster agrees to drop the eviction, but Berry must pay soon or they will all be back here again in a month. There will be no more grace periods.
The two lawyers fill out the paperwork and hand it to the clerk. Thiemann signs it and immediately goes back to his docket.
There are dozens of names still to call.
A backup plan: Sleeping in the car
Despite Berry’s reprieve in court, the clock is ticking to get the help she needs to avoid going back. The money from St. Vincent de Paul must come through or she’ll be facing eviction again.
About a week after the magistrate dismissed her case, Berry drives to Legal Aid’s downtown office to talk about her prospects. She needs to sleep after working all night at the airport, but she needs Legal Aid’s help more.
Berry sits at a conference table with DiNardo and Deanna White, the Legal Aid advocate who connected her with the lawyer. They tell her their outreach to St. Vincent de Paul has gone well and she qualifies for aid.
“It’s not over,” DiNardo cautions. But he’s upbeat about Berry’s chances.
The rental assistance program is new, an experiment, of sorts, for a city that hasn’t offered much help in the past to its renters. Cincinnati taxpayers invested $227,000 in the program and St. Vincent de Paul runs it and checks tenants for eligibility.
The money has helped about 160 families since last summer, with most getting less than $700. Demand is high. The program is expected to run out of money sometime in March.
After looking over her finances, St. Vincent de Paul decided Berry needed $764 to get caught up and pay on time next month. Free counseling is part of the deal, too. The idea is to help tenants manage money better, so they’ll be less likely to get into another jam.
Question: What type of research did you do to learn about the requirements of the deal included with St. Vincent de Paul?
Horn: This information came from the lawyers and not much from Page Berry. The lawyers are familiar with the program. I also looked up the program and I had to talk with somebody in the city. I talked to our city hall reporter about it, how it worked and looked up the account when the council approved it. A lot of this information also came from Nick Dinardo because they use that program. This was probably not the deepest research because a lot of information was available.
Berry tells DiNardo and White she’s fine with that. But she also knows all the counseling in the world isn’t going to increase her take-home pay or spare her the kind of surprises that got her evicted in December.
Berry has been on her own for years. Her mom told her in her late teens that if she was going to have babies and live like an adult, she was going to have to take care of herself.
She lived in public housing in English Woods for a while, but she walked away in 2016 when a shootout on the street shattered the windows of her parked car and left a bullet hole in a car seat her daughters shared, right where one of their heads would’ve been.
Berry has always worked – fast food, grocery stores, the airport – and takes pride in providing for her daughters. But housing is a constant worry. She’d been evicted before, years ago, and never forgot what it was like to be without a home. She felt unmoored, lost.
Question: The use of the words unmoored and lost sets a scene of doom and gloom. How important was it for you to get this emotion across at this point in the story?
Horn: In any narrative you must use details to propel a story. You shouldn't use data or graphs too much as it will bog down a story. Keep it human. With her and any narrative, it's important to show what the stakes are. It's important to show why anything matters. The background serves that purpose rather than stuff to be filler.
Ever since, Berry has kept a mental checklist of where she and the girls might go if it happened again. Her sister’s place? A hotel? It’s why she usually makes the car payment a top priority. If they have to, they can always sleep in the Camry.
Berry is grateful for Legal Aid’s help, but she knows there’s only so much DiNardo and White can do. The rental assistance, if she gets it, will be gone in a month and she and the girls will be on their own again.
When the meeting is over, Berry thanks DiNardo and White for all they’ve done for her. Then she heads home to get some sleep.
Looking for a better way
The girls dash through the rain to their mother’s car and tumble inside, as if the early February drizzle were a monsoon.
“What did you learn today?” Berry asks.
The girls take turns showing her the friendship bracelets and dream catchers they made in the after-school art program. Berry looks over the delicate braids, nods her approval and taps the gas.
When they arrive home, the girls pile out of the Toyota and hop-skip over the cracked pavement and puddles leading to the apartment building. Once inside, Angelina scoops up Bobo and rocks him in her arms. Ajaunae settles at the kitchen table to work on her dream catcher. And Amariyonna munches pieces of cantaloupe on the couch.
Question: How did you decide what certain parts or scenes in the story emphasize Berry's circumstances?
Horn: This is something where when you’re reporting a narrative you kind of write down everything. Reporters have to take way more notes than they are ever going to use. For some narratives, I have notebooks stacked high if I am interviewing someone for over a year. In this case, I had four or five notebooks filled with stuff I knew I would use. When it comes to sitting down and writing the story, you have an idea of what you're going to use in your head. But until you get into it you don't know for sure and so it's handy to have that resource you kind of go through to piece different scenes together. That's why I included the details about their home because this is why the home matters to them. It gets into knowing the family, knowing why this matters to them and knowing what's at stake for the family.
Berry gets to work at the stove, browning ground beef and boiling spaghetti. In minutes, the apartment smells like meat and onions and tomato sauce.
“I’m gonna wash my hands,” Amariyonna says as Berry sets out bowls and plates.
“Yes,” Berry says, motioning to all three girls. “Wash your hands.”
For the first time since early December, the apartment feels like home. The rental assistance came through and she’s caught up again on her bills. Berry can relax a little and think about something other than an immediate crisis.
Lately, Berry has been thinking that in a few years she’ll be the mother of three teen-aged girls, and that sharing a bunk bed in their tiny bedroom can only work for so long. Every day, Berry walks by the doorframe where the girls mark their heights with a blue Sharpie, and, every day, she’s reminded how fast they’re growing up.
She’s already started looking online at listings for three-bedroom apartments. The rents are more than she’s paying now, sometimes hundreds of dollars more.
Berry has a plan, though. She wants to go to cosmetology school so she can make better money styling hair and doing makeup. She’d have to keep her job at the airport working nights, but she’s mapped out a schedule she thinks will be manageable.
Question: What questions did you ask that prompted her to share her plan with you?
Horn: There's a certain comfort level with them to be able to talk to you about things like this. Some will never get to that point but Berry was responsive. She was open and comfortable. We didn't talk about it initially but a little bit after. I worked with that scene to get into the topic at hand.
As she watches the girls scoop tomato and meat sauce onto their plates, Berry’s mind already is on the busy night ahead: homework for the girls, the drive to her stepmother’s, a long night moving freight on a cold airport tarmac.
Question: What about the scene of the girls scooping tomato and meat sauce onto plates convinced you to include it to the story?
Horn: It humanizes people. What's it look like when she's doing stuff she would normally do with her kids at home? After school at home? What does it actually look like when she's making dinner and what's happening around her? It sets the scene. It's real.
Going to school would make the routine even harder. She’d lose a few more hours of sleep and might not be able to spend as much fun time with the girls on weekends.
But Berry has decided she can’t keep doing what she’s doing. She has spent almost two months fighting to hold on to the place she and the girls need to be.
It’s time, she tells herself, to figure out how to get where they want to be.
(About this story: Statistics in this article related to housing, income and the renter population are based on an Enquirer analysis of U.S. Census estimates in the American Community Survey, from 2014 to 2018. Eviction statistics are based on an Enquirer analysis of Census tract data from Eviction Lab at Princeton University.)