Photo By Cameron Knight

It's not easy being green, according to mediator Betsy Sato

When Holly Niehaus moved into her first apartment after 27 years as a homeowner, she was also planning to make it her last.

"I told my sons I was never moving again and this is where I wanted to die a natural death at a very, very old age," she says.

She was no stranger to the building; parents of her childhood friends had lived in the same College Hill apartments 45 years ago. So when Niehaus faced eviction, she was determined to fight it.

"So I know the history, pretty much, is why I pretty much dug my heels in," she says.

Eight years into her new life, after a couple run-ins with the newest in a long line of changing property managers, she received a notice to vacate.

First the owner made it difficult for her to re-qualify for housing assistance, Niehaus says. Then her heat went out. She says the apartment manager started swearing after accidentally stepping on her dog. After she told him she didn't appreciate his language, she says he refused to move the table blocking access to the heating grate. Niehaus, who has chronic illness, couldn't move it herself, and it was eight days before her son could come move the table and her heat could be fixed, she says.

Niehaus made her displeasure known. The very next day she received a notice that the landlord wished to terminate her month-to-month lease, she says.

She called Housing Opportunities Made Equal (HOME) and was referred to the Fair Housing Mediation Service (FHMS).

Through mediation, she and her landlord worked through their differences and Niehaus kept her apartment. She has nothing but praise for Diane Harper, the mediator who handled her case.

"Diane was very helpful, at any hour encouraging me, saying, 'Tell them this and this and this,' " Niehaus says. "It worked out so beautifully."

Pucker up
The mediation service, a joint project of HOME and the Greater Cincinnati/ Northern Kentucky Apartment Association, began about five years ago.

"At first it was like kissing porcupines," says Charles Tassell, the apartment association's director of governmental affairs.

That's how he sums up the initial unholy alliance between an association that advocates for tenants and residents and one that advocates for landlords and property owners.

"In one sense, you've got an agency that sues our industry and an industry coming together," Tassell says. "So we were kind of nervous at first."

But a success rate of 80 to 85 percent quickly convinced naysayers. He attributes that phenomenal success to the different aims of mediation and litigation.

Litigation, he says, addresses symptoms. But mediation actually addresses problems.

"It took people sitting down across the table," Tassell says. "When somebody started crying, we usually started getting close to a solution."

FHMS was born of a trend toward alternative dispute resolution and the recognition that many complaints would be better handled through mediation than by the court system.

The best cases for mediation are those where there's a continuing relationship, such as landlord-to-tenant or tenant-to-tenant, not those in which, "it's a matter of, 'You denied me housing and I'm never going to rent from you anyway,' " according to Elizabeth Brown, HOME's new executive director.

HOME received about 1,300 inquiries last year and took on 350 cases that involved fair housing issues. With recent cuts in funding from the city and from United Way, that's about all HOME can handle, Brown says.

Even so, the mediation program was too important to let go. It fell by the wayside for a time last year, but the Cincinnati Real Estate Investors Association (CREIA) recently committed to supporting the mediation service with a yearly donation of $5,000.

Most of CREIA's members are small property owners, according to Ray Nichols, board president. Many are investing for retirement. That means there's a lot of learning to do in the transition from consumer to property owner, and some of what needs to be learned is fair housing law. So supporting the mediation service makes perfect sense, Nichols says.

"Any time when you can solve those conflicts without judicial intercession, without going to court, it benefits everybody," he says. "We are actually trying to eliminate what the city or county would call 'bad landlords.' They don't do us any good. That's not the way we do business."

Lose the broomstick
But much of what jams up landlord-tenant relationships is communication, not deliberate discrimination.

"The mediators are excellent at reducing the defensiveness so you're actually hearing each other," Brown says. "There's a lot of, 'Gee, I didn't know that's why you did that.' "

Lead mediator Betsy Sato coordinates the team of six or seven mediators. She says a lot of complaints are noise-related. Sometimes it just takes sitting down and talking for irate tenants to realize that it's not the woman living upstairs who's always stomping but her neighbor.

One kid incensed neighbors by jumping around a lot, so his family agreed to buy rubber cushioning from Sam's Club, Sato says.

It's a healthier way to deal with conflict than smacking the ceiling with a broomstick.

"It teaches people how to communicate better so they can talk in a civil way rather than yelling or pounding," she says.

Other issues deal with accessibility for the handicapped, whose landlords might not realize they have to make certain accommodations.

"It comes down to helping people communicate with each other so they can solve the problem without going to court," Sato says.

Most people think that housing discrimination is racist, and it's true that most of the complaints to HOME are racially based, but Brown says many of the recent mediation cases have involved people whose disabilities make communicating with landlords difficult.

"And it may just be that because (landlords) don't understand that, when you're green, you do certain things certain ways," Sato says.

Then, too, some complainants who allege racial discrimination just need more information.

"Sometimes we have cases based on ethnicity or race, or at least that's kind of the perception, and maybe it's not," Sato says. "If you're a minority living in a place and something happens, sometimes your first reaction is, 'Well it's because I'm green.' "

Other times it's landlords who need to be clued in. That often means reminding property owners that the law recognizes protected classes: handicapped people and those who are of a certain race or national origin.

"You can't just say, 'I don't want to rent to you because you're green,' " Sato says.

No such luck for the chronically broke, though.

"You can say, 'I don't want to rent to you because you don't have enough money,' " she says. "That's all right." ©