Nestled just below the hills marking Cincinnati’s West Side and just above the trains humming and screeching through the industrial Mill Creek Valley lie a series of small communities far removed from the bustle of redevelopment currently lighting up downtown.
Just off Beekman Street, which passes through these enclaves to the west of the CSX train yard in Camp Washington, a few roads curve and loop through Millvale, a low-income neighborhood consisting mostly of nearly identical two-story public housing townhomes.
Iraqi refugee Oday Kadhim and his family live in one of them, across from several other Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority-owned homes, most currently vacant and wearing boards over their windows. Beyond these, an old mill structure looms behind a thicket of trees, echoing the area’s mostly departed industrial past.
Kadhim and his family came to the United States a year ago after an arduous four-year wait. Since that time, he says, living in Millvale has been a nightmare of gunfire and break-ins, a sentiment echoed by many other refugees and residents in the area in general.
“I go straight from my house to work and from work to my house,” Kadhim says through a translator. Until recently, he worked for a hotel downtown helping set up for conferences and parties. “If we have to take the kids somewhere, I lock my house and we go and come right back.”
Millvale is a small place, with a population of 2,400 mostly black, low-income residents centered around some single-family homes, 570 units of CMHA housing built there starting in the 1950s and a recently refurbished community recreation center.
Millvale and its surrounding communities are part of the unseen Cincinnati, an area that houses many of the city’s more than 90,000 residents living below the federal poverty line. Millvale is one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, with a pa median household income under $16,000 a year. More than a third of its 960 households live in even more dire circumstances, earning less than $10,000 a year.
The neighborhood is also one of the city’s most violent, struggling with drug activity, shootings, break-ins and murders. For families like Kadhim’s, the violence is an echo of the very strife they’ve come here to escape.
“We still feel like we’re in Iraq with what’s going on with the crimes and the shootings,” Kadhim says. “I cry to myself, but I don’t show my family. I want a better life for them, but I feel like I can’t do anything.”
Kadhim and his family aren’t the only ones who struggle with the neighborhood’s challenges. Two-hundred Burundian refugees have ended up there in the last decade, plus others who have arrived more recently. The total number of refugees in the neighborhood is unclear — even the organizations helping refugees get acclimated don’t keep long-term statistics — but it’s clear they’re a big presence there, and often a positive one.
Dozens of the refugees living in this often-ignored corner of the city have found unique and vibrant ways to build community, helping to energize a 125-year-old church just down the road in North Fairmount. Some see their diversity as hope that the area can rise again.
But for many like Kadhim, the neighborhood’s danger, isolation and poverty remain obstacles to achieving the dreams of peace and prosperity they believed they could find in the U.S.
Welcome to Millvale
Ahead of a recent interview in his home, Kadhim set out bottles of water, chocolate covered cherries and mints atop a white tablecloth on his dining room table for his guests. His gregarious personality easily crosses the language barrier, a big smile and a jocular nature telegraphing his warmth.
Before getting to America, Kadhim worked for the U.S. Army at an anti-insurgency camp outside Baghdad, where he oversaw the base’s generators. Proud to display a number of certificates from the Army thanking him for his seven years of service, Kadhim explains how things got much worse once the U.S. Army began leaving Iraq in 2008.
“When the Americans left, we had a really, really bad time,” Kadhim says. “We really suffered. We didn’t have any money and there wasn’t any security there. When I was working, my kids and my wife were used to me having money and getting their needs met.”
That’s when Kadhim began trying to apply for refugee status with the help of an American he worked with. He says the situation became increasingly dangerous as America scaled down its presence in Baghdad. Iraqi militants known as the Mahdi Army threatened his life often.
Then, shortly before the family left Iraq, militants killed Kadhim’s brother.
Kadhim’s son Hayder, now 10, witnessed the immediate aftermath, an experience that has changed him, his father says. The exceptionally bright student has had difficulty focusing in school even though his his brothers and sisters have excelled. Kadhim thinks he may have some form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a common problem among refugees.
“One of Hayder’s problems, we think, is that he saw everything in the house immediately after the murder,” Kadhim says. “He saw everything, and he keeps talking about that.”
It doesn’t help that Hayder witnessed another tragedy soon after getting to Millvale.
One day last October, Hayder and the other children were playing soccer in the front yard when a fight broke out down the street. Concerned, Kadhim called all the kids inside. Gunshots rang out five minutes later and Hayder described the scene from his bedroom window.
“He kept saying, ‘Dad, he got shot. Dad, he’s been killed. Dad, the ambulance is here,’ ” Kadhim recalls.
Police records show a man was shot multiple times in the back around 6:45 that afternoon. The man survived after he was rushed to the emergency room and underwent major surgery. It is unclear who the shooter was.
It wasn’t the first, or the last, report of violence in the area. In 2014, crime data shows that 12 of the city’s 66 murders happened in the neighborhoods around the Beekman Street corridor, including North Fairmount, Millvale, South Cumminsville, East Westwood, English Woods and Fay Apartments.
Oday Kadhim / Photo: Nick Swartsell
At least three more serious shootings have already happened near Kadhim’s street this year, including the March murder of 20-year-old Adaezia Flowers, an anti-violence activist from Avondale, who was shot in the chest by a man named Michael Duett while sitting in her car. Duett does not appear to have been living in Millvale, having bounced between addresses in Price Hill, Winton Hills and other areas of the city.
Some of the violence is from drug activity, officials say, and some of the perpetrators, like Duett, aren’t necessarily from the neighborhood.
The area’s problems aren’t new. Millvale and the surrounding communities have been on a long, steady decline. German and other immigrants settled in the city’s western foothills in the mid-1800s, and the area just west of the Mill Creek Valley soon became heavily industrial and mostly working class. By 1900, the land just above the valley was one of Cincinnati’s industrial powerhouses as factories moved out of a rapidly crowding downtown and other central areas. South Fairmount bore most of the industry, the hulks of which still dot the neighborhood along Beekman Street and Queen City Avenue.
North Fairmount, Millvale and the surrounding areas also saw some growth in industry during these years but mostly became a residential area for workers, many of whom were German immigrants just arriving in the country. The 1900 Census tract for Baltimore Avenue, which runs through the heart of North Fairmount, shows a slew of German names and working class occupations like butchers and mill workers.
At the time, the main avenue was lined with small shops and single-family homes. Today, the once-bustling thoroughfare boasts only St. Leo the Great Catholic church, a school building and a handful of surviving single-family houses, some well-kept, some slightly careworn, others yawning and decrepit.
North Fairmount / Photo: Nick Swartsell
The neighborhoods fell victim to a familiar story in the middle of the 20th century as America’s industrial might slowly dissipated. By the 1970s, many of the once busy, smoking factories sat empty and silent. As they stopped shipping out orders of machine valves, hosiery and the other obscure but vital products, the neighborhood’s main export became its residents, who moved away and didn’t bother returning. Many of those who remained fell into a cycle of generational poverty.
By 1990, when then-CMHA Drug Education Specialist Carolyn Winstead participated in a Cincinnati Magazine forum on the drug war in Greater Cincinnati, Millvale had become a serious problem area. Police crackdowns on cocaine in other housing projects pushed drug activity to the Millvale area, she said, causing a spike in violent crime.
“The drugs in Winton Terrace and Findlater Gardens have actually moved to Millvale,” she said of police efforts to clean up those other housing projects. “And we are now seeing more crack cocaine, crack houses in our vacant units of Millvale.”
Remaining residents and social service organizations have struggled valiantly against the neighborhoods’ isolation, poverty and crime over the decades, winning battles at times, losing ground at others. But as Kadhim and other residents will tell you, it is still a dangerous and isolating place to live.
The Long Road to Cincinnati
In Cincinnati, the local organization that oversees refugee re-settlement is Catholic Charities Southwestern Ohio. Since the first refugees came to the U.S. during the Vietnam War, Catholic Charities has resettled more than 10,000 people here. It is on track to resettle 200 this year alone, according to data provided by the organization. Nationally, about 30,000 come to America every year, “a drop in the bucket” compared to the 15 million people the UN has identified as refugees, says Catholic Charities CEO Ted Bergh.
The organization has a relatively short period of time to get immigrants on their feet here. The State Department gives Catholic Charities about $1,000 for each refugee to be used over three months on housing, food, transit and other necessities. The organization then helps during the first three months by finding housing, providing English classes, helping with employment and other necessities. After that, Catholic Charities continues to provide some secondary language and job services.
“It’s challenging because there’s kind of a 90-day window in which we have to get everything done,” Bergh said during a recent interview at Catholic Charities’ new headquarters in Bond Hill, one of the city’s outer-ring neighborhoods where it is resettling many refugees these days. “We have more funds beyond that, and we stay in touch with refugees for two years, but it’s like, OK, this person is showing up at the airport not knowing English. They’re vulnerable. We’re going to get them into our culture the best we can.”
Refugee resettlement is a long, complex chain of events beginning with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, whose office works with the State Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement to identify populations eligible to apply for refugee status. That application process can take months, or as was Kadhim’s experience, years. Meanwhile, many live in large refugee camps, often in the shadow of hunger and violence.
Since 1975, more than 3 million refugees have come to the United States. The State Department contracts the work of resettling them to various charitable organizations, including the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which holds the largest single contract with the government for the work. The USCCB in turn relies on local agencies to do the nitty-gritty, on-the-ground work of resettling refugees. Locally, that’s where Catholic Charities comes in.
Refugee populations tend to come in waves, and around 2007 a group of about 200 refugees originally from Burundi but living in camps in Tanzania and other Central African countries came to Cincinnati. Nearly all were resettled into Millvale.
The Burundians fled power struggles between the majority Hutu and minority Tutsi ethnic groups that broke out following the country’s 1962 independence from Belgium. A great deal of violence and bloodshed resulted from this struggle, coalescing in all-out war and genocide by 1972. More than 1 million Hutus and Tutsis have been killed over the decades-long conflict between the two. Another 800,000 are thought to have fled the country for neighboring Rwanda, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Dieudonne Niyubahwe / Photo: Jesse Fox
One of the refugees fleeing the camps was Dieudonne Niyubahwe, now 19 and a student at the University of Cincinnati. Niyubahwe came to the U.S. in the summer of 2007, at age 11, with his family after living nearly his entire life in a refugee camp. The State Department sent the family to Cincinnati.
Niyubahwe’s family lived in huts with dirt floors in the camps. Life there was sometimes dangerous, sometimes not.
“It was safe because the UN had set up structures and police that controlled things,” he says. “But there would be rebels who live in the forest who would come into the camp to steal stuff and sometimes to kill people.”
When Niyubahwe’s parents told him they would be going to the U.S., he felt overjoyed by the prospect.
Niyubahwe says the journey from Tanzania was long and surreal. The family of 11 first took a bus to the town of Kigoma, where they got on the first of the four airplanes they would take during the trip. Their journey took them through Kenya, then London, then New York City, where, finally, the family boarded its flight to CVG International Airport.
“It was mind-blowing,” Niyubahwe says of the trip. “I never knew that the whole world was like that. I got to see different landscapes and different mountains in the plane. I kind of thought it wasn’t real. I thought it was a dream, and at some moment, I was going to wake up.
“Even when I got to America, for weeks I thought I was going to wake up back in the camps.”
When the family finally got to Cincinnati, Catholic Charities was there with an interpreter who spoke Kirundi to pick them up. Representatives from the organization took Niyubahwe’s family to temporary housing, where they stayed for a couple months before moving to Millvale, like nearly all of the Burundian refugees coming to the city.
“The temporary place was really nice,” Niyubahwe says. “It was in a good neighborhood. The neighbors brought us food. I remember going into the streets and playing with them. And then, when we moved to Millvale, it was different. Some of the people were drug dealers. Some of them had guns. People would threaten us sometimes when we went outside. One time, some people fought my dad. They just punched him.”
Niyubahwe and his family lived in Millvale, on the same street where Kadhim now lives, for two years before his mother and father found enough steady employment to move. They chose to relocate to Evanston, near where he and some of his siblings attended school at the Academy of World Languages, a K-8 Cincinnati public school specializing in English language learners.
“It wasn’t safe,” Niyubahwe says of life in Millvale. “That was the main part. That’s why my parents decided to move.”
Struggle and success
Despite the neighborhood’s dangers, Catholic Charities says there have been positive aspects of resettling Burundian refugees in Millvale. Bergh was not yet with the organization when the group came to the U.S., but he says things are much better than they used to be in the community.
Bergh is familiar with affordable housing issues in the city. Before his current job heading Catholic Charities, and during the time Burundians were coming to Cincinnati, he served as interim director of the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority. He says in the past decade the neighborhood has gotten safer, thanks to police efforts and a remodeling initiative undertaken by CMHA that reduced the density of public housing there.
“They were a stable population to put into Millvale,” Bergh says of the refugees. “At the Housing Authority, we were really happy to have them there.”
Practical considerations also came into play, the organization says. There aren’t many places where a family can affordably find housing with four to six bedrooms, and many refugees come with large families in tow.
Public housing in Millvale / Photo: Nick Swartsell
But it’s hard to know if the process as it stands has helped those families in Millvale get ahead because refugees aren’t tracked long-term. It’s unclear how many still live in Millvale, how many have moved on and what their prospects as a group look like today.
Catholic Charities says about half the refugees who came to the U.S. in 2014 are currently employed. The picture long-term is harder to see, though there are some bright spots. Catholic Charities cites refugee success stories, including a Burundian refugee they say has started his own real estate business a decade after arriving in the U.S.
“We don’t have demographics, because we don’t track them that way,” Catholic Charities Communication Director Kelly Anchrum says about refugee employment and educational attainment. “We just have anecdotal stories. But because we maintain these relationships, that’s how we’re able to hear their successes, even though we don’t track the demographics.”
Catholic Charities says it tries to stay connected to refugees beyond the 90-day window and that it collaborates with other agencies where possible. The organization points to a recent collaboration with St. Leo the Great Catholic Church, near Millvale in North Fairmount, on an effort to improve the church’s food pantry, for example.
Other service providers see room for big improvement in the organization’s efforts. There are smaller nonprofit organizations playing a big role in helping refugees resettle after the first 90 days, and some say Catholic Charities doesn’t do enough to help refugees in what they call “the long welcome,” or the extended effort of acclimating whole families to a new language, a new culture and a new life.
Sheryl Rajbhandari, who founded a refugee aid organization called Heartfelt Tidbits in 2008, has been an advocate for refugees she’s worked with over the past seven years coming from the Asian country of Bhutan. Today, they represent one of the largest refugee populations in Cincinnati.
Rajbhandari says working with Catholic Charities has always been competitive, noting that the organization doesn’t share information with smaller service providers who could help fill in the gaps and isn’t transparent enough about its activities.
“If you knew what I have to go through to find out where people are, and to keep track of that moving target, it’s incredible,” Rajbhandari says.
Despite criticisms, there are success stories. Some of the Burundians who were resettled into Millvale, including 19-year-old Niyubahwe, have moved on and thrived.
At a recent interview at Buffalo Wild Wings in the glistening new developments surrounding the University of Cincinnati, Niyubahwe talked about his life since leaving the neighborhood.
He’s doing well these days, living in a nice off-campus dorm he shares with fellow student Alex Marembo, another Burundian who once lived in Millvale. Both are excelling in school and exploring their interests. Niyubahwe is heavily into soccer — the only sport he and his childhood friends played in the refugee camps. He currently plays on an intermural club and would like to play for UC later in his college career. Marembo is diving into video production in the school’s Electronic Media program.
Niyubahwe is involved in the university’s Gen-1 program, which helps first generation students with housing, school funding and navigating college life. He’s already chosen an apt major: International Relations.
“I want to help people back in Africa who went through the same experience I went through,” he says. “I want to work for the UN or Red Cross, an organization that helped us.”
One place Niyubahwe won’t be going back to is his old neighborhood. He says “financial problems” keep people in Millvale.
“My mom and dad and my older brother were working,” he says. “That’s how we got to move. Some of the families there are older or have young kids. And so they’re stuck there, I think. They can’t move anywhere where they can pay for anything.”
A New Community
Despite the realities of living in a neighborhood largely devoid of resources, some of the refugees resettled into Millvale have stayed in the area and found positives there. Most notably, many have helped build a community unlike any other in the city at St. Leo the Great Catholic Church.
During a recent service at the church, a diverse group of congregants filed in at a casual pace, speaking Spanish, English and Central African languages like Kirundi. As traditional praise music played, two Burundian teenagers in white robes preceded Father Jim Schutte to the altar. Schutte had a busy service ahead; before it was finished, he would preside over six baptisms of Guatemalan infants. He read Spanish aloud from a bible held by another young Burundian girl.
During communion, a group of young women sang a praise song in Kirundi and kept beat on hand drums. Their voices, high and vibrant, bounced off the walls of the church.
The Burundians began attending the church about six years ago, Schutte says. The Guatemalans began arriving shortly before that. Though the United States does not consider them refugees, St. Leo does, in a way. Horrific levels of violence surrounding Central American drug cartels and political turbulence have led to a mass exodus north toward the United States. Some of those fleeing eventually end up in Cincinnati.
The church provides a number of services for the refugees and immigrants, as it does for anyone in need in the area. But that’s nothing compared to what the church gets in return, Schutte says.
St. Leo was founded in 1886 by the German immigrants who flooded into North Fairmount and other Cincinnati neighborhoods. Like the neighborhood itself, the church found its congregation on a steady decline over the last few decades. Ten years ago, it was a rare event if a few dozen people filled the pews on a Sunday.
“For the first time, because of [the Burundians] and our immigrants from Guatemala, we’re growing in a parishioner base. For years we were stagnant,” Schutte says. “They’re allowing us to not only survive but thrive as a parish. Now, they’re on our parish council. They’re becoming more and more involved, not just as receivers, but as givers.”
Pascasia Irakoze is a bright 14-year-old who attends St. Leo. She left a Burundian refugee camp in Tanzania with her family and arrived in Cincinnati around the same time as many of the other Burundian refugees. After a brief stay in temporary housing, they were settled in Millvale.
Irakoze says the neighborhood had its pluses and minuses. There were a lot of kids to play with, she says, but, “it was dangerous — there were shootings. People died. A lot of people had guns.”
They quickly set down roots after arriving — Irakoze’s mother Maria serves on St. Leo’s parish council, and a few years ago the family left Millvale and bought a home near the church. A very active member of St. Leo named Alma Richardson owned the house previously; her parents were the first couple married in the church’s 100-year-old sanctuary. Richardson was the church’s last living link to its immigrant founders until she passed away a few years ago.
When Irakoze’s parents bought the Richardson house, Schutte says he felt like a torch had been passed.
“We were founded by immigrants,” he says, “and now we’re being re-founded by immigrants, just from different places.”
Father Jim Schutte performs a baptism at St. Leo / Photo: Nick Swartsell
For Irakoze and her family, who have since become American citizens, the commitment runs deep.
“This is the only church I’ve ever known since I’ve been here in America,” she says. “It’s not the only church other people have known, but it’s the only one that has a lot of different communities coming together. Even if you aren’t Catholic. Sometimes people come here that no one has ever seen, but no one says anything because they accept everyone.”
Mary Beth Basch and Obed Nkuriragenda work out of the church and are paid by TriHealth, a healthcare consortium in Cincinnati. Ostensibly, Basch is the parish nurse and Nkuriragenda is an interpreter, but both say their jobs have expanded over the years. These days, they’re helping to make sure the Central African refugees, Central American immigrants and any other nearby residents in need get the myriad services the church provides. These include language classes, the aforementioned food pantry, help connecting with health care and other assistance.
Obed Nkuriragenda / Photo: Nick Swartsell
Nkuriragenda has been in their shoes. He came to Ohio from Rwanda, which neighbors Burundi, as a refugee a decade ago. He’s been working at St. Leo’s for about two years now.
“This job is therapeutic for me,” he says. “Because these people I’m working with, they’ve been abused, beaten, raped. And when they tell me, and they say they feel better about talking about it, because they haven’t talked to anyone before, it makes me feel better, too. I feel them. Because I’ve seen some of the same things.”
Both Nkuriragenda and Basch are troubled by the problems they’ve seen refugees struggle with just up the road in Millvale. Three years ago, a St. Leo parishioner named Joseph was shot in the head while sitting in his car in Millvale, according to police reports. He survived after a trip to the emergency room, but the experience was devastating to him, Nkuriragenda and Basch say.
“When there are gunshots, that terrifies many of them,” Basch says. “They’re used to gunshots from war, but not gunshots in their neighborhood.”
Some of the issues have centered around general crime in the neighborhood, Basch says, and some, especially at the onset, were more targeted toward the refugees specifically. When the refugees first arrived, there was “tension” between them and the residents of the housing complex, she says, an assertion echoed by other service providers and the refugees themselves.
“They didn’t understand what [the refugees] had been through,” Basch says of the residents. “What they saw was people showing up with washers and dryers and beds and clothes and food. And it was like, ‘Hey, what about me? I’m an American. I’ve been struggling my whole life and no one showed up with a bed for me.’ ”
Basch notes that many of the locally born residents of the housing projects struggle with the same challenges with poverty and isolation that the refugees do. She believes the conflict could have been avoided.
“I feel like if someone had held a town meeting and said, ‘We have this special group of people who are coming into the neighborhood,’ they would have rallied around them,” she says.
Besides St. Leo, there are other glimmers of hope for those who have stayed. One is the federal Choice Neighborhoods program that Xavier’s Community Building Institute and CMHA are trying to bring to Fairmount. It’s an initiative offered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development that, if implemented, could refurbish some of the existing homes around St. Leo and add 150 new units of housing to the area. And there could be big effects beyond new buildings in the neighborhood.
The program looks to improve neighborhoods by increasing housing opportunities, education levels and public and private reinvestment at the neighborhood level. A similar grant in Avondale has led to more than $100 million in investment there.
“The primary hope is that services will return to the neighborhood,” says CBI’s Peter Moorhouse, who is currently working on pushing for the Choice Neighborhoods program in North Fairmount from an office at St. Leo. “There’s hardly anything going on there. There are convenience stores but they’re not grocery stores. There’s been this exodus of folks and services and jobs. The principle isn’t just to relocate people but to lift up the whole neighborhood.”
St. Leo could help administer that process, Moorhouse says. Father Schutte is on board with that. He says the church is very interested in increasing home ownership among the refugee and immigrant populations in the area. The church currently works with a realtor who can guide the families through the home-buying process.
After the Irakoze family bought their house in North Fairmount, five other Burundian families followed suit. Many more are interested, Schutte says.
“That’s why we’re excited for the Choice Neighborhoods plan,” he says. “If that comes down, we have them in mind.”
Moorhouse, Schutte and Catholic Charities all see possibilities in the long-dormant parts of North Fairmount, and they see refugees potentially playing a big part in its future.
“I think North Fairmount is really beautiful,” Moorhouse says. “When you take that turn onto Baltimore, it’s like a different world back there. That neighborhood, in general, won’t be reborn because of huge investment — it’s not OTR. There’s no renaissance about to happen in North Fairmount. But a population moving in there that is organized and engaged could really define it.”
In the meantime, life remains difficult for many in Millvale. Recently, some of Iraqi refugee Kadhim’s worst fears were realized.
On a Saturday evening in mid-April, Kadhim and his wife packed their five kids into their minivan. It had been a hard stretch for the family — Kadhim had recently lost his job due to back troubles that made him unable to work, and tensions in the house were high. The kids wanted to go to McDonald’s, a rare treat for the family, and despite money being tight and the family’s reluctance about leaving the house unattended, this time, Kadhim obliged.
During the hour they were out of Millvale getting Happy Meals, their home was burglarized. Everything of value from a computer down to the kids’ backpacks was stolen. According to police records, the thieves even stole some of the family’s shoes.
Kadhim continues to look for a new living situation for his family, but with very little income and a need for a big place that can hold his whole family, he has found few if any options he can afford.
“When you live somewhere, you want to know your neighbors, you want to have people over, you want to let your kids out,” Kadhim says. “We don’t have any of that.” ©
This article appears in Apr 22-28, 2015.