CINCINNATI — A West End man may have to pay $18,000 to remove graffiti from his warehouse or risk the city of Cincinnati placing a lien on his property, under a new rule council members quietly passed in 2024 that pushes cleanup costs to taxpayers.
Rory Benson has lived in a historic warehouse on York Street for more than a decade. Vandals occasionally tagged it with graffiti, but until recently, city crews always cleaned it up without being asked.
“Around 2000, in the middle of COVID, it just stopped. I would call, I would get no response,” Benson said. “I thought there were delays just because of COVID … and it was a few years before someone finally said, ‘Hey, we just don’t do that anymore.’”
Benson said he was given no notice of the city's rule change. For many years, the Department of Public Services had removed graffiti from both public and private property.
That formally changed in May 2024, when the Cincinnati City Council voted to limit graffiti cleanup by the Department of Public Services to public sites at the suggestion of City Manager Sheryl Long.
WATCH: WCPO's I-Team looked into how the city's new rule could impact residents
“Over time, shifting responsibilities within the city administration have rendered portions of the present graffiti abatement chapter functionally obsolete,” Long wrote in a May 8, 2024, letter to council introducing a new program “to provide an improved mechanism to mitigate graffiti within our neighborhoods.”
Instead, West End residents say the city’s new policy has encouraged vandals to produce an ever-increasing amount of graffiti in their neighborhood. Many homeowners can't afford removal, so it isn’t getting cleaned up.
“It’s basically surrounding the neighborhood, fast. It just keeps exploding and radiating out,” Benson said.
Noah O’Brien, a West End Community Council Executive Board member, agreed, saying the city continues to concentrate poverty here with more low-income housing, which leads to blight, repeated graffiti, drug dealing and violence.
“The city’s new graffiti policy is simply a symptom treatment that victimizes property owners while City Hall refuses to fix the root causes that it exacerbates,” O’Brien said. “Property owners are now supposed to pay for endless cleanup crews for criminals the city won’t catch or deter."
The city’s Buildings and Inspections Department now oversees graffiti abatement, along with other nuisance issues, including overgrown grass, litter and dumping on private property. Once a notice of violation for graffiti is issued, owners have 30 days to remove it.
City officials declined an interview. Instead, a city spokesperson sent an email about the policy change, saying that the public services department, “had very limited resources to handle graffiti removal on private property and essentially no formal means of working with property owners to gain access or enforce noncompliance.”
“In the case of noncompliance, B&I will bid the work to a contractor to have the graffiti removed, then pass the cost of the removal to the property owner,” city spokesperson Ben Breuninger said in the email. “The cost of the removal depends on the size of the tag, the difficulty of removal, and the method of removal used. The city has received quotes ranging from $13,000 for difficult cases to as little as $250 for simple abatements."
Benson received his first notice of violation last summer. He didn’t want the city to send out a random cleanup company for fear it would damage the façade of his warehouse, which was built in 1904 and had been owned by the Wegman family. He tried to remove it himself.
“One company gave me a quote for $18,000 to have it removed,” Benson said. “Another company said that they knew the city was changing their policies and that I should be warned that other people are going to be increasing their prices because of that … then I’m just forced to pay whatever the city assesses. They’ll just put a lien on your property.”
Benson asked city crews to remove all graffiti one last time, so he could apply an anti-graffiti coating on a clean surface and prevent future vandalism at his warehouse. But he said the city inspector refused.
Instead, Benson spent more than $1,000 on special chemicals that partially removed some of the graffiti last summer.
“It was a couple of weeks after I took most of it off that, at least my first pass, that another giant piece showed up,” Benson said.
On March 9, Benson said he received another violation notice, warning that the city could place a lien on his property if he fails to remove the graffiti.
“We regret that you were the victim of this vandalism. Nonetheless, as owner of the property, it is incumbent upon you to see that the condition is abated,” a building inspector wrote in the notice.
That’s when Benson reached out to the WCPO 9 I-Team for help.
“I don’t think it’s fair that I should have to pay for it. If I do pay for it and it comes back a week later, I have to pay for it again,” Benson said. “It’s an endless cycle at that point.”
Benson's neighbor, Paul Tucker, got hit with his first noticeable graffiti last year. He bought his first building in the neighborhood in 2007 for his luxury commercial seating business, Orange Chair. He bought a second large industrial building across the street on Hulbert last year to expand.
“This just really kind of exploded in the last number of months,” Tucker said. “I think it’s a fair question to wonder why the city stopped maintaining it, because had I known this was a problem and it was going to cost me, say $18,000 a shot, I might not have made this investment.”
Tucker said the city is victimizing the victims of vandalism and hurting the West End. He also said he received a notice of violation from the city for graffiti in March and is not sure what to do.
Tucker said if he’s forced to spend tens of thousands removing graffiti from his large buildings each year, it could threaten his business.
“I feel like while they’re working so hard to regenerate life in this corner, they’re not really helping the people that are actually putting in the time and the dollars,” Tucker said. “It would be a vital threat, and also it would certainly stall any further development in the neighborhood.”
Last year, city inspectors issued 223 notices of violation for graffiti removal, and 44 so far in 2026, as of last week, Breuninger said.
To date, the city has not filed any property liens for nonpayment of graffiti removal.
Benson said the city has a double standard by targeting residents for code enforcement issues while failing to maintain its own public property. He showed the I-Team photos of waist-high grass on city land adjacent to his warehouse and on an island on his street, and said he was forced to mow it because the city never did.
O’Brien agreed.
“Meanwhile, the same city can’t or won’t keep its own West End Recreation Center free from hand-to-hand illicit drug sales and massive amounts of litter on its own properties,” O’Brien said.
