A Phil Hall Op-Ed: I would like to share a news story that hasn’t received a great deal of attention. It is about private property and a city government harassing a law-abiding homeowner because he believes in God. Admittedly, this isn’t something that you normally see in a real estate news site, but stick with me on this.
In January 2021, a resident of the Cleveland suburb of University Heights, Ohio, named Daniel Grand invited 12 friends to his home for a prayer gathering. By all accounts, there was nothing disruptive about this get-together. There were no noise complaints from neighbors that evening. The streets around the home were not clogged with a surplus of parked cars. Nor were there any offenses that could be considered as violence against one’s auditory or olfactory senses.
Well, someone in Grand’s neighborhood didn’t like the idea of people having a prayer gathering in a private residence, and that malcontent contacted the city’s then-mayor, Michael Dylan Brennan. The next day, Brennan’s administration sent a cease-and-desist order to Grand accusing him of illegally operating a “place of religious assembly” in his home and threated him with legal penalties if his friends came over again to share their spiritual beliefs.
Now, of course, if Grand invited 12 of his friends to his home to watch a baseball game, or have a backyard barbecue, or discuss the latest books, or play Charades, or enjoy a movie on his big screen television, or have a cocktail party, the city would not be threatening him with lawsuits. But having 12 friends come over to pray together created a furor in University Heights’ City Hall.
The city’s lawyers told Grand that he would need to apply for a special use permit for his home to be designated as “a place of religious assembly.” Grand attempted to apply for this permit, but the city threw up multiple roadblocks to prevent the permit from being considered in a traditional hearing. He also discovered that if he received a permit, his home would then be considered as a house of worship and he and his family could not use it for “sleeping or residential use.”
The city began to build a case against Grand, claiming it received angry letters from people in his neighborhood about Grand’s hosting a prayer gathering at his home – people who never interacted with him and didn’t even live around his house. Mayor Brennan encouraged Grand’s neighbors to spy on him and to report back to City Hall if he tried to bring over his friends again for another prayer gathering.
To further its harassment, the city withheld Grand’s Certificate of Occupancy and tax abatements, which required him to pay more than his fair share of taxes. Sanitation workers started to intentionally bypass his home on trash-collection days.
Grand saw his First Amendment rights were being trampled. He took the city to court, but to date the judges ruled against him – first the US District Court of Northern Ohio in October 2024 and then the Ohio 6th District Court of Appeals in November 2025. The judges claimed his case was not ready for judicial review because Grand did not complete the permit process that was stacked against him.
Grand’s attorneys are petitioning the US Supreme Court to hear his case. The Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal organization supporting Grand’s effort to get before the Supreme Court, warned, “The outcome of Daniel’s case could have broad ramifications on whether government officials across the country can silence home prayer gatherings with a zoning law, harassment, and endless delays.”
Now, let me ask you this: As a real estate agent, how would you approach this type of situation? Would you be comfortable trying to sell property in a community where people are harassed in their own homes because they have friends over for prayer? Or would you back the homeowner’s efforts to live a private existence that does not intrude on the surrounding residences or create an embarrassment to the wider community?
If you got this far in this op-ed, you may have realized that something is missing. In concept, its absence shouldn’t matter – after all, an attack on one faith should be seen as an attack on all faiths. But in too many corners of today’s America, the harassment in University Heights is perfectly acceptable and even justified by some thought leaders and politicians.
You see, Daniel Grand and the friends he invited to his home for a prayer gathering are Orthodox Jews. And as one member of Grand’s neighborhood complained to City Hall: “I am not Jewish and I do not want our neighborhood labeled as Jewish.”
Oh? I don’t know how you feel about this, but that does not reflect the America I grew up in.
Phil Hall is editor of Weekly Real Estate News. He can be reached at [email protected].
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