A new report has recommended four interventions for the region’s housing problems: establishing a housing fund, expanding workforce development, employer-assisted housing programs and construction of “missing middle” housing.
Released by the Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce and dubbed the “Northern Kentucky Housing Blueprint,” the report follows two other major explorations of housing in the region.
The first was a 2023 report released by the Northern Kentucky Area Development District and conducted in partnership with the county fiscal courts, the engineering firm Stantec, as well as local businesses and civic organizations. It suggested that the eight northernmost counties in Kentucky need “to build 6,650 housing units to support economic development in the next 5 years, which equates to 1,330 units per year.”
Read our latest deep dive into solving NKY’s housing shortage here.
Broken down by income level, the study showed the largest need is for what they called “workforce housing,” which refers to households whose wages ranged from $15 to $25 with monthly housing costs between $500 and $1,500. The region needs about 3,000 more housing units to provide for people within that income range.
The second major report was released earlier this year. Spearheaded by the Northern Kentucky Area Development District and the Brighton Center, a wraparound nonprofit based in Newport, the report, titled “Home for All,” presented a list of 50 options for addressing housing. In many ways, the Chamber’s new report is a refinement of the Home for All initiative, narrowing the focus to four priority strategies.
The Chamber of Commerce is an advocacy group composed largely of businesses, and the suggestions made in the report comport with a business-minded perspective.
Brent Cooper, the current president and CEO of the Northern Kentucky Chamber, admits that “there is no single silver bullet that’s gonna help solve this problem. It is a supply and demand issue, and it ain’t simple to solve.”
Cooper emphasized the need for partnerships between private enterprises and public institutions, especially as it relates to workforce development. If there’s a shortage of housing, training more people to build housing should ideally address the strain on the supply.
“We have to get people into the workforce,” Cooper said. “Trades, construction, plumbing, electricians, everything you need to construct a home.”
“A lack of sufficient workforce in residential construction is one of the largest drivers of housing costs and the lead time to build new homes,” said Brian Miller, executive vice president at Building Industry Association of Northern Kentucky, in a press release. “Without skilled labor – such as carpenters, electricians, and HVAC specialists – projects are delayed, costs increase and the housing shortage persists. Addressing this workforce gap through expanded training programs, apprenticeship opportunities and outreach to younger generations is critical.”
The construction of what is often referred to as the “missing middle” of housing types was the next recommendation.
The missing middle refers to housing that can hold several families at once but isn’t as high-density as multi-story apartment complexes. These include housing units like duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes and town homes (i.e. occupying a middle ground between a single-family home and a high-density complex).
The other primary strategy that Cooper emphasized was a regional housing fund, which would serve as a funding vehicle for bankrolling housing construction the market wouldn’t usually support by itself. Specifically, the Chamber pointed to the Catalytic Fund of Northern Kentucky, a federally designated community development financial institution, or CDFI.
The fund was started in 2008 but wasn’t fully capitalized until 2012. Today, the fund contains roughly $32 million, supplied by both federal grants and private investors, which the organization lends out to projects that CEO Jeanne Schroer described earlier this summer as the “really hard stuff.” Any money the fund earns from project investments is channeled back into the fund for future projects.
The fund has already invested in several rehabilitation projects in the region, such as the Kent Lofts in Bellevue. Since 2013, the fund has aided in the creation of over 1,000 new residential units, as well as the preservation and rehabilitation of 91 historic buildings. It has also invested in numerous commercial spaces (the fund does not invest in businesses themselves, just the real estate).
Although the fund has funded affordable housing in the past, it currently doesn’t have a dedicated sub-fund specifically for affordable, workforce, or income-aligned housing, and there’s presently no guarantee that a given project the fund invests in would contain such housing. Schroer could not yet provide details on what the new fund would look like when she spoke with LINK nky, as the exact sources of seed capital were still being worked out.
Still, the Chamber offered some projections of what such a new fund could accomplish. With seed capital of $10 million, the fund could bankroll the construction of 1,000 new income-aligned homes and repair approximately 500 existing homes. Such a fund could also provide down payment assistance to 275 first-time homebuyers.
“Generally, what we are wanting to do is to really leverage the money that we have so that the maximum amount of units can be funded,” Schroer said.
Models for this kind of fund already exist. One is the Northern Kentucky HOME Consortium, which uses federal grant money to provide forgivable loans to qualifying home buyers in Covington, Ludlow, Newport, Bellevue, Dayton, Erlanger, Florence and Independence.
The other is across the river in Cincinnati: the Cincinnati Development Fund. Also, a CFI, the Cincinnati Development, already has a specific sub-program for affordable housing. Called the Affordable Housing Leverage Fund, it provided roughly $75 million in investment to 54 projects, comprising about 1,800 income-restricted units, in the fund’s service area between September 2022 and September 2024.
“I do think there’s a lot of partners within the region that are interested in supporting this initiative,” Schroer said.
Finally, there are employer-assisted housing programs, which are exactly what they sound like – programs designed to help employers defray the cost of housing they provide to attract and retain qualified workers.
The Brighton Center, which was instrumental in producing the initial 50 strategies in the Housing for All report, already provides a variety of workforce training and housing programs for its clients.
Wonda Winkler, the president and CEO of the Brighton Center, said, “there could be a role for our organization to partner with employers to make supports available to their employees, for example, and align what we do as an organization well in support of what innovations employers might be interested in pursuing.”
Winkler stated that key performance indicators, or KPIs, were currently being developed to track the region’s progress in its housing interventions.
Winkler and Cooper emphasized that there was no single solution for every community in the region.
“What is needed in the urban core of Northern Kentucky is different that [what] might be needed in the five lower counties,” Winkler said.
“Each [recommendation] is going to have to be worked on and done collaboratively across the region,” Cooper said. “This is a heavy lift; it is. It’s a heavy lift, but it’s a heavy lift that we know that we need to make in order to keep our region competitive.”
You can read and download the full report below or at nkychamber.com/housing