Hundreds of new apartments, a new hotel, single-family homes, and office and retail space are planned for the Bellevue riverfront.
Bellevue City Council approved a disposition of property and development agreement with Cincinnati-based Neyer Properties Wednesday night for a project whose investment is estimated at around $115 million of private funds and $17.5 million in infrastructure improvements.
There are still details to be worked out, City Administrator Frank Warnock said, but there would be immediate financial benefit to the city. At the closing of the sale of the city-owned riverfront property, Bellevue would receive $2.5 million, which would be used to retire debt associated with bonds issued by the city in 2012.
The land is about seven acres and is bound by the Ohio River to the north and Fairfield Avenue to the south, with Lafayette Avenue to the east and Berry Avenue to the west. It has long been the target of redevelopment efforts that ultimately never materialized.
Mayor Charlie Cleves recalled the challenges of bringing development to the riverfront as long ago as the early 1990s, when he operated his family’s jewelry store and served on a committee tapped to pursue the issue. At that time, he said, only a few developers presented possibilities and none of them were particularly good, and so the committee went the least-bad idea which never came to be.
After being elected mayor in 2018, Cleves and Warnock worked with Southbank Partners — an economic development organization that supports efforts in Northern Kentucky’s river cities — to craft a new plan for the riverfront.
On Wednesday night, Cleves said that the Neyer plan reflects exactly what the Southbank plan had in mind.
“It’s more than we could ever ask for,” Cleves said of the announced development.
Charlie Pond, who represented Neyer at Wednesday’s council meeting, called the project “transformative.” He sees it as an opportunity to better connect the riverfront to the city center and to improve pedestrian access to Ohio and the ongoing Riverfront Commons trail project, which will eventually connect all the river cities.
Pond said that the project would take around three years to complete and would create roughly 800 construction jobs. When the project is finished, Neyer anticipates that 190 jobs would be created through the hotel, apartment community, and retail/restaurant/office opportunities.
The plan calls for 239 market-rate multi-family housing units (apartments), a 104-room hotel, 21 single-family homes and approximately 15,500 sq. ft. of office and retail space.
The single-family homes are expected to cost in the neighborhood of $1 million each.
Parking infrastructure plans include 250 structured parking spaces in one area, 143 structured parking spaces in another for the housing units and retail component, and 32 structured parking spaces to serve the hotel.
Harbor Greene Drive would be extended in this plan while improvements are brought to Lafayette and Berry avenues.
Warnock, the city administrator, anticipates that some efforts to fund the development would include the tax increment finance district and industrial revenue bonds.
The City of Bellevue and Neyer Properties have collaborated on another recent project: In 2020, Neyer worked with the city to acquire land that housed a mobile home park in order to develop a single-family home neighborhood on Covert Run Pike.