Life Outside
Dean Raney, Jess Sissom and Joe McGee sat in the McDonald’s on Winston Avenue in Latonia in October. Sissom said he likes this McDonald’s in particular because it’s one of the few places in town where they don’t get harassed.
“Everything’s more complicated when you’re homeless,” McGee said.
Sissom and Raney are both unhoused.
McGee is not unhoused. He’s a retired nurse and attorney. Driven by a deep sense of what he describes as a Christian mission to help others, he spends many of his days with the region’s homeless population, helping out as he can.
He said people refer to him as “this preacher man,” though he’s not actually ordained. He spends many of his mornings outside distributing supplies to Covington’s homeless population: blankets, food, tents and other basic supplies. Often, he said he pays for these materials out of his own pocket.
With snow on the forecast for this weekend, people who lack any kind of permanent housing — people like Dean Raney and Sissom — are hunkering down for the winter. Raney and Sissom are but two of a population of people who exist in the hidden away places parallel to the rest of society.
Raney and Sissom share an encampment hidden away in Covington. A makeshift fire pit sits in the center with two tents and a plastic table nearby.
Exact numbers are difficult to pin down, but there are data sources that shed some light on the size of the homeless population in Kentucky. Almost 4,200 people in Kentucky received various sheltering services in 2022, according to the Kentucky Homeless Management Information System, a 6.6% increase from the 3,941 who received shelter in 2021.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development, on the other hand, indicates there were 3,984 homeless people in various sheltering programs throughout the state of Kentucky in fiscal year 2022, based on point-in-time measures, which log the number of people staying in shelters during the last ten days of January. They increased the following year to 4,766, indicating a upward trend, even if the numbers aren’t anywhere near the 2007 peak of about 8,000.
Point in time measures are the go-to metric for tracking homelessness figures, but they don’t provide a complete picture as they only collect data for 10 days out of the year. Furthermore, there’s no centralized way of tracking figures for people who, for whatever reason, didn’t access available shelters.
Analysis of HUD’s data by the National Alliance to End Homelessness suggested that an average of 17,000 new people entered homelessness per week in 2022 throughout the country, a 30% increase from 2020.
The homeless, Raney and Sissom said, are vulnerable to all sorts of threats, not just the weather. As such, Sissom said he carries a large knife on his belt for self-defense.
“When you’re out here sleeping on the ground, you’re susceptible to everything, whether it’s man or beast,” Sissom said. “So you have to have something to kind of defend yourself with.”
“Everybody on the street gets robbed,” McGee replied. “These are universal: Everybody gets robbed. Everybody gets harassed. Everybody gets attacked sooner or later.”
“Since I’ve been out here, I have been harassed by citizen and law enforcement officer alike,” Sissom added.
“I’ve actually had friends that have gotten so cold they had to get their toes cut off, or they froze to death,” said Kim Raney.
Kim Raney met with LINK nky at the Covington Frisch’s on 5th street in December. She was homeless for three years, she said, and an alcoholic for longer, although she’d been sober for about year and half when she spoke with LINK nky.
McGee and others insisted that no one chose to become homeless. Kim Raney, who is related to but not in contact with Dean Raney, confounded that assertion but not because she liked living outside. She left her home to flee an abusive relationship.
“I was homeless because I chose to be homeless,” Kim Raney said. “It’s better than getting beat on every day. I think anybody would pick that choice.”
She stayed at the ION Center, a women’s shelter in Covington, for about a year before getting approved for housing choice vouchers. She then got a job at Walgreens before getting approved for disability benefits. Two months after she got her first disability payout, she’d moved into her own apartment.
She was still drinking when she moved in but said she was prompted to quit through studying the Bible. These days, she helps out McGee doing outreach and charity work.
Dean Raney and Sissom both became homeless gradually, they said, after breaking up with romantic partners.
“After couch surfing from here and there and sleeping in my car, my car broke down, and I ended up on foot,” Sissom said. “And that’s where I’ve been ever since. And it wasn’t because I’m a law breaker, and it wasn’t because I’m a drug addict. It’s just a chain of events that can lead anybody to being homeless.”
Based on his own observations, McGee said that certain populations tend to be more vulnerable to homelessness than others, and they can become homeless for any number of reasons.
“There are a lot of elderly,” McGee said. “There’s a lot of disabled. There’s some mental illness, but there’s also a second cadre, I would call it, of 20 to 30-year-olds out there, as well, that have other problems,” McGee said. “Some of them, it’s drugs and alcohol. Some of them, it’s mental illness. Some of them, it’s bad circumstances and bad economics. All kinds of reasons.”
Although mental illness and substance abuse are often cited as driving forces of homelessness at the level of individuals, there are, as McGee said, broader economic forces that frame the problem as well.
A recent study from the Northern Kentucky Area Development District investigated housing trends throughout the region and found that demand for small one to two-bedroom houses, as well as low-cost rental properties, consistently outpaced the available supply in Boone, Kenton and Campbell counties.
In spite of the pressures on pricing and the housing market, the overall number of housing units has been trending upward over the past 10 years or so in Kenton County, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2022, the county’s estimated total number of housing units was about 73,000, about 6,500 of which were vacant.
“The housing situation’s unbelievable,” Dean Raney said. “I see them putting up the high rises. They’re even putting them up in the old IRS [site] now. I mean, why can’t they use that money to build a place for people out here?… People will die out here.”
“People are dying out here,” Sissom said.
“Our society has produced this problem, and the result of it is what we see on the street,” McGee said.
Later in October, at a different encampment elsewhere in the city, Candy Kaiser and Kenneth Scott shared coffee and food that McGee had brought them from Frisch’s, the same one where LINK nky would meet Kim Raney in December.
Scott and Kaiser spoke of many of the same dangers Sissom spoke about at McDonald’s, including harassment as well as threats from stray dogs and wild animals. “Zombies,” or heavy drug users, they put it, are another issue.
Scott and Kaiser tend to give them a wide berth just to be safe.
“You can’t let them within 10 feet of you,” Scott said.
Kaiser and Scott are both in recovery, and Kaiser attributes much of her sobriety to her relationship with Scott. When LINK nky interviewed them both in October, Kaiser had obtained shelter at the Welcome House, but Scott still lived outside.
Although there are service agencies that provide housing to women and children, as well as single people generally, few offer services for unmarried couples.
Kaiser said she’d been approved for permanent housing but hadn’t been placed yet. She and Scott were both critical of housing voucher programs, as they often entailed long wait times, and there was no guarantee that a landlord would accept them.
Covington Neighborhood Services has historically managed the housing voucher, known more commonly as Section 8, program for all of Kenton County, although the city recently began the process of merging the housing voucher program with the Housing Authority of Covington. Neighborhood Services issued 1,144 vouchers in 2023 as of Nov. 30. There are 333 landlords who participated in the voucher program, and there are 1,771 applicants on the waiting list as of the same date.
“That’s one of the major problems is even once you get vouchers, they last how long, a few months?” Scott said.
Vouchers last for 120 days, and applicants have to reapply if they’re unable to find housing before their vouchers expire, putting applicants back at square one if they’re unable to furnish the income to afford market-rate housing.
Kaiser, who’s originally from Erlanger, was quiet and reserved when she spoke with LINK nky, but Scott had no problem sharing his thoughts on things, whether that was his own experience, politics, economics, religion or anything else that caught his interest.
“We clash theologically big time,” Scott said, referencing conversations he’d had with McGee. “… I’m an absolute heretic.”
Scott suffered an injury to his back while working at a construction site in 2005. The healing process, he said, ended in two fused vertebrae, which limited his ability to work, although he could still move around and exert himself for short periods.
Injuries, age and physical disability limiting people’s ability to find jobs was a recurring issue among the people that LINK nky interviewed for this story. Dean Raney and Sissom, for instance, both had mobility issues due to age and nerve damage arising from diabetic complications, respectively.
Despite their own problems, most of the men who spoke with LINK nky agreed on one thing: Life outside was much harder for women.
“Travel in pairs if you’re female,” Kaiser said.
Kaiser said that she had been sexually assaulted in the past but not since she had been in Covington. McGee argued that rape and other forms of sexual assault were inevitable among women without housing.
What’s more, Kaiser said that she encountered abused women regularly. Scott said that often, women will pair up with a man for protection, but abusers would sometimes exploit this tendency as another way of seizing on the women’s vulnerability.
“You’ll know it because [the women] won’t look at you,” Scott said, “It’s just eyes down; don’t look.”
Food, on the other hand, was comparatively easy to come by, at least near the rivers.
“If you’re in downtown Covington, there are places to feed every day,” McGee said, referencing the various kitchens and service providers in the region.
“There’s no reason to go hungry,” Scott said. “If you want to go eat, they got places in Newport. The people that rotate around here all gain weight.”
Homeless service providers tend to cluster in urban centers, particularly in Covington and Florence. Many providers specialize in working with particular groups, such as victims of domestic violence or people struggling with substance abuse.
Sometimes, they’re constrained in what services they can provide due to facility size, monetary limitations, local laws or location. Fairhaven Rescue Mission on Madison Avenue in Covington, for example, cannot work with sex offenders due to its proximity to a school. Florence Christian Church, on the other hand, will work with sex offenders, but they do not provide overnight services.
Yet, even with the presence of service agencies in urban centers, the relative accessibility of food and government housing aid programs like the river city HOME consortium, the brute mathematics of the housing market and the focus of economic public policy don’t operate with the region’s most vulnerable in mind.
Sources didn’t always see eye to eye on what the collective response to homelessness ought to be, but there was one point that McGee often harped upon as a sort of baseline.
“Let people live,” McGee said. “You know, somebody’s out here living, leave them alone. Let them live.”
‘Where are they supposed to go?’
Sissom and Scott both expressed a profound suspicion of established institutions, characterizing them as being driven by greed and a lust for power.
“They’re all working for the same people,” Sissom said. “We’re living in a world… full of lies.”
“Putting intrinsic value on paper over humans, that’s the real… problem.” Scott said, arguing that existing power structures had gotten lost in the abstraction of monetary value at the cost of human life.
This kind of revolutionary politics was not universal among the people who spoke with LINK nky–McGee, for instance, is largely driven by his spirituality–but most agree that something needs to change.
“Right now, the best way to help the homeless is to open more shelters,” said Kim Raney.
Even if Kim Raney doesn’t share Scott and Sissom’s politics, like many of the unhoused people who spoke with LINK nky, she was critical of the police and much of the public response to homelessness.
Sissom recounted a time he said a policeman accosted him when he was sleeping in a parking lot. The officer had noticed the knife sitting on top of his sleeping bag; he said the officer told him to stand up and raise his hands. Then, the officer told him to get on the ground, which prompted Sissom to ask what he had done.
Then, he said, the officer drew his gun.
“So he came over, and he handcuffed me and this is what he said to me: He said, ‘You’re here in my city,'” Sissom recounted. “‘You’re going to do what I tell you to do. You’re going to obey everything I tell you to do because if I have to come back here again, I don’t think I have to tell you what’s gonna happen.’ I was scared to death. I thought he was going to kill me right there.”
Dean Raney said it seemed like anytime he found a safe place to stay, he would be displaced.
“They don’t understand being homeless,” Dean Raney said, talking about city staff and police officers.
LINK nky was not able to corroborate Sissom’s account, but an encounter Scott had with the police in March was verifiable.
Based on statements from Scott, McGee and what could be gleaned from the police report, on March 9, 2023, a group of teenagers threatened Scott with a pistol. He called the police. Police communications, the details of which are sparse, indicated that the police talked with several other witnesses before meeting Scott. One witness indicated that the person with a gun fled over the flood wall.
Upon encountering Scott, the officers trained their rifles on him and instructed him to sit down, evidently believing he was the person with the gun.
Scott recorded the encounter and posted it on his YouTube page. The video shows Scott approaching an officer, who orders him to sit down. After some expletive-laden exchange, the police and Scott were able to resolve the confusion and no arrests or violence occurred.
The city issued a statement on the incident, writing that responses to calls involving firearms, especially in large, wooded areas warranted officers approaching the scene with guns drawn.
Moreover, the statement reads, Scott approached the officers with a machete. It’s not clear from the video if Scott was brandishing such a weapon, and there’s no mention of a machete in the police report. Scott did voluntarily show LINK nky that he had a machete in October, however.
Finally, the statement reads, “the man they encountered is someone with whom police and other City officials have had numerous encounters over the years, including a dozen arrests for everything from assault to non-support to criminal trespass to a fugitive warrant from another state.”
Kenton County Court records confirm prior records of trespassing, often as a result of camping, and nonpayment of child support as well as other charges, such as obstructing an emergency vehicle.
“They throw all these people off the flood wall and stuff,” Kim Raney said. “Where are they supposed to go?”
Where are they supposed to go?
This question loomed large in the background of every conversation, as homeless people would often stake out temporary encampments in public places, a practice that has prompted responses some characterize as overly punitive. Scott viewed his March encounter with the police, as well as other encounters he’s had with the police, as evidence of this tendency.
Homelessness advocates often refer to methods like encampment sweeps, panhandling bans as well as the installation of architecture to discourage sleeping on benches and other public places as the criminalization of homelessness.
Covington has an anti-camping ordinance, which prohibits setting up tents and encampments in public parks and on the river banks between 9 p.m. and 9 a.m. It doesn’t ban sleeping in public places outright, but the presence of sleeping bags and other camping materials can put someone in violation.
The city defended its camping ordinance to LINK nky in a written statement, where it argued the ordinance was necessary to preserve the communal character of public property:
“Parks, playgrounds, picnic shelters, and green spaces are owned and paid for by taxpayers for recreational use by residents of and visitors to Covington. Individual people and groups cannot simply come in and seize ownership of those public parks by building structures, taking up roots, establishing communities, partying, burning fires, housing pets, and claiming all the rights of private land ownership, thus taking those recreational areas from taxpayers for their personal and exclusive use.”
The statement also noted that the issue of homelessness was “rife with complexity and nuance, and any response is a balancing act that must take into account the larger issues at play.”
If found camping on public property in Covington, a person is usually given written notice to vacate before penalties escalate. Arrests and trespassing charges can follow if the person doesn’t leave. In more extreme cases, encampments can be displaced or destroyed. Scott and Kaiser, for instance, both said they witnessed the city’s Public Works Department bulldozing a nearby encampment, but LINK nky was not able to corroborate this account.
The March incident presents another question, in addition to Kim Raney’s question of where homeless people should go: Are the police justified in using these sorts to measures to deal with homelessness?
Shortly before this article appeared, LINK nky was informed that the spot where Scott had been camping was, in fact, private property and the city had threatened the property owner with a fine if he failed to remove Scott from his property.
Scott recorded a conversation with the property owner, where the owner showed the warning letter from the city. LINK nky could not reach the property owner for comment, but McGee confirmed Scott was no longer on the spot where LINK nky interviewed him in October and that he was attempting to get him connected to services at the Welcome House.
“Just because you’re homeless doesn’t mean you’re a bad person,” Kim Raney said.
She admitted that even she had a checkered past.
“I’ve seen so much bad stuff happen, stuff I couldn’t even repeat that could probably get me in a lot of trouble,” Kim Raney said. “But I’ve also met a lot of good people when I was homeless.”
“A lot of them are good people,” she added. “… They’re just out in the streets, and they’re in bad situations.”
How to help
Here are some ways you can help people experiencing homelessness in the Northern Kentucky region:
Emergency Shelter of Northern Kentucky
What: Low-barrier shelter for men and, during cold months, women
Location: 436 W. 13th St., Covington
Phone: 859-291-4555
Website: emergencyshelternky.org
- The shelter welcomes volunteers to cook meals and/or serve guests. To sign up, go to bit.ly/46qkPtw
- To volunteer doing things like laundry, greeting guests, organizing donations and more, go to emergencyshelternky.org/help-out/volunteer/ and fill out the form at the bottom of the page; you can also email Britt Schroeder at britt.schroeder@esnky.net.
- To make a monetary donation to the shelter, go to to bit.ly/412F13X
- If you’d like to donate items, go to this website to find a list of items the shelter needs the most and how to drop them off: emergencyshelternky.org/help-out/wish-list/
- For any other questions about how to volunteer or donate, email info@esnky.net
Welcome House of Northern Kentucky
What: Shelter for single women over 18 with and without children
Location: 205 W. Pike St., Covington
Phone: 859-431-8717
Website: welcomehouseky.org
How to help:
- Donate a meal or give a monetary donation here: www.welcomehouseky.org/donate/
- To donate your time at Welcome House doing things like sorting donations or preparing shelter activities, go to www.welcomehouseky.org/about-us/volunteer-application-form/
- For more information about how to get involved at the Welcome House, go to welcomehouseky.org/get-involved
Fair Haven Rescue Mission
What: Shelter for men 18 or older who are experiencing homelessness. Must have a picture ID and pass a Breathalyzer test for admission.
Location: 260 Pike St., Covington
Phone: 859-491-1027
Website: fairhavenmission.org
How to help:
- To make a monetary donation, go to fairhavenmission.org/#donate
Homeward Bound Shelter
What: Shelter for homeless and runaway youth run by Brighton Center
Location: 13-15 E. 20th St., Covington
Phone: 859-581-1111
Website: brightoncenter.org
How to help:
- To learn how to volunteer with the Brighton Center, including donating or volunteering in person, go to brightoncenter.com/get_involved/volunteer