Detached single-family homes could be coming to the Central Riverfront Development, located at the site of the former IRS complex in Covington.
The Covington City Commission voted on Tuesday to send an amendment of Covington’s neighborhood development code to the Kenton County Planning Commission for recommendation. The amendment would allow for both single-family detached homes and single-family lot line properties (houses on their own lots that butt up against the lots’ side property lines) at the development site.
The proposal first came before the commission last week. At that meeting, Economic Development Director Tom West argued that the code’s current lack of allowance for detached and lot-line homes was essentially a “scrivener’s error or an omission.”
West said that when the city bought the property, they rezoned the area to include single-family homes. When the city revised its neighborhood development code in 2020, West said, they moved the use category over but not the building type.
The current neighborhood development code does, in fact, include single-family homes in the Central Riverfront’s zoning category, but only attached homes (i.e., apartments, townhomes, condos, duplexes, triplexes and quadplexes) are included in the building type category.
West confirmed with LINK nky that developers looking to build detached homes at the IRS site had already reached out to the city. However, the development agreements that have been approved so far are only for attached homes, meaning they share buildings with other shelters on the lot.
The amendment will now pass on to the planning commission, which will make a recommendation in the coming months. The city commission will then have to cast another vote to codify the amendment into local law.
LINK nky will report more on this situation as it develops.