Mayor talks affordable housing plan with Covington businesses

Businesses in Latonia got an early peek of Mayor Ron Washington’s and the city’s plan to tackle affordable housing in Covington this week.

Although the issue of housing has been a recurring topic over the past couple of years, this was the first time since Washington took office that concrete interventions direct from the city have been publicly pitched.

“We have something that’s happening in our city, that’s happening all over the United States, and it’s not having enough housing stock for our population,” Washington told the Latonia Business Association on Monday. “We have a lot of productive people in our society that are sleeping on couches and still staying with mom and dad, sleeping in parents’ basements, and we as a city, if we want to continue to grow, we’re going to have to do the best we can within our tax structure to grow our housing stock.”

In his presentation to the association – after briefly discussing the city’s overall appeal, various economic developments in the city, such as the Central Riverfront Development, and the city’s financial situation – Washington focused on the peculiarities of Covington related to the housing issue.

He referred to an often-cited 2023 study from the Northern Kentucky Area Development District that pointed to a shortage of smaller, one—to two-bedroom homes and apartments in the region and how many working professionals and civil servants (i.e. teachers, nurses, police, fire, etc.) often get priced out of the region.

The area development district’s study postulated that Kentucky’s eight northernmost counties needed “to build 6,650 housing units to support economic development in the next 5 years, which equates to 1,330 units per year.”

Broken down by income level, the study showed that 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.

“It’s people working; it’s people contributing to society,” Washington said. “We’re talking about school teachers. We’re talking about people that we see in our restaurants. We’re talking about service people. That’s the market that we’re going after.”

One thing that sets Covington apart from other cities in the region is that it has a lot of abandoned and in-fill housing.

There are a variety of reasons for this, but abandoned properties inevitably end up being more expensive for everyone, the city itself and the tax payers, because they a) don’t generate tax revenue and b) cost money to maintain in the form of labor from the public works department, who has to do basic landscaping and structural work to keep out squatters.

Washington showed slides of abandoned properties from around the city and the cost they incurred.

Increasing the city’s housing stock would go a long way to attracting productive people to the city, Washington said, which would have downwind effects on Covington’s general health.

Washington also spoke about the need for extending the city’s economic development to its southern reaches, specifically south of 12th Street.

“As good as [the Central Riverfont] is going, we need to make it go for the rest of the city,” Washington said. “We need to grow our population, and we need to provide within reason places for people to live in our community.”

Washington said the city’s overall strategy would be to expand the city’s portfolio of affordable housing, protect neighborhoods’ unique character, revitalize streets with high numbers of vacant lots and abandoned properties and reduce the cost of maintaining abandoned properties.

To accomplish this, the city plans to carry out the following actions:

• Create a housing advisory committee composed of local residents, builders, nonprofits and experts
• Create a housing development board, responsible for advising and making recommendations to the city commission
• Conduct a comprehensive inventory of available lots, including analyses on topology and other traits key for infrastructure construction
• Identify benefits and risks for each available lot

“It means a lot to me to be able to help people that are willing to help themselves,” Washington said. “And I think this action plan does this.”

Steve Hayden, a member of the Covington Economic Development Authority, asked if banks engage in a practice of refraining from foreclosing on an abandoned property to avoid paying maintenance costs.

One Latonia Business Association member, Pat O’Donnell, also asked if banks still had mortgages out on abandoned properties, thus preventing the city from taking more action.

“I imagine the majority of those have mortgages on them,” O’Donnell said. “Is that the problem that you’re running into?”

“We probably need to come up with a way to pay for going after those homes legally,” Washington replied.

Sometimes, Washington said, a property owner will die before a property can be turned over to an heir. Thus, when a family member tries to get financing to fix it up, the bank won’t play ball, even if the house is paid for, because that person isn’t on the paperwork.

“So we need to, as a city, try to find funding to take legal possession of these properties, to turn them back over to the community,” Washington said.