“I understand about the housing problem,” Covington Mayor Ron Washington told a room full of attendees at a special community meeting Monday night.
The reason he understood Washington said, “is because those people are in my family. They’re sleeping on the couches in my family members’ homes. They’re using the basements because they can’t find an adequate place to live.”
The meeting was the first of two planned by the city to gather residents’ feedback on the housing issue and discuss policy implementation to address it. The second meeting is scheduled for Oct. 6 at the American Legion post in Latonia.
The meeting was well-attended by many slices of Covington life: tenants, homeowners, business people and landlords alike, all of whom were eager to share their thoughts on how to go about solving the housing crisis.
Since taking office, Washington and the rest of the Covington Board of Commissioners (two commissioners, James Toebbe and Tim Acri, attended the meeting) have made housing one of their policy priorities.
The board had established a housing committee earlier this summer to spearhead ways to think about the problem. Information collected at the meetings would be used to inform future policy decisions, said Neighborhood Services Director Brandon Holmes. The city is expecting to furnish a report on the results of its investigations next summer.
Programs to build out affordable housing in the city aren’t new. In fact, Washington described how a previous program that resembled the current one was on the books within the past half decade or so, but the program had to be sidelined in the face of the city’s general fund budget shortfall.
The new program aims to draw funding from the sales of unused city property throughout Covington. Ideally, this could be used to make up for the gap that couldn’t be covered previously. In fact, the city recently foreclosed on 12 unused properties.
“We have over 300 sites in the city of Covington that we can sell, and that’s what we’re trying to do,” Acri said to a resident during the meeting’s table discussions.
Much of the meeting consisted of table discussions facilitated by professionals with Kenton County Planning and Development Services. Attendees also completed surveys describing their experiences and ideas related to housing.
Holmes, a former HUD fellow, spoke briefly before the table discussions about the state of housing in the city. He discussed how much of the housing in the city predates 1940 and how there is limited space for new housing, meaning the city and developers would have to think critically about density when considering new housing construction. He also described the different aesthetics of the city’s neighborhoods (and the housing therein) and the ballooning cost of housing.
“When we look at what we’ve seen here recently, 55% increase from 2020 to 2025 nationally, versus 122% locally, that’s the definition of housing burden,” Holmes said.
Discussion topics ranged from the overall cost of housing to ways to deal with the aforementioned density problem (some ideas pitched included allowing more accessory dwelling units, tiny homes or manufactured homes), parking, environmental sustainability, ensuring any new housing was “trimmed out,” as one resident put it, with the surrounding historical housing and ways to rehab existing housing. The discussions lasted well over an hour.
The topic of how money influenced the phenomenon of housing was inescapable in many of the discussions.
“There is nothing cheap about new housing,” said Mainstrasse Resident Laura Hussey.
“Everybody’s thinking about this,” said Austinburg resident James Thomas, rubbing his fingers together.
Doug Ludwig, a Westside resident who owns nine properties, talked about the experiences of some of his tenants as they tried to get federal housing vouchers, known more commonly as Section 8 vouchers.
“You’ve got a lot of people that they’re trying to claw their way back into living as opposed to existing…,” Ludwig said during the discussion. “I’ve got one tenant, she’s got five kids, and she’s been trying to get Section 8 since last year.”
Similar discussions occurred around each table.
“One thing that I think we really need to look at on this, with all these projects and everything, is what can we do with how we develop them, to control the out of control and arguably artificial inflation that’s happening,” said resident Tom Hull.
City staff members encouraged residents to sign up for city announcements to stay up to date with city initiatives.
The next meeting will take place at American Legion Post 203 on Winston Avenue in Latonia on Monday, Oct. 6, starting at 6 p.m. It’s free and open to the public.