Clara and William “Bill” Riley bought a two-story home in Covington’s Eastside neighborhood in 1974. They moved to the Eastside in 1961, shortly after getting married. Clara had grown up in Cincinnati, and Bill was from Covington. Bill died in 2019, and Clara was left with an aging house and a growing list of maintenance tasks.
The Riley home is one of four properties slated for painting, minor repairs and yardwork on Nov. 8 in an event the Eastside+ Neighborhood Association is calling “Neighbor to Neighbor.”
Billed as a neighborhood-wide home repair day, Eastside+ is collaborating with Keep Covington Beautiful, a program in the Center for Great Neighborhoods.
“Some of it applies to code enforcement,” said Eastside+ founder Melissa Kelley. “Things that need to be removed and fixed, that are like, overgrown, and, you know, the owner is an 80-year-old lady and she can’t get out there and do it, that kind of thing.”
Clara and Bill Riley’s first Covington home was on Bush Street. That’s where Bill grew up and where his parents, William and Vileria, lived.
From there, the young couple moved to an apartment in the Jacob Price Homes and then Eastside houses they rented before buying 402 Byrd St., across Wheeler Street, where Vileria Riley had owned 344 Byrd St. since 1974. She acquired the property from a nephew who bought it in 1970.
Vileria Riley’s grandchildren still own the Bush Street home and 402 Byrd St.
The Eastside has changed a lot since the 1970s.
“When Blacks start moving in, the whites start moving out,” Riley said. “They thought there were too many Black people coming in.”
By the time the Rileys moved to Byrd Street, Covington’s schools had been desegregated. The restaurants had slowly begun serving Black customers , but redlining still shaped the city’s neighborhoods.
Eastside has been a working-class neighborhood since at least the 1930s, when the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation gave it a “C” grade: “definitely declining.”
Newcomers and longtime residents working together
The Neighbor to Neighbor event is one way longtime residents can reclaim their neighborhood, with the help of some new neighbors like Kelley and her husband, Scott Banford. They’ve lived in Eastside since 2022, when the New Jersey transplants bought a brick home built in the 1850s.
“This is one of the original houses built on Pleasant Street,” Banford said while sitting in the living room of his rehabilitated historic home. “This was owned by a landlord who owned a bunch of homes.”
The house, like many of its neighbors, was in bad shape before Banford and Kelley bought it.
“This was a dump,” Banford said. “It was falling down. It looked terrible. The exterior of the building just looked terrible.”
“This was a really blighted area right here, because of this house,” Kelley said.
Not all Eastside homes are lovingly rehabilitated and bought by well-educated transplants. Their conversations with longtime residents, many of them older Black homeowners, tackled the “G-word”: gentrification.
“The feedback we got from the neighborhood was, we don’t want gentrification,” said Banford. “We don’t want people coming in and buying up our housing stock and raising the prices so we can’t live here.”
The pair got involved in community upgrading initiatives meant to build the neighborhood up through collaboration, not displacement. Kelley revived and expanded the defunct neighborhood association, and Banford got his hands dirty working on the environment.
Last year, during Habitat for Humanity’s Rock the Block event, he helped to clean six tree pits along Pleasant Street and later planted pollinator shrubs in the pits that had been used as dumping places for trash and cigarette butts.
“November 8th, we’re having a Neighbor to Neighbor event, which was an idea conceived after we did Rock the Block,” Banford said.
Neighbor to Neighbor is a smaller undertaking than Rock the Block, which involved 22 homes and 400 volunteers. Habitat for Humanity had a high bar, including income eligibility, for the senior citizens and veterans’ homes that got minor repairs and beautification.
Banford took his idea to Keep Covington Beautiful. The organization visited Eastside homes and selected four from a pool of applications submitted by residents.
Unlike Rock the Block, there were no criteria that applicants had to meet.
“We specifically didn’t want there to be any qualifications,” Keep Covington Beautiful Program Manager Allison Wendling told LINK nky.
“We checked out what work they were requesting us to do,” Wendling said. “That’s anything from painting and yard work to small repairs, small carpentry tasks, things like that.”
Wendling is helping to assemble volunteers, tools and materials for the event.
Projects include repainting patios, power washing exteriors, and removing work astroturf from the steps to Clara Riley’s side door.
“They’re going to fix the carpet on my steps,” Riley told LINK nky. “My husband kept it up, you know, he’s gone, and it looks terrible.”
Neighbor to Neighbor volunteers will also paint the masonry foundation on her frame house.
Building resilience and fortitude
The small projects, Banford hopes, will inspire future events.
“All of the projects that I try to work on, I have an eye towards sustainability and replication,” he said while walking through Eastside and pointing out some past project sites and the sites where Neighbor to Neighbor volunteers will be working.
The volunteer database and results, says Banford, will be the foundation for future events involving more homes and bigger projects. He’s building an infrastructure for the future.
“I’m gonna keep that list of volunteers, keep communicating with them and let the neighborhood know that we’re here if you need us,” Banford said.
“The neighborhood association is about building neighborhood unity, resilience and fortitude,” Banford explains. He defines resilience as the capacity to bounce back, and fortitude as the ability not to get knocked down.
“So how do you have a resilient city with fortitude, with citizens with fortitude?” he asks. “It’s community.”