Local developer to purchase lots from Covington, build market-rate units

Local developer A.M. Titan is set to buy up a handful of vacant city-owned lots in Covington’s Westside neighborhood and build 12 apartments on them after responding to a city request for proposals issued late last year.

The Board of Commissioners placed A.M. Titan’s development proposal on its consent agenda for next week, meaning it will likely be approved. This will be the first development to spring from the city’s new affordable housing initiative, launched last year, which aims to catalog and develop city-owned land throughout Covington in an effort to address the region’s housing woes.

The parcels in question were first put on the market last fall, along with several other city-owned properties. There are four lots in total: two on Banklick Street and two on Holman Avenue. The properties on Banklick Street are located at addresses 1129 and 1131.

One property on Holman is located at street number 1136. The other Holman addresses, 1138 through 1140, are located on a single land parcel. Due to their proximity, the city had sought single proposals for all of the properties as one development.

There are about 200 vacant lots throughout Covington, and the city holds title to about 50 of them.

Initial development talks put the number of apartments at 12, then 16, then back to 12. A.M. Titan plans to purchase the land from the city for $68,000 before spending about $2.6 million on construction, plus other costs for admin fees, overhead and contingencies, according to the company’s proposal.

The proposal slated for approval next week calls for a mixture of one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments with rents of either $1,395 or $1,750.

In an email to the city, A.M. Titan indicates that the properties on Banklick may be difficult to build on due to their hilly geography, but this was apparently not enough of a disincentive to stop the company from buying the lots. The apartments and a parking lot would appear on the Holman land.

Anthony Bradford, A.M. Titan’s principal, described the apartments as a form of workforce housing, specifically for households making $68,000 a year. A later development proposal from A.M. Titan states, “the homes will be targeted to households earning 80-120% of Area Median Income (AMI), providing much-needed middle-income housing in Covington’s urban core.”

An oft-cited 2023 housing study from the Northern Kentucky Area Development District corroborates Bradford’s assertion about the “much needed middle-income housing.”

It identified a shortage of one to two-bedroom rentals in the city (and Kenton County generally) in the $50,000 to $74,999 household income range, although A.M. Titan’s higher proposed $1,750 rent level exceeds the study’s maximum monthly housing cost of about $1,560 in that same range.

In other correspondence, Bradford quotes market stats from various online real estate web services, such as RentCafe and ApartmentList, to make his case for the proposed rent levels. Bradford quotes the average rent for all apartments in Covington in November at $1,517 a month, according to RentCafe. The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Covington as of November was $2,097, Bradford writes, according to ApartmentList.

The city’s own numbers put the most recent median (or middle) household income in Covington at $63,717 and average household expenditures (i.e., taxes, retirement savings, housing, groceries, transport and healthcare) at $87,918.

The U.S. Census Bureau, on the other hand, puts the median household income in Covington at $61,166 and the median gross rent, which includes both contracted rent prices and estimated cost of utilities, from 2020 to 2024 at $1,006.

At Tuesday’s meeting, most of the commissioners, as well as Mayor Ron Washington, were silent on the proposal, except Commissioner Tim Downing, who had questions for Covington’s Neighborhood Services Director Brandon Holmes. Specifically, he asked about the city’s criteria for assessing development proposals and the appearance of the proposed apartment buildings.

Holmes listed off some of the proposal criteria.

“The capacity of the developer is one thing we look at,” Holmes said, “the proposed use, the value that has been offered to us. Those are the main things we’re going to look at.”

As far as the appearance, Downing was specifically worried about the fact that the properties were both street-facing. Holmes indicated the land was zoned for semi-urban, or SU, residential use.

Although Holmes said he wasn’t aware of the specifics of what the eventual buildings may look like, he said, “Everything has to be in context with the block face. So, it’s going to be close to the front of the street. It’s not going to be four or five stories high. The highest would be three.”

A.M. Titan’s proposal did not include drawings of the proposed buildings but did state the units would be between 700 and 1,000 square feet with brick or Hardie siding facades, stoops or porches, and rear access parking.