The elevator opens. A black marble hallway leads to a front desk, flanked by staircases that arch down to the front doors of 100 E. Rivercenter.
Bill Butler’s office is on the 10th floor. It overlooks the Roebling, which stretches over the Ohio River to Downtown Cincinnati.
A beautiful view. An ironic view, perhaps, for a man who has spent his life building up a place that is at times reluctantly reliant on the city his window frames.
“We don’t have an identity,” he said on a zoom call from Florida. “What is our identity? Whatever it is, Cincinnati looks down on it.”
It isn’t the office one would expect for a person most credited, at least anecdotally for this project, with influencing what urban Northern Kentucky, and perhaps most of Northern Kentucky, has come to be.
There’s a desk in the center of the room with five neat piles of paper spaced out evenly. A few momentos.
The view is the showstopper.
Angie Fischer’s office is almost as big as his, but hers has a lot more in it. Fischer is the director of the office of the chairperson. She is here, holding down the fort while Butler is in Florida.
Back downstairs, revolving doors open to Rivercenter Boulevard. A coffee shop is to the right, then the Embassy Suites by Hilton Cincinnati RiverCenter and Cincinnati Marriott at Rivercenter; the hotels’ unfairly ironic names reflect Northern Kentucky’s identity, or perhaps, it’s frustrated relationship with the city across the river.
“Ninety percent of the people who bought condos in the Ascent project in Covington were from Cincinnati,” Butler said. “They moved over from Cincinnati. The same things happened in Newport and Bellevue and Dayton. Those are mostly Cincinnati people. So that stigma about who we are in Northern Kentucky is still there. But not really. Not with the people who have money and not with progressively thinking people.”
Jess Sheldon moved from Over-the-Rhine with her partner, Chris, last year. They now live in a home on 7th Street in Covington. Sheldon didn’t expect to end up in Kentucky. She was admittedly caught up in the stigma. But she loves it here.
“I feel like OTR was getting too fancy,” she said while out walking on a recent evening with Chris, their 2-month-old son, Wilder, and her dog, Findlay. “We were paying a premium to live in this tiny apartment where we are on top of each other.
“I felt like I had to get dressed up just to go down the street or get something to eat,” she said. “Here it still feels urban but it’s more …. Country urban.”
Northern Kentucky is its own place.
But it also has a reluctant if occasionally agreeable relationship with the Queen City. A place with a name. A place where the newspaper and the TV stations congregate. A place with fewer politicians and municipalities and school districts. A place that happens to be 14 feet higher than its southern counterpart, taking settlers from their initial landing place on the flat bank on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River to Cincinnati, where the hills better kept the flooding at bay.
A place that many in Northern Kentucky would say they don’t want to be; but a place with which they still associate when necessary.
Just before the Cincinnati Marriott at RiverCenter is Madison Avenue. Traveling south, there is the Northern Kentucky Convention Center, then the Transit Authority of Northern Kentucky, and the Kenton County Justice Center. Beyond that, shops and banks and restaurants, like Kung Food Amerasia, with its neon signs and bar and surprisingly cheap lunch menu.
There’s Hotel Covington, Agave & Rye, The Madison Event Center. A mile and a half later, after a turn on West 19th, is the steep hill up Benton Road.
Through two open gates with an unmanned security booth is a general store that doesn’t look open, though resident Josiah King said it’s a decent place to get basics if a 1.5-mile trip to Kroger can be avoided.
Residents were told last year that the public housing complex, built in the 1950s, will be closed in the coming years because the cost to make necessary improvements is too high and the money just isn’t there.
The Covington Housing Authority, which owns City Heights, will sell the complex, which has about 360 units.
Urban Northern Kentucky is – and has been for decades – a place defined by change. A desire for change, the embracing of change, and yet occasionally a stubborn hanging on to things that once were.
LINK, the multimedia local news startup you are reading right now, is a product of that change. And yet on the wall of LINK’s office is an excerpt from the Covington Journal in February of 1868.
“…We are fully apprised of the difficulties attending the publication of a newspaper in the city of Covington,” it reads. “So far as the news of the day is concerned the Cincinnati dailies anticipate everything, and no Covington paper can hope to compete with them in that particular. There are, however, interests which demand a local organ and which ought to ensure it a liberal support.
“We believe then that there is a vacancy for a newspaper in Covington and we hope in resuming the publication of the Journal to be able to fill that vacancy.”
The vacancy that planted the seed that brought this startup into existence is still there, 154 years later.
Maybe, then, any pushback – or even passive and sometimes active resistance – is a reflection more of a disagreement about the implementation of the change and its effect on those who were here first.
Urban NKY: Where we came from
Pamela Mullins grew up in Peaselberg. She is on the Covington Human Rights Commission, an organization created “to foster mutual respect and understanding and to create an atmosphere conducive to the promotion of amicable relations among all members of the city’s community,” the website says.
Mullins recently stopped by LINK’s offices to talk about a 42 Art Meets Activist grant she was awarded to create a social media team of women and girls who will learn video and podcasting skills.
Mullins was born in 1953. She described an integrated community with single family homes. Sure, the white people congregated toward one end of the street and the African American people on the other, but they lived together, they owned homes, they were a community.
Mullins speaks about the past, before her memories, as if she were there. Her memories come from the elders, as she calls them, who still occupy streets not torn down to make way for the public housing community City Heights, which was known then as the Ida Spence Homes.
“We were property owners, then once people were displaced, they became renters,” Mullins said. “We were fortunate my dad was a veteran and qualified for a loan through the GI bill.”
Mullins’ family moved to a home in a white neighborhood. “We integrated the neighborhood,” she said.
The home was on Greenup between Pleasant and Bird streets. It’s still there, and the family is still making use of it, she said.
Bill Butler has told this story before.
The founder of Corporex could have brought his company’s headquarters anywhere in the world. But Northern Kentucky is his home. And he’s determined to make it everything it has the potential to be.
“I gave a talk recently on the fact that what we’re all about is reversing 200 years of history,” Butler said. “The settlers back in the 1500s and 1600s, they actually settled the Kentucky shores first. But everything blew up in Cincinnati because the banks of the river are sloped 14 feet higher on the Ohio side. The Kentucky side is flat. There was great farmland and topsoil. So they set up in Covington and Newport. But it flooded.”
Butler grew up on 14th and Greenup streets in Covington. He went to the old St. Xavier, the one on Seventh and Sycamore streets in Downtown Cincinnati.
When he talks about Northern Kentucky, there’s an affection in his voice that’s similar to when people talk about their children. Like Mullins, he speaks of the history of his home as if he were there to see it all those years ago.
“At 7th Street (in Covington) you see Huntington Bank and U.S. Bank,” he said. “And on the corner you see another bank and another bank. They all located at 7th Street. Whenever people settled a community in the early days, the bank was the first to be set up. Madison and Pike, when I was a kid, that was Main Street. That’s the center of the city of Covington.”
The Banks opened on 7th Street as opposed to closer to the river, Butler said, because of flooding.
“You had to get back at least that far to get out of the floods,” he said.
When he started in business 56 years ago, Boone, Kenton and Campbell counties amounted to about 130,000 people. Now it’s just over 400,000 people.
“In 10 years there will be close to 500,000 in this thing we call Northern Kentucky,” Butler said. “We don’t have a name. We don’t have a reference to a place on the map. We need a name. But before we get a name, we need to become a united community. So who are we?”
What happened in the urban core, or perhaps more accurately what didn’t happen all those years ago, “speaks to a whole community,” Butler said.
“It is just now happening 500 years after people first settled here,” he said. “And the reason it didn’t happen was because of flooding. Because our land was 14 feet lower than it was on the other side of the river. It had nothing to do with us people.”
Jeanne Schroer is the president and CEO of the Catalytic Development Funding Corp. of Northern Kentucky. The fund executes “high impact real estate development projects in Northern Kentucky’s River Cities by connecting people, place and product with capital and technical expertise,” its website reads.
In other words, Schroer said, the fund does not act as an actual developer of properties. Rather, “we have an investment fund and we use that to make loans and investments in different properties that meet our criteria. We only work on projects that would be difficult to accomplish by the private or public sector by themselves.”
The fund was born out of Northern Kentucky Vision 2015, a brain child of Butler, who started Corporex and is widely credited with much of the change in Northern Kentucky, and Chuck Scheper, known in some circles as the accidental mayor of Covington.
“Chuck and Bill asked me to lead this thing,” Schroer said.
The Vision 15 plan, Schroer said, recognized that for a while in the 80s and early 90s, Northern Kentucky really had a lot of momentum.
“That’s when Rivercenter was developed and several fortune 500 companies moved to Northern Kentucky to be part of Rivercenter,” she said. “A lot of hotels were built, Newport on the Levy.”
But then, Schroer said, the area started losing momentum in the 2000s.
“You started to see a lot of disinvestment in the urban core,” Schroer said. “Covington and Rivercenter lost several major employers and tenants. That was the major concern that led to the creation of an entity that could regain the momentum that had really stagnated in the early 2000s.”
Butler, in talking about what led us to where we are now, points to two more things: The changing media landscape and Interstates 71 and 75.
First, the interstates.
“The other thing we did to screw up Covington, Newport and Cincinnati is these high-speed road systems,” Butler said. “In Europe, they don’t do this there. Their urban centers are vibrant.”
You know the old proverb: All roads lead to Rome. Because European cities are set up the way they are, people must travel through them, as opposed to around them, as has happened in the United States.
“It used to be that way in America, too,” Butler said. “In order to get to Louisville or Columbus, you had to drive through Covington and Cincinnati. But with 75, they put it on the side of the city, and on the Kentucky side they raised it up so you were going over the top of the city in addition to going around it. So no longer did you have to go through Rome. All roads didn’t lead to Rome, they went over the top of Rome.”
On to newspapers.
“When I grew up, there was the Times Star and the Post,” Butler said.
The Cincinnati Post began publishing in 1881 and launched the Northern Kentucky edition in 1890. The Post acquired the Times Star in 1958. The post ceased publication in 2007.
“So the media are all in Cincinnati,” Butler said. “The primary focus is over there.”
1NKY Alliance, whose mission is to transform Northern Kentucky by uniting and mobilizing leaders, holds a meeting every quarter, Butler said, and one of the things that came out of the meeting was that we don’t have a voice.
“Northern Kentucky doesn’t have a voice,” Butler said. “We can’t talk to Frankfort, we can’t talk to each other.”
And that is how LINK came to be. Butler is on LINK’s board and also is one of the funders of the local news startup.
Which brings us to now.
Urban NKY: Where we are
Pam Mullins’ family home on Greenup Street is still there, and she said you’ll know which one is theirs because there’s a full porch but only half an awning.
But the neighborhood around it keeps changing. Many of the homes surrounding it have become Airbnbs. Demographics are changing, Mullins said. The area was initially primarily African American, but it’s flipping now.
In Mullins’ mind, the changes happening in Northern Kentucky are “all about the money and the politics.”
Janet Harrah is the executive director of outreach at the Haile/US Bank College of Business at Northern Kentucky University. Before that, she led the Center for Economic Analysis and Development at NKU.
“We have the same challenges any city has,” she said. “One, limited land. Two, how to balance displacement versus gentrification and historical development.”
Harrah pointed to other urban cores that have experienced similar tensions when it comes to gentrification versus maintaining historical neighborhoods: In Cincinnati, there’s Over-the-Rhine and most recently, the FC Cincinnati stadium. Those same conversations are happening in Northern Kentucky, she said. Then comes the recognition that some buildings are too old and have outlived their usefulness. And in those tensions, Harrah said, there is no quick answer.
“One of the things I always tell people when they talk about affordable housing,” Harrah said. “What does that mean? Every house that is occupied is affordable for someone.”
As people occupy urban cores, she said, the bar for how much it costs for people to live there moves up.
“It’s not like you’re pricing everyone out, but it’s who you are pricing out,” Harrah said. “Typically who you are pricing out are low income individuals who have often lived there for a very long time.”
People like Ebony Friday and Josiah King and Talisha Hubbard.
People who know they have to leave the City Heights homes they’ve occupied for years, but who have been given no timeline and who don’t know where they will go.
The price to rehabilitate City Heights would be around $50 million, housing authority Executive Director Steve Arlinghaus told WCPO 9 reporter Courtney Francisco. WCPO has a content sharing partnership with LINK.
“The federal government is just not going to award us over $50 million to take care of that,” Arlinghaus said.
But that explanation doesn’t help current residents figure out what to do next.
“There’s nowhere to go,” Friday said in one of the second-floor rooms of a City Heights apartment. “Nobody takes Section 8.”
Residents will receive Section 8 vouchers that they can use anywhere in the country, but as apartments that accept the vouchers are notoriously hard to find, many residents will have to leave the area, their jobs, their kids’ schools, and their community.
“I’m going to have to move out of town,” Friday, a single mom who works two jobs, one at New Riff and one as a home health aid, said. She likes her jobs – they provide good, flexible hours and benefits.
Now she’s looking to Charlotte, South Carolina. She said she heard it’s a good city for kids to grow up in and develop.
Mullins, for her part, is frustrated.
“The economic divide continues because the equity issue is still a concern,” she said. As for City Heights, she wonders who is benefiting from the development’s closure.
“If it’s not for the benefit of the people, who is it for?” she said.
Outreach efforts on behalf of the housing authority haven’t been effective, Mullins said.
“I know there has been a lack of inclusion,” she said. “There have been outreach efforts, but how effective have they been?”
Mullins pointed to a 150-page document that outlines the relocation plan for residents of City Heights.
“One hundred and fifty pages,” she said. “How many people are going to understand that?”
Hubbard, a 12-year resident of City Heights and a home health aid, said she knew there were meetings about the development’s eventual closure, but “since I work so much I can’t go to City Council meetings.”
Two miles north, back on the bank of the Ohio River, many projects that were outlined in a document called Northern Kentucky’s Future have come to fruition.
The document, published in September of 1981, was the result of an eight-member Economic Development Task Force that set out to compile a report that included “a united tri-county growth plan, and to identify hindrances to growth and potentials for an increased rate of growth.”
The document’s recommendations include a significant pacesetting project in the urban center.
“A multi-purpose civic/business oriented development is hereby recommended for the highest priority to cause the greatest single impact on the trend of the entire area,” the document reads. “The core areas remain and shall always be the center of a successful metropolitan system.”
Butler has remained focused on bringing just that to the southern banks of the Ohio River.
“The Mainstrasse project has come alive after it took 30 years to ferment,” Butler said. “That all started in 1988, and it was built through 2008 to develop Rivercenter. The result of Rivercenter was the aquarium. Then Newport on the Levee.”
The Levee, Butler admits, has some flaws. Flaws he is hoping to overcome with Ovation, also in Newport.
“At Ovation, there’s a street we are building and you’ll have to drive up the street, then you drive all the way across the platform. With the Levee you have to pull into a garage, then go up an elevator,” Butler said. “So we are going to let you drive right up. And of course you have the music venue.”
Urban Northern Kentucky is, the Catalytic fund’s Schroer said, a place of amazing opportunity.
“Urban Northern Kentucky has all of the assets you look at when developing,” she said. “Proximity, beauty of river and hillsides. The potential and the greatness was there and it just needed some examples of what I call catalytic investment to kind of prove there was a market.
“And if we had product that was quality and unique people would want to live and work here. We made investments that might not have been made otherwise. But now all these projects that have happened have been extremely successful.”
There are other things unique to urban Northern Kentucky that attract business and families, she said: the historic buildings, the ability to walk to attractions.
“And then the historic housing stock,” Schroer said. “We are a bit different from urban Cincinnati because there is a lot of single family housing integrated into the urban core. And it’s all very walkable to the urban business district here.”
Urban Northern Kentucky is, Schroer said, an area of small businesses. An area where entrepreneurs have thrived.
Which brings us to Nancy Aichholz at Aviatra. The accelerator – solely for women entrepreneurs – sits in a storefront on Pike Street in Covington.
Aviatra welcomed its first cohort of entrepreneurs in 2010 and moved into their current location in 2016.
“Since then our organization has just boomed,” Aichholz said. “Between the space in general and having the connections with the entrepreneurial ecosystem, the city of Covington is very real estate friendly. They are very active in bringing people into brick and mortar locations. They make it really easy.
“They’re also really good at bringing businesses together that are going to be supportive of each other.”
There are bars and breweries and bakeries, but “then you have a lot of businesses like ours that aren’t retail but we are certainly serving the community,” Aichholz said. “It’s been a really great place to do business for us.”
Urban NKY: Where we’re going
There are many, many people invested in urban Northern Kentucky’s future.
“The urban renaissance is going to bring together the entire region,” said Karen Finan, president and CEO of 1NKY Alliance. “I really feel like what is happening in the urban core will bring all of this together.”
What’s happening is a lot:
“From the urban side,” Finan said, “there is a lot of private development happening on the riverfront. Riverfront Commons is a walking/hiking/biking trail that has been in the works for a long time. It will connect to the crown in Cincinnati when it’s complete. That, coupled with Ovation and the Levee remake, Manhattan Harbor, the things you see up and down this area, the redevelopment being completed by the Catalytic fund.”
Two priorities for area leaders right now, Finan said, are talent attraction and population increase.
So what’s after that? For Finan, it’s the ties between the urban, suburban and rural parts of Northern Kentucky. The marriage of those is going to be incredible, she said, and it is going to create who we are as we move forward.
“There is such a strong private sector interest in this region,” Finan said. “There is an acknowledgement that there are things we need to work on. It’s up to us to take advantage of it.”
Unity. It’s a word most everyone included in this project has pointed to as a goal.
But unity of what? People? Places? Government? And what would it mean to bring unity to all of those pieces of Northern Kentucky?
For those who rely on affordable housing, NKU’s Janet Harrah said that officials will often say we need more affordable housing, just not in their backyard.
“Some of the wealthier neighborhoods need to lead by example if you want more low-income housing in more areas,” Harrah said. Places like Indian Hill or Fort Thomas need to lead by example, she said, and bring affordable housing into these wealthier communities.
“There is a recognition that high density housing projects aren’t working,” Harrah said. “Cities around the U.S. are demolishing them because they haven’t worked. But the problem is, we are demolishing these typically urban housing projects, and we aren’t building new low income housing to replace it in the same numbers.”
Many people, she said, cite crime as reasons they don’t want public housing in their neighborhoods.
“The problem that typically comes with high density is crime,” she said. “If you don’t have that high density housing, the incidents of crime go down greatly.”
When it comes to bringing Northern Kentucky together, Butler is excited about a new facility that will house Northern Kentucky’s growth organizations – the Catalytic Fund, 1NKY Alliance, The Chamber of Commerce, MEETnky, TriEd, the Horizon Community Funds of Northern Kentucky.
This will bring “not just the urban area but the entire community forward,” Butler said. It will be located near the Ascent in Covington, he said.
And finally: government.
“Fragmented political and geographic limitations are at the heart of the problem,” Butler said. “So you’ve got three counties, not one county. You have 30 some cities within those three counties. The same goes for the schools, for the planning, the same goes for everything.”
What would bringing together Northern Kentucky’s various forms of government look like? Could Campbell, Kenton and Boone counties become one big city?
NKU law professor Kenneth Katkin said it wouldn’t be all that hard, at least logistically.
“There aren’t huge obstacles to it other than political obstacles,” Katkin said. “There’s nothing in the Kentucky constitution that would prevent it. There’s no requirement that the localities agree to it.”
It would be as simple as a legislator introducing a bill.
“If the Republicans really wanted it, they may be able to get a bill passed even if the democratic cities didn’t want it,” he said.
The problems could, he said, come from things like:
- –In the suburbs of Boone and Kenton counties, they may think they would have to carry more of a financial burden if they were linked with places like Covington.
- –More democratic cities like Covington and Newport would end up becoming part of a relatively conservative area if all three counties combined.
“I think there’s reasons that the democratic mayors in places like Covington and Newport – they’d be losing power so they’d probably oppose it,” Katkin said.
But it is possible, Katkin said, pointing to Louisville and Jefferson County, which went through city-county merger in 2003.
So what will it take to create an urban core that will unite the people, places and government of Boone, Kenton and Campbell counties?
In Bill Butler’s mind, Henry Kissinger put it best when he said:
“The job of a leader is to get the people from where they are to where they have not been.”
