COVINGTON, Ky. — Construction is booming along Northern Kentucky’s riverfront.
City of Covington economic development director Tom West calls it the “$5 billion mile,” a way to group together the public and private investments that are underway on the stretch between Covington and Newport.
There is a lot happening:
- The Brent Spence Companion Bridge
- Covington Central Riverfront, a 23-acre, mixed-use development on the site of the former IRS building
- OneNKY Center, the new office space for Northern Kentucky’s growth operations
- SparkHaus, entrepreneurial space redevelopment in the former Sims furniture building
- 4th Street Bridge
- Ovation, a 25-acre mixed-use development
- General James Taylor Park redevelopment
- Newport on the Levee’s new development, including a new Jimmy Buffet Margaritaville hotel
- Newport World Peace Bell site, a 2.1-acre mixed-use development
“That has got to be the largest concentration — within a mile of riverfront — of investment, public and private — anywhere in the country,” West said. “I can't prove it, but I know it to be true.”
He called it a "once-in-a-generation opportunity."
“Just as getting the IRS here back in the 1960s was a once in a generation opportunity, now this generation has an opportunity to leave its mark,” West said.
Much of this development blends commercial and residential. Northern Kentucky Port Authority Executive Director Christine Russell said there’s always been a demand for people to be able to live, work and play in the same location, but the COVID-19 pandemic supercharged it.
“These developments are able to move forward, capture and capitalize on that, and deliver product that is really in demand,” Russell said.
Russell will move into the OneNKY center in June of next year, which is being built right off of the Roebling Bridge. The four-story office building is nearly completely leased.
Bucking the national trend, Russell said demand for office space in Northern Kentucky is strong, something she attributes to the region’s legacy for a “walkable, connected atmosphere.”
“This is not a new concept at all. This is bringing back some of the sites to the highest and best use that maybe they did see 100 years ago,” she said. “Northern Kentucky is very unique in that way and in its ability to truly deliver live/work/play in a very small footprint."
Thus, much of the current development is mixed-use, meaning it blends commercial and residential.
That’s the approach for the 23-acre Covington Central Riverfront, West said.
When complete, Covington will have a brand new neighborhood, bordered by the Ohio River to the north, 4th Street from the south, Madison Ave to the east and Clay Wade Bailey Bridge to the west.
Beginning this week, crews are laying the horizontal infrastructure including streets, sidewalks and utility lines to restore the street grid between third and fourth streets.
“We have multiple investors from both the public and private sector. We're going to have multiple property owners within the central riverfront, different architects, different developers, different tenants,” West said. “We have a lot of communities in Greater Cincinnati that are auto-oriented, but they accommodate pedestrians, and sometimes they accommodate bicycles. This is a neighborhood that's designed for pedestrians and bicycles, but will accommodate automobiles. This is all mixed use."
The combination of public and private-sector partnership has enabled all of this to come to fruition, BeNKY executive director Lee Crume said.
“It really highly accelerates that piece of development. It gets the horizontal infrastructure into that site and it takes the burden off of that … the developers,” Crume said. “We don't drive the strategy behind housing … but we advocate for it, because we know that they're intermixed with the industrial and office work that we do."
“Place equals population, population equals workforce, workforce equals growth,” he said. “You really can't detach one from the other.”
