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an experience centered around five Kentucky Bourbon Trail Craft Tour® Distilleries.

Local bourbon-centric bars, all with a culture of their own, and all named to The Bourbon Review’s list of The Best Bourbon Bars in America. Finally, mix in amazing restaurants cultivating the freshest tastes in bourbon culinary delights and you’re on the The B Line® nity organizations that aid in reducing homelessness and increasing affordable housing, such as The Center for Great Neighborhoods and Housing Opportunities of Northern Kentucky, often shortened to HONK.

On the policy side of things, there are programs to encourage the development of small businesses. Covington, for example, has instituted facade-improvement grants and rent-subsidy programs, which Covington Economic Development Director Tom West said helps new businesses get on their feet.

“If someone has a startup retail operation or a startup marketing business or maybe they’re moving from an incubator accelerator into a bricks-and-mortar location for the first time, we want them that first year focused on running their business, building their clientele, establishing their brand – really focused on their business, not on trying to make rent,” West said.

Still, although sources interviewed by LINK nky said these programs and policies are helpful to their beneficiaries, the mathematics of the market make it difficult to keep up.

For example, HONK’s flagship rent-toown pipeline places people in refurbished properties it owns before gradually turning over the property to the clients over a 12- to 18-month period. The program, however, can carry only about 10 families over the course of a year, said David Hastings, HONK executive director.

“We get a lot of phone calls from people who are at wit’s end,” Hastings said. “(We’re helping two handfuls of families in a year … providing maybe 10 new opportunities. Given the scope of the need for housing, that’s a drop in the bucket.”

For comparison, there were 121 eviction cases scheduled to appear before a judge in April in Kenton County.

Many of the cases, 54 exactly, were dismissed before trial, meaning the tenants either paid their rents or worked something out with their landlords to get them to drop their cases.

Thirteen were settled out of court, five were dismissed in court and 19 were scheduled for trial at later dates.

Thirty cases, meanwhile, received a default judgment from the court, which usually means the tenants did not appear at the assigned court time. Invariably, the court rules in favor of the landlord when this occurs.

Although the number of cases in eviction court varies from month to month, if one were to use the 30 cases ruled in favor of the landlord as a typical monthly pattern of outcomes, that would mean for every 10 families annually placed in sustainable housing with the help of organizations like HONK, at least 360 other people in the region lose housing.

Craig, the Woodford resident who moved in knowing that an ownership change was likely imminent, eventually relocated to The Hayden when his lease expired due its proximity to his former apartment. Although he was fortunate enough to be able to afford the new building, many of the other Woodford residents, he said, were not so lucky. Some couldn’t afford to stay in Covington at all.

“I want to be in an inclusive city,” Craig said at a public hearing related to federally subsidized homeownership programs at Covington City Hall in April. “I was very fortunate that when my building was legally evicted, I could move next door to the new development. But most of my neighbors couldn’t, and most of my neighbors don’t reside in Covington anymore.”

Changes in rent are one thing, but Kentucky tenants’ ability to legally oppose an eviction is slim when compared to many other states.

There is no statewide statute for escrow, for example, unlike in Ohio and many other states. This means that if a landlord fails to make major repairs necessary to make a residence safe or habitable, a tenant cannot pay his rent to the court to legally fulfill the contract while depriving his landlord of income until repairs are made or some other solution makes the apartment habitable.

Tenants in Kentucky also have no statewide right to legal counsel, meaning that if they can’t afford a lawyer in an eviction case, the court has no obligation to provide them with one as it does in criminal cases.

Several advocacy and citizens groups, such as the Northern Kentucky Tenants Union, have engaged in efforts for statewide or, at least, countywide tenant bills of rights. Such regulations would guarantee things like the right to legal counsel, just cause for eviction – renovation would not count among the union’s list of just causes – and the right to first purchase, which would compel property owners to offer properties to tenants before the broader market if they decide to sell. As it stands, however, the only way a tenant can gain a legal advantage is to pay his rent, regardless of the action or inaction of the landlord.

It doesn’t help that many landlords in the area refuse to accept federal housing vouchers, often due to stereotypes about perceived bad behavior by Section 8 tenants.

Holmes, Covington’s neighborhood services director, estimated that there are about 1,200 housing vouchers administered for Kenton County annually, with at least 1,000 active contracts with landlords who accept housing vouchers. This means that there are about 200 tenants – including entire families – at any given time foundering in the rental market because they can’t find a landlord who will accept vouchers.

“I realize that everybody wants to live in a certain place,” Cooper said. “We don’t have the options for that right now, that is true. But I do think we can work deliberately, intentionally to change that.”

If you visit Greenup Street today, you’ll find that things have changed even as they’ve remained the same.

The Hayden is complete and still accepting tenants. The Woodford, meanwhile, is under construction. A temporary wire fence cordons off the sidewalk in front of the building, allowing room for workers to haul drywall and other materials out onto the pavement. A nearby office building has a “space available” sign on its window.

The building that housed Lil’s Bagels is empty. The business itself has since partnered with Roebling Point Books and Coffee and serves food out of the shop’s Newport and Dayton, Kentucky, locations. It no longer serves bagels.

One artifact from the former occupant still adorns the building: A paper sign in a plastic-framed bulletin board displays the restaurant’s former hours and a message inscribed to its loyal customers.

The message reads:

“We’ll get through this together!”

LINK nky contributor Alecia Ricker contributed to this story.