Kenton County Housing Suitability

Kenton County housing suitability

Kenton County, Kentucky

Income-Aligned Housing Implementation Strategies & Action Plan

This dashboard is part of the Action Plan, which CommunityScale prepared with Kenton County Planning and Development Services to carry out the housing element of the 2024 Kenton County Comprehensive Plan.

Income-aligned housing means housing that fits the households the county already has, particularly those earning roughly $15 to $25 an hour and seniors on fixed incomes. The Comprehensive Plan's housing element asks the county to diversify its housing mix and density, target struggling neighborhoods for rehabilitation and redevelopment, and encourage new housing where utilities, commercial activity and community services already exist.

The Action Plan turns those three recommendations into five benchmarks the county can measure itself against year after year. This dashboard is where the measuring happens: it keeps the benchmarks current, and it maps the land the third recommendation is about.

Where to go from here

How the suitability score is built

Unbuildable land comes out first: FEMA flood hazard areas, priority non-residential land, and otherwise constrained ground. What remains is scored on six inputs, to a maximum of 7 points.

A score above 2.5 marks land that should be absorbing most of the county's new housing, which is what benchmark B measures. Land below 2.5 is left unshaded on the map, so the shaded parcels are the ones above the threshold. Moving the cursor over a parcel breaks its score back into those six inputs, so you can see whether it scores low because the pipes are missing, because nothing is within walking distance, or both.

Data sources and vintages

Two kinds of data meet in this dashboard. The development and affordability readings keep moving; the parcel layers and the infrastructure behind them were captured once, when the project began, and have not been recomputed since.

Updated on a schedule

Fixed at project initiation

Supplied by Kenton County Planning and Development Services and LINK-GIS at the start of the project. Each date is the day the layer was captured for this analysis, which is the vintage the dashboard is speaking for; it is not the day the county last edited the layer.

Parcels and the published suitability score2025-09-26 Kenton County PDS and LINK-GIS. 57,623 parcels after clipping to the county line.

Sanitary sewer service areas and mains2025-09-25 Kenton County PDS. The sewer service flag on each parcel is the county's own.

Water service areas2025-09-05 Northern Kentucky Water District and other providers, via LINK-GIS. 2023 service-area boundaries.

Zoning districts2025-09-10 Official zoning map, LINK-GIS and Kenton County PDS.

Allowed units per acre2025-10-06 Derived from the same official zoning map.

Assessed value per acre2025-09-09 Kenton County Property Valuation Administrator, July 2025 parcel file.

Residential use type2025-10-23 Kenton County Property Valuation Administrator.

Recent sales2025-09-05 Kenton County Property Valuation Administrator. Prices adjusted to 2025 dollars.

Groceries, schools, healthcare2025-09-05 OpenStreetMap.

Transit stops2025-09-11 OpenStreetMap.

Walkability2025-09-05 EPA National Walkability Index, by block group, on its native 0 to 20 scale.

Car-free commute share2025-09-05 American Community Survey 5-year estimates, on 2023-vintage census tracts.

Flood hazard2025-08-08 FEMA.

Priority non-residential land and other constraints2025-08-12 Kenton County PDS.

City limits2025-09-10 Commonwealth of Kentucky city boundaries, filtered to Kenton County.

County line2025-08-07 Kenton County PDS.

Because the parcel layers are a snapshot, a parcel that has since been split, rezoned, annexed or connected to sewer will still read the way it did at project initiation. The permit log is the layer to check for what has happened since.

CommunityScale

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