Tag Archives: Covington (Ky.)

A system failure that’s too close to home

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Sometimes work hits a little too close to home. Over the past six months I’ve been investigating vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated housing issues in Pittsburgh. While immersed in that reporting, we’ve been dealing with housing issues on our block. In 2025, we moved onto a street with three long-abandoned houses owned by a politically connected slumlord.

Trash-strewn back yard of an abandoned house on our street, one of three owned by the same slumlord. Photo by David Rotenstein.

A house next door to us, we learned soon after moving here, has a long history of code violations and police calls and arrests for drugs (meth and crack), domestic violence, weapons charges, arrest warrants being served, and one hostage situation requiring an armed police response.

Police respond to a hostage situation in 2019. Photo provided.

The owner has a long criminal history of felony drug arrests and at least one firearms possession arrest. Also, over the past decade, the owner has used the property as a flophouse for unhoused people.

A bed in the back yard was concealed from view. A pair of men’s shoes is visible next to the piece of furniture and a woman’s hair clip is on top of the cabinet. Photo by David Rotenstein.

In September, the city declared the house next door unfit for human habitation and the owner refused to vacate the premises. He artfully dodged process servers, code enforcement officers, and the police. Ultimately, last week the city went to court to get a temporary restraining order forcing him from the property.

Placard declaring the house unfit for human habitation and code enforcement citations attached to the facade. Photo by David Rotenstein.

Unable to serve him with the order and hamstrung by the law from removing him, city officials waited for him to leave and then padlocked the property. We (my family and our neighbors) had no other choice. Over the past 30 years, the city had failed to effectively deal with the situation — a confluence of mental health issues, substance use disorder, homelessness, unemployment, and food insecurity — and we were left with a terrible choice: move, like the folks who sold us the house we bought in 2025, or find a solution that ends the unhealthful and unsafe situation for the property owner and his boarders, and his neighbors, including ourselves.

The City of Covington padlocked the property to prevent entry by the owner and unhoused people boarding there. Photo by David Rotenstein.

The city, county, and state lack the resources to intervene effectively and now there’s another unhoused person in Covington and his house is on a slippery slope towards abandonment.

© 2026. D.S. Rotenstein

Communities lose out when journalists fail to follow up

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Journalists working in a healthy news ecosystem would have jumped on events that played out in one Northern Kentucky city in late February. That’s when news broke that the City of Covington had removed its public works director. Instead of firing the agency head, municipal officials created a new position in city government, one that doesn’t involve supervising a large staff.

Two Northern Kentucky newsrooms covered the staff shuffle. And, both published corrections after the city mistakenly released a draft memorandum reprimanding the former public works director. In the three months since the episode, neither newsroom investigated the circumstances surrounding the mistaken memo release and there have been no follow-up stories about the public works department.

I had a front row seat to the episode as a reporter for one of the newsrooms. My freelance gig with the online news site ended days after the public works story broke. Within weeks, the publication had erased all 32 stories I had written since January, including the public works story. I’m reprinting the story here, along with additional details about the mistakenly released memo.

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