For decades, the United States has faced a growing housing shortage. The same is true for Northern Kentucky, where the region will need 6,650 new homes to support economic development in the next five years, according to the Northern Kentucky Housing Blueprint.
As the population increases, the housing that is needed will not support the continued growth the region will see over the next few years. In total, Northern Kentucky’s population is expected to grow by .5% annually through 2050, reaching approximately 457,000 residents, according to the baseline scenario outlined in a BEnky study.
Northern Kentucky University Political Science professor Dr. Shauna Reilly believes this housing shortage could deter people from coming to the region, and the styles of housing being built are not serving a broader purpose: people who need income-aligned housing.
“You can’t attract new businesses, and you can’t keep populations if they have nowhere to live,” Reilly said. “The other problem is affordable housing. It’s what kind of housing and what kinds of income levels are required to have that…it is a self-reinforcing cycle.”
Out of the three major counties – Boone, Kenton and Campbell – Boone County is seeing the most growth, with CVG Airport, manufacturing jobs and other amenities that will draw in new residents. Boone County is projected to add 8,100 households in the next ten years, according to Homes for All, in a detailed analysis from 2023.
Outrich oversees population and employment projections in the greater Cincinnati region. From the trends he sees, Boone County is building a lot and is increasing the amount of multifamily structures.
“Boone County leads the growth there because of the airport and all the jobs at CVG, with Amazon and all the other future investment projects that they have,” Outrich said. “In the past, there was a lot of single-family growth, and now we’re seeing a lot more multifamily that’s accommodating for renters.”
Tara Johnson-Noem, the executive director at Northern Kentucky Area Development District (NKADD) said the population makeup is also changing. She said people are having fewer children, living independently and living with roommates, among other factors.
“There’s a lot of change happening in addition to the population growth,” she said.
The senior population also plays a role in the housing shortage. Individuals older than 65 who own homes usually have their houses paid for because they have lived in them for so long. They may only pay insurance and water and electric bills. They are locked into a rate that is comfortable for them. Even if that generation wants to downsize, they run into competition in the market.
“If someone already owns their home and they have a set mortgage rate, they’re not experiencing the turbulence in the housing market, like someone who was trying to rent,” Johnson-Noem said.
Greg Crase, President of Northern Kentucky Association of Realtors, said, “We are seeing people stay in their homes where they may not want to stay because they may not be able to find that right home. Especially, they’re downsizing, it’s harder for them to find, they’re competing with maybe the first home buyers or the second.”
With the demographic shifts, the style of housing being built across the region is also shifting and is not adding up to what the population needs.
For Outrich, who oversees this data, this brings up the issue of how much space is really needed. Independence, for example, needs more area to build more one- or two-bedroom housing units. Its population demographics aren’t aligning with what is really needed to support them.
“We don’t need to continue building our three- or four-bedroom subdivisions,” Outrich said. “We need to be building cottage homes, or more apartments or other things.”
Crase, who is also the Vice President and sales manager for Sibcy Cline, says starter homes and average to medium-sized homes are selling quickly in Northern Kentucky — especially along the riverside — because buyers can comfortably afford that style of housing.
Crase sees population growth in the region has kept the realtor business steady, but notices an issue with basic economics: supply and demand.
“If you have a lot of buyers, you don’t have enough houses, you don’t have anything to sell,” Crase said. “Sellers may be holding off on putting a house on the market. They want to sell, but they don’t sell because they don’t know where they’re going to be able to find a house to go to.”
Reilly has seen the effects of housing shortages in her own neighborhood. She closed on her house in 2020. The very next month, the value of her house went up significantly, but since buying her home six years ago, housing costs in her neighborhood have doubled, or even tripled in some cases.
Johnson-Noem isn’t affected by the housing crisis in her personal life — she has lived in her home for more than ten years and is not planning to move anytime soon –– but she feels a personal effect as an employer with her team at NKADD. She wants to remain competitive in hiring team members, especially younger team members and the price of housing puts a strain on them.
“Housing cost is keeping them from being able to live out some of their dreams about where they want to be, as a person,” Johnson-Noem said. “As an employer, I want them to be able to meet those goals that they have for themselves. I certainly don’t want that to hold them back and I am competitive, so that they can keep here.”
All across the country, more Americans see buying a home as increasingly out of reach, according to a poll done by Gallup.
25% of non-homeowners believe they will buy a home within five years. That’s down nearly 50% from a decade ago, the lowest since Gallup started tracking that data. Another 28% of non-homeowners now say they expect to buy a home within 10 years, and 45% do not believe they will buy a home in the foreseeable future.
Sixty-seven percent of U.S. adults think now is a bad time to buy a house, and 65% of Americans think home prices will increase in the next year. The median home price in the U.S. has reached more than $400,000 — approximately $408,800-– this year (2026), according to the Federal Reserve Bank (FRED) of St. Louis.
“That deficit is hard to make up,” Crase said. “They’ve had some issues with cost and labor, which is probably a big factor. I think the development parts help it, but some of your builders were getting out of the business…so, it’s harder now, you only have a lot less smaller builders.”
To Reilly, if these issues aren’t solved, the region will start to lose talent, and it would hurt the economic growth of Northern Kentucky.
“Folks will…move to Cincinnati, which takes money away from Kentucky,” Reilly said. “That doesn’t invest in our schools and our local government, and it doesn’t invest in our university and things like that, because the tax base isn’t here…I think we can’t grow economically if we don’t have the folks’ ability to live here and it has to be affordable.”
There are many ways the housing issue can be solved, Johnson-Noem believes. For her, the first thing is if housing materials were cheaper, but she sees that as out of the local government’s control. What she believes will be in local government control is zoning, development and mixed-use housing.
“We can also be more open-minded about different styles of development that might be less expensive to build,” Johnson-Noem said. “The idea of starter homes, smaller homes, more density, so like smaller lots. If we had some communities where there were a little bit more flexible about those kinds of things, I think we could get some additional development happening that would create more products.”
Outrich believes that the housing crisis will be hard to solve because developers don’t want to take a hit and the financial risk of saturating the housing market. For him, the model is set up in a broken way to always operate in shortage.
“When you structure it and finance it and underwrite it that way…you’re always going to operate in a shortage, because you need shortage to make the price go up,”