Cincinnati-Covington Area for Gay Mature Single Man (Findlay, Kent: middle-class, for sale)

[huskybear]

I'm moving to the Cincy area later this year when my house sells here in Colorado to be close to family who live in downtown Covington. I just spent a week there looking for a house on a large lot (1+ acres) close to town. There seem to be hundreds and hundreds of potential properties. My agent is not allowed to direct me to "good" areas so maybe I can get some help from you all. By good, I mean a live and let live community. I would like to find a 3-4 bedroom house with some privacy within 20 minutes of downtown Covington. I'll be back out there in a few weeks, hopefully armed with more information. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks, Ian

[progmac]

Covington is about 3 or 5 minutes from downtown Cincinnati. It is just on the other side of the river. So within the 20 minutes you cite, you could live many places in northern kentucky and also in the City of Cincinnati.

Northside is the City's "gayborhood," but I think you'll find many places within the city and the metro to be very "live and let live" as you say although you won't find a large lot. Hopefully some of our northern kentucky posters can ring in about Covington and Newport.

[motorman]

As progmac already mentioned, northern Kentucky posters will certainly prove helpful, but try the KY thread to reach them.

[goyguy]

Wallace Woods is said to be the place to be. It's a section of southern Covington, built mostly between the World Wars with some older and newer housing mixed in. For whatever reason these things happen, some urban pioneers started moving in and displacing the incumbent Appalachians in order to buy low + restore + sell high. There were the usual tensions between working poor and middle class, new arrival and established resident, etc. Same-sex pairs and same-sex-oriented singles had the usual slurs yelled at them, vandalism perpetrated, and so on. But everything simmered down ten or so years ago. Given that the area offers neither river views nor a Cincinnati address, it tends to not be on people's radar much.

By contrast, downtown Covington has been gentrifying at an uneven pace. Pike St resembles Cincy's Northside or Clifton Gaslight with its antique shops and trendy pubs downstairs from apartments. "Mainstrasse" (an eye-roller of a name if ever there was one) has made it most of the way through its overhaul. Anything along or very close to the river is a done deal. But sections in between have stalled. A "destination bistro" first known as Greenup Café and more recently as Chalk + Wine recently went out of business. Rows of spiffed-up buildings housing realtors and attorneys on their main floors sit opposite sketchy convenience stores and gas stations. The area takes on an edgy feel after dark, and there've been some "gay bashing" incidents around there which have made the papers. But you wouldn't find a house on a lot with any yard to speak of in the downtown area anyway.

Mr & Mrs Goyguy Sr have been good friends for some time with a male couple who live in Park Hills, which is an inner-ring suburb not far from Covington. These guys own a large and "showy" house in the part of that community which has no small number of them. It's yet another unnoticed place by virtue of not having river views or a Cincinnati address. Any difficulties which may have befallen them haven't been reported to my folks, but all that means for certain is that nothing major has happened. My hunch, though, is that since they're older and quiet and keep up their property nicely the neighbors either leave them alone or accept them as they are.

Other than in the least wealthy parts of town - no matter what the skin tone or native language of most of the inhabitants - Cincinnati largely has what could charitably be called a "tolerant" take on LGBT types. It's the attitude of "That's OK by me, just don't flaunt it." Settle in a more affluent locale such as Hyde Park or Clifton Gaslight, and you'll get along fine as long as you pass the smell tests for income level. Ditto for the communities a step or more down the economic ladder like Oakley, "CUF" (Clifton/University/Fairview), and Northside. It's all about "fitting in," which in Cincy means keeping things to yourself - no rainbow flags, definitely no leather costuming. The prejudiced person's paradox is in full effect: be however you like, but look and act and live just like me.

While da Nati is not a gay Mecca by any stretch of the imagination, it's not the same place it was even twenty years ago either. Progress is relative. There, it can be measured by the fact that a city ordinance forbidding GLBT civil rights laws was easily approved by voters only to be repealed within a decade thereafter. So...there's still no statute making discrimination illegal, but there's nothing preventing such statutes from being enacted now. (Whereupon the city would go into a uproar, and more likely than not be allowed to vote on the matter, when they'd favor throwing out the law.) Ohio is also one of the states that decided a group of citizens' access to civil marriage could be blocked if enough citizens didn't like the idea. Enough citizens didn't. No such antidemocratic ballot issues have surfaced in Kentucky, but one look at the officials who get elected there will tell you how something like that would fly. For anyone who's been in Colorado for any length of time, none of this should be new, since that's where the infamous Proposition 2 got voted in.

Like most American cities, Cincinnati doesn't have very many communities where ethnic diversity is working well on a large scale. (A "mixed" neighborhood doesn't automatically equate with "gay-friendly," but the odds get a tad bit better.) The main exception to the rule is the largely upper-middle-class part of town centered around the Paddock/Reading intersection, best known to the north of that focal corner as Paddock Hills and to the south as North Avondale. Some streets are lined with literal mansions, others boast roomy Tudors and Colonials, and there's a more suburban-style part with post-WWII ranch houses. Living there has its challenges, mainly the fact that one of the worst areas in the city lies immediately to the south and helped to bring on the demise of shopping and dining on Reading Rd. You can roll past block after block of meticulously kept yards offset by beautiful homes, yet the traffic artery bisecting the community is lined with vacant storefronts and empty lots. All kinds of shopping can be accomplished with a short drive either to the east or west, but there's no place to run out to for a quart of milk or to drop off dry cleaning.

Along Montgomery Rd, the historically WASP and upper-middle-class neighborhood called Pleasant Ridge is doing well with demographic shifts. A notable upswing in the AA population hasn't deterred many of the older families from staying put, and certainly hasn't prevented young White couples and families from moving in. (Far from it - C-D forum threads might not be the best indication, but look through 'em and you'll see rave after rave about this community.) Whichever LGBT residents may make their home there would be going by the unwritten laws of conformity, but any place that can claim a store called "Everybody's Records" and a chili parlor that stays open into the wee hours is signaling "laid-back and accepting."

On the west side of town, the adjoining neighborhoods of Mt Airy, Westwood (largest in the city) and Price Hill are in the throes of diversifying. Their patchwork of housing styles is now also the home address of a patchwork population. Some parts (mainly toward the east) are struggling with crime and transiency while others are more comfortable but with denizens who are mostly nervous to some extent. One person will sing the praises of where they are - see a recent thread started by somebody new to Price Hill. Another will bemoan all the problems and go on about how they can't wait to escape or are glad they did. Nothing in this instance would work better than having a firsthand look. Particularly but far from exclusively in Westwood, the perfect home on an ideal street might be waiting. Some of my fellow C-D regulars will tell you so too.

Not that this post hasn't gone on for long enough, but there are still other city neighborhoods and suburban communities left to describe. For now I'll not hog the virtual podium any longer!

[huskybear]

Thank you all for the suggestions! The information helps a great deal and is appreciated more than you know. Cheers, Ian

[Sarah Perry]

I haven't been in Wallace Woods for a while, but my recollection is that it's a lot denser and more urban than what the OP asked about. Ditto for many of the other neighborhoods GG mentioned.

[kjbrill]

Your criteria for a larger lot to me means go South. 20 mins. from Covington goes a long way. And you should find literally hundreds to chose from. As has been commented Cincinnati as a whole is pretty much a laissez faire environment, both in economics and personal relationships. Cincy is economically segregated perhaps more than racial. The more affluent neighborhoods require you meet the money test. If you do and are relatively discrete in your conduct I forsee no problems. But if you just feel compelled to be both visual and vocal on every issue of the subject you might just get run out of town on a rail.

[restorationconsultant]

You might look out at Riverside, a community on the far western edge of town larger Federal and victorian mansions in good shape can be had for 100-200k on huge lots. I know a few people who live over there and have zero problems, its close to downtown and Newport/covington.

We have had no problems in our neuighborhood which turned out to be more gay than we realized when we bought, but ours is a more densly populated neigborhood than you are looking for.

Cincinnati, is more "out" than I expected it be , especially around the university and OTR. I've seen more than one gay couple holding hands and Findlay Market for example or by the university. the city after years of holding gay pride at a park, held it downtown last year. Sign that times are changing. The gay community here seems to be slightly more closeted than Indy where we came from and its a smaller community but everyone, gaya nd staright have been very friendly. Not to say there are not "narrow minded bible thumpers', there are plenty , but people are pretty tolerant. People tend to make decisions based on the kind of person you are here. Respect has to be earned just like anywhere else.

[huskybear]

Thanks again for all the responses. I'm coming out that way in a few weeks to sample the area, and look at a few dozen houses. I've been using Zillow and a few other real estate search tools for the past two weeks to give me a head start. Thanks again for the helpful suggestions.

[Sarah Perry]

Because many parts of the Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky areas have good neighborhoods interspersed as pockets in not-so-good ones, Zillow's price and value estimates can be completely skewed by irrelevant sales data. You can probably get much better online information by using a combination of one of the realtors' searches along with Google Earth.

I have no connection with this realtor, but they're a major company in the area and I like their site's search capability: Coldwell Banker West Shell - Coldwell Banker West Shell Real Estate and Homes for Sale - CBWS.com