Cincinnati’s Kingsley Incentive Ban Lasted Just 47 Days

Article Summary:
Cincinnati City Manager Sheryl Long told developer Kingsley + Co. in an April 17, 2026 letter that she could not recommend further city incentives until the company resolved code violations and completed a compliance audit. Forty-seven days later, on June 3, the administration released a previously paused $2.5 million Affordable Housing Trust Fund grant to Kingsley for a senior housing project, citing progress on code compliance but not addressing whether the audit was completed. Whether Cincinnati met its own stated conditions before releasing the money remains an open, undocumented question.

Cincinnati City Manager Sheryl Long told developer Kingsley + Co. in writing on April 17 that its conduct did not represent that of “a good partner or developer.”

Forty-seven days later, on June 3, her office released $2.5 million in city housing money to the same company anyway.

The reversal ended what amounted to a Kingsley incentive ban almost as fast as Long imposed it. The public record does not yet show whether the two conditions she set for lifting that ban were ever met. Long’s letter went to company founder and former Cincinnati Bengals safety Chinedum Ndukwe. It’s short, and it’s direct about what she expected before Long said she would recommend additional city incentives. Whether the city actually cleared its own bar before moving that funding forward is the open question at the center of this story.

What Long’s April 17 Letter Actually Says

Long addressed the letter directly to Ndukwe. On the first page, she wrote that Kingsley had failed to maintain its properties. She said the company had failed to respond adequately to code enforcement, too. Long named two properties specifically: the former St. Mark’s Church in Evanston and the historic Hoffman School building on the Evanston/East Walnut Hills line. Both, she wrote, had created blight and public-safety hazards. Hoffman School had been cited multiple times, according to the letter, including for what appeared to be construction debris dumped from other Kingsley projects. Separately, Local 12 reported that Long told Ndukwe his company’s behavior was “creating hazardous situations.”

Long’s response went beyond a warning. She directed city staff to conduct a compliance audit of Kingsley’s existing agreements with Cincinnati. Under a section titled “Future Incentive Requests,” she wrote that the company’s conduct did not represent that of a good partner or developer. She said she could not recommend any further incentives until two things happened: the code-enforcement issues got resolved, and the compliance audit got finished. Any outstanding request or award not already under contract, she added, should count as negated. She would not revisit her position, she wrote, until the audit was done.

That’s the two-part test behind the Kingsley incentive ban, in the city’s own words. Neither part came with a deadline.

The Kingsley Incentive Ban Ends After 47 Days

By June 3, something had changed enough for the city to act. Assistant City Manager Billy Weber said the city manager “has determined to release the planned $2.5 million investment” from Cincinnati’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund. Kingsley + Co. needs that money to finish financing Kinsey Lofts, a planned 52-unit senior housing building on Reading Road in Walnut Hills. Weber’s stated reasoning cited “progress made to date on addressing outstanding code compliance issues.” He also cited Kingsley lining up the rest of the project’s financing.

Weber’s statement addresses the first half of Long’s test. It says nothing about the second half. Nothing in the public record confirms the compliance audit Long ordered in April was ever finished, or what it found if it was. Kingsley still owned the properties that prompted Long’s April letter when the city released the money. The administration said progress had been made on outstanding code issues. Its public explanation did not specify which violations had been corrected, or whether all of them had been resolved. WCPO reported that the city’s administration did not respond when the outlet asked for comment on the decision in June.

Councilman Jeff Cramerding was the one council member to object publicly. He said he disagreed with the city manager’s call to release the funds. He pointed to what he called a long, troubled history with Kingsley. That history started with the company’s purchase of Hoffman School without a redevelopment plan, then its later threat to demolish the building. Cramerding said he still saw potential in Hoffman School becoming the kind of housing Cincinnati needs, if someone preserved it instead of tearing it down.

The Question That Matters Most: Was Kinsey Lofts Already Under Contract?

Long’s April letter drew a specific line. Any award “not under contract” should count as negated, she wrote; anything already under contract, by implication, was exempt. Whether the Kinsey Lofts money fell inside or outside that line depends on paperwork nobody has published. It may be the most consequential open question in this story.

Kingsley’s application for separate state affordable-housing financing on the same project was already moving through Ohio’s 2025 funding cycle before Long’s letter went out. That suggests the broader financing package was in motion well before April. It doesn’t settle whether the city’s own $2.5 million commitment was locked into a signed contract on April 17, though. The two possibilities point in very different directions.

If Kinsey Lofts was already under contract that day, then calling the June release a reversal of the Kingsley incentive ban gets less clean. The city may have already been contractually bound to pay, regardless of what her letter said about future incentives. If it wasn’t under contract yet, the calculus changes. The administration released discretionary money to a company it had just called an unfit partner, without publicly showing that either of its own conditions had been met. Nobody has published which one happened.

Kingsley’s Record Before the Letter

Long’s ban didn’t happen in a vacuum. Months earlier, elderly tenants at Victory Vistas, a Kingsley-owned senior building in Paddock Hills, said their rent was set to roughly double. One resident’s monthly rent rose from about $500 to more than $1,110. Cincinnati officials said in December they were “furious” over the increases. Legal Aid took up the residents’ case, arguing they had a contractual right to the lower rents they were promised when they moved in.

It’s worth getting this part right, because it gets mischaracterized often. The Ohio Housing Finance Agency reviewed the rent increases. It found Kingsley’s proposed rents fell within the maximum allowed under the property’s federal low-income housing tax credits. OHFA did not find a violation. Legal Aid disagreed that the finding settled anything, arguing individual leases created separate promises that OHFA’s review never addressed. The city arranged emergency vouchers in January to buy affected seniors more time. Residents and at least one council member called that a temporary fix, not a resolution. At no point in this dispute did a state agency confirm a violation by Kingsley + Co.

Hoffman School Is Still Kingsley’s

The properties at the center of Long’s complaint stayed live public issues after the June reversal. Three months after her letter, a nonprofit called the DeSales Community Urban Redevelopment Corporation reached a purchase agreement with Kingsley. The plan: buy Hoffman School and pursue preservation instead of demolition, using East Walnut Hills tax-increment-financing dollars. On July 20, that agreement fell apart, and DeSales dropped its TIF request with it.

Kingsley + Co. still owns the building. The company has proposed demolishing Hoffman School as part of a larger housing redevelopment on the site. Cincinnati City Council rejected local historic designation for the building in 2023, making demolition easier to pursue.

What’s Still Missing

Cincinnati’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund exists partly because voters rejected a larger, dedicated housing levy at the ballot box in 2021. That left the city funding affordable housing projects on a project-by-project basis instead of through a formula. Cincinnati isn’t the only Ohio government revisiting incentive commitments this year, either. Governor Mike DeWine paused new data center tax exemptions in July over similar cost-and-accountability concerns, though the mechanism and the dollar amounts involved were entirely different.

Whatever the broader mechanics of Cincinnati’s own funding process, the administration described this particular release as Long’s decision. Long’s April letter laid out exactly what standard she said she’d apply to Kingsley + Co. before making that kind of call again.

Forty-seven days later, her administration cited progress on the code-compliance half of that standard and released $2.5 million for Kinsey Lofts. It did not publicly address the audit half. The Kingsley incentive ban lasted exactly 47 days, and the city never fully explained why it ended.