The old Szechuan Garden building sits on the curve where Dixie Highway bends into Arlington Road, and it has sat empty long enough that most people driving past no longer register it as a restaurant at all. It registers as a stoplight. Two of them, actually, stacked close together on a short stretch of highway that never needed two, put there decades ago when the road was built around a curve nobody would design that way today. If you live in Park Hills and drive that corner on a regular basis, you already know the rhythm: light, curve, light, and a building nobody has eaten in for years.
What has been happening behind that empty storefront since the fall of 2025 is not really a story about a Chinese restaurant reopening as something else. It is a story about what it actually costs a small city to get rid of one traffic light, and why the answer turned out to be twenty-four apartments.
Two Projects Wearing One Name
Officially, Park Hills has two separate projects on that stretch of Arlington Road: a housing development and a road realignment. In practice, city officials and the developer have said plainly that neither one works without the other. The realignment would shift Arlington Road around the police station next door, straightening out the curve and letting the state eliminate one of the two lights at that intersection. But Park Hills doesn't have the budget to build a road on its own, so the city applied for county funding, and county rules for that particular pot of money require the road project to be tied to an active development. The Szechuan Garden site's apartments are that development. Without the apartments, there's no project to attach the grant application to. Without the grant, the developer has said he can't build the apartments, because the realignment is what makes the site usable at all.
Park Hills Mayor Kathy Zembrodt described the pressure from the state's own transportation cabinet during a June 2026 planning commission meeting, saying she'd had "numerous calls from KYTC" asking how the city planned to get rid of one of the lights. The developer behind the apartment plan, Greg Berling, framed the project to the commission the same way: not as a housing play first, but as leverage for a road nobody else was going to fund.
How The Plan Changed Shape
Watching this project move through Park Hills city government for the past year means watching it change identity almost every time it comes back up for a vote.
- September 2025: Developers Berling and Mark Zimmerman hold an informal meeting at Joe Nienaber's Granite World showroom on Dixie Highway, pitching two kinds of townhomes on the site, stacked one-bedroom-over-three-bedroom units on one section and two-story two-bedroom units on the rest.
- October and November 2025: The city council fights over the zoning mechanics needed to even allow the townhomes, with council member Sarah Froelich walking out of a special meeting in protest and Mayor Zembrodt casting a tie-breaking vote to send the question back through the standard map amendment process.
- April 2026: Berling returns to council trying to revive the stalled plan, now described in meeting coverage as "24 homes."
- June 2026: The Kenton County Planning Commission approves recommendations for 24 apartments on the site, along with the density changes needed to build them, and the Arlington Road realignment is priced at roughly $1 million by the developers.
- August 11, 2026: Park Hills council unanimously passes the second reading of City Ordinance No. 12, rezoning about 2.4 acres on the south side of Arlington Road between Dixie Highway and Aberdeen Road to allow the 24 multi-family units, on the condition that the site plan push parking back far enough to keep the sidewalk clear.
Somewhere in that year, the same footprint of land went from commercial concept to townhomes to "homes" to apartments, and the road cost estimate climbed from about $1 million to $1.4 million by the time it showed up in Kenton County's own fiscal court briefing this August. None of that is unusual for a project this size moving through a small city's process. It's exactly what that process looks like from the inside, and it's useful to see plainly if you're trying to guess when construction actually starts.
What Still Has To Happen
The zoning is done. The road is not.
As of this month's Kenton County government briefing, the city expects to receive about $1.25 million toward the $1.4 million realignment, through a county program built specifically for smaller, harder city infrastructure projects that only require a 10 percent local match. Park Hills qualified for that program because the Szechuan apartment project gave it an active development to attach the application to. That's the deal in plain terms: the housing made the road eligible for money, and the road is what makes the housing site usable.
What hasn't happened yet is a contractor. Berling is confirmed as the developer for the apartments. As of the same August briefing, there is no developer lined up for the road realignment itself. That gap matters if you live nearby and have been waiting for that second light to disappear. The apartment building could plausibly start construction before a single shovel touches Arlington Road, which means the traffic pattern most people actually care about may not change for a while yet, even with the zoning fully approved.
The Corner Isn't the Whole Story
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Park Hills still runs on the same civic calendar it always has, the one built around Trolley Park rather than Dixie Highway. The Park Hills Civic Association's event calendar still has the annual Easter egg hunt, the Memorial Day parade and flag raising, Saturday morning yoga in May, and the Halloweenies at the Firehouse gathering hosted by the fire department every October 31st. None of that moves because of a rezoning ordinance three blocks away.
A short walk from Trolley Park, Devou Park keeps its own separate rhythm through the warmer months. The Kentucky Symphony Orchestra's free Summer Series still brings crowds to the Devou Park Band Shell on Saturday nights, with lawn chairs and picnics spread across the grass and a shuttle running from Covington Catholic High School for anyone who'd rather not deal with parking. That's the version of Park Hills most residents actually live in day to day. The Arlington Road corner is a small, specific piece of the city, not the whole picture, and it's worth keeping that scale in mind while a fairly ordinary zoning fight plays out over a fairly small parcel of land.
What the Szechuan Garden saga actually tells you, if you live along that stretch of Dixie Highway or drive it regularly, is how these small infrastructure fixes really get funded in a city Park Hills' size. Nobody wrote a check for a stoplight removal. Somebody built an apartment building that happened to make the paperwork work, and the traffic light is riding along for the ride, still waiting on a contractor.
If you're watching this corridor because you own property nearby, or you're weighing what a project like this means for a home you're comparing along Arlington Road or Dixie Highway, that's exactly the kind of local detail worth talking through before you make a decision. Laura Zembrodt has spent years reading zoning fights like this one for what they actually mean to a buyer or seller, not just what they say on paper. Reach out to schedule a consultation if you want a straight read on how a specific block or a specific plan affects what you're looking at.
