Thursday, May 20, 1999

What's best for downtown?

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As boarding house goes up for sale, developers see a chance for market-rate housing while some see more homelessness ahead

BY MARK CURNUTTE
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Vern Jones, 63, has lived in the Fort Washington Hotel for nine years. 'I don't know where I'd be if I wasn't here." (Michael E. Keating photo) | ZOOM |

        The historic Fort Washington Hotel, downtown, could become the next battleground pitting advocates for low-income housing against developers.

        On one side, developers such as Arn Bortz of Towne Properties say the six-story boarding house has great potential as market-rate housing and could help produce the renaissance on Main Street that the Aronoff Center was supposed to bring about.

        On the other side are low-income housing advocates who fear a demise of the Fort Washington would worsen the shortage of low-income housing in the central business district.

        Hanging in the balance are people the likes of 30-year-old Melvin Rachel. The Fort Washington is his home. He just started a job washing dishes at the Maisonette, which is within walking distance.

        “I have no car,” said Mr. Rachel, who pays $95 a week for a double-occupancy room. “The Fort Washington is nice. It will help me get through.”

        The Fort Washington, the subject of a public forum this afternoon at Christ Church Cathedral, is for sale.

        Its owners for 14 years, Frank and Sandra Fieler, are retiring but have given a nonprofit corporation of low-income housing advocates six months to come up with a $600,000 purchase price and $5.4 million more to renovate the 112-year-old building.

        If the group, Save the Fort Washington Inc., can't come up with the money by November, the Fort Washington goes on the open market. There has already been interest from developers, Mr. Fieler said Wednesday.

IF YOU GO

• What: Community Issues Forum on the future of the Fort Washington Hotel.   • When: Noon, today.   • Where: Christ Church Cathedral undercroft, 318 E. Fourth St., downtown.   • Miscellaneous: No reservations required. Brown bag lunches welcome. Lunches available for $4. A tour of the hotel will follow the forum.   • Information: 381-4994.

        Maintaining the Fort Washington as an SRO — single-room occupancy facility — is critical, advocates say. At least eight of these boarding houses have been demolished downtown in the last two decades. The most recent was the Milner Hotel, a 115-room building on Garfield Place. The hotel was leveled in June 1994 to make room for Greenwich on the Park, a Towne Properties development where monthly rents ranged between $525 and $1,000 in December 1996.

        A month's stay today at the Fort Washington starts at $175.

        Mr. Fieler, who also owned another SRO, the Lafayette on Eighth Street, before buying the Fort Washington in 1985, would like to see it remain low-income housing.

        “There's a need for this kind of housing,” said Mr. Fieler, 56, of Mount Washington. “I'd hate to see all these people thrown out.”

        The Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless fears that the loss of the Fort Washington would throw more people in homelessness. In a letter of support for Save the Fort Washington Inc., coalition executive Donald Whitehead and Mary Burke write that 1,200 SRO units have been lost downtown in the last 20 years.

        Mr. Fieler said the number of SROs downtown is now 500, and if the Fort Washington is lost, another 75 would be gone.

        SROs downtown are also available for rent at Metropole Apartments in the 600 block of Walnut Street and the Dennison Hotel in the 700 block of Main; both of those buildings have more restrictive admission policies. The Fort Washington has the most liberal, allowing people with felony convictions to rent there.

        Mr. Bortz, the former Cincinnati mayor who didn't exercise an option to buy the Fort Washington in 1975, said there is a need for SROs and market-rate housing downtown.

        “But,” he said, “more important, we can't let the low-income housing tail wag the dog downtown. Done right, the Fort Washington has merit as SRO. It also has merit as market-rate. We had a notion of turning it into a boutique hotel.”

        The city's 1982 goal of creating 10,000 market-rate housing units downtown has been reduced twice but still fallen way short of the latest target, 4,000. “We've managed about 500,” Mr. Bortz said.

        The city also has a stated goal, written into its Consolidated Plan, to minimize the displacement of low-income residents in the urban core, Mayor Roxanne Qualls wrote in a letter to Save the Fort Washington Inc. in 1998.

        “Rehabilitation of this area is consistent with ... the plan,” she wrote to one of the coalition's founding members, Mark Brunner, formerly of the Over-the-Rhine Foundation. Other founding members were Steve Gibbs, executive director of the FreeStore/FoodBank; and Suhith Wickrema, director of the local prison reform group Justice Watch.

        But the committee's efforts to secure funding from the city has not been successful. In short, the Fort Washington doesn't fit into any of the low-income housing funding sources the city coordinates, according to a March 1 letter to Mr. Brunner from Susan Utt, a community development analyst in the city's Department of Neighborhood Services.

        Ms. Utt and department Director Cheryl Meadows were out of the office and not available for comment Wednesday.

        Advocates point out that the residents of the Fort Washington are not indigent and do contribute to the city's economy.

        While the Fort Washington's population is relatively fluid, four of five guests are employed, said Mr. Fieler, the current owner. They have an average annual income of $8,600 and most work in downtown restaurants, as day laborers and as vendors at Cinergy Field. The Fort Washington allows them to live independently without receiving public assistance.

        Loby Forney, 52, has lived in the Fort Washington since December 1996. He works on a weekly basis for a meat-packing company in the Tri-County area. He makes $6.75 an hour and gets a ride to work in a van he meets at 6:30 each morning at Race and Ninth streets.

        “It's OK here,” said Mr. Forney, who pays $75 a week rent. “It beats the park benches.”

        The Fort Washington is also home to convicted felons who served prison time, disabled veterans, people with mental illnesses and alcoholics. Most rooms are furnished with a bed, dresser and table. There are sinks in every room but not toilets.

        Microwaves are allowed in rooms, but not hot plates or open flames.

        Most boarders share common toilets and showers.

        The baths on the west end of the building are unofficially designated for women — there are now about 15 female guests — and the east restrooms are for men.

        Only the overnight rooms have television sets and private baths.

        Residents can walk steel steps up to their rooms or ride in a small hand-operated elevator. Coffee and microwaved hamburgers are available in the lobby. There is a TV and vending machines.

        And the entry hall is lined with nine canvas watercolors painted by a 1970s resident, Anna Lee Weber. They are all in a George Washington theme — he's atop his horse, at his Mount Vernon home, accepting the British surrender to end the Revolutionary War.

        Vern Jones, 63, likes the paintings. He's the Fort Washington's senior resident, nine years.

        Originally from Kentucky and brought up in Mount Orab, Mr. Jones served in the Army during the 1950s and drove a truck for 21 years. He had a stroke and has lived at the Fort Washington since his recovery.

        “I live on veteran's benefits,” he said Wednesday while standing at the front door and watching traffic pass on Main Street. “It's all right here, for a sleeping room.

        “But I don't know where I'd be if I wasn't here.”

FORT WASHINGTON HOTEL
        • Original Name: The Bodman Building.

        • Address: 621 Main St., downtown.

        • Construction: Built in 1887 by Lauretta Bodman Gibson to house the management office of the Bodman estate. The estate had been established by her father, Ferdinand Bodman, a wealthy Cincinnati tobacco merchant and real estate developer.

        • Tenants: The first office of the Western-Southern Life Insurance Co. was in the building. The company rented one room on the sixth story, the top floor.

        • Importance: The Queen Anne style building is part of the Main Street Historic District. The Bodman was one of several structures put up in the 1880s and '90s during a boom in office development and wholesale business.

        • Making movies: Parts of three major motion pictures used the Fort Washington as a filming location: City of Hope and A Rage in Harlem (1991) and Milk Money (1994).

        • Famous resident: Cincinnatian Robert Lowry, praised in the 1950s by Ernest Hemingway as “one of the best writers America has today,” lived at the Fort Washington Hotel before his death in 1994.

       

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