Insurance giant buys out SW Ohio women's home after 2-year court battle over historic property

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  Protesters shown on Wednesday, May 8, 2013, in downtown Cincinnati. The group of 150 protesters are demanding that insurance giant Western & Southern Financial Group end a two-year court fight to stop the women's home from renovating and ultimately get them to sell the property to make way for a boutique hotel. (AP Photo/Amanda Lee Myers)The Associated Press

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  Kate Gallion, member of Allies of the Anna Louise Inn, rallies protesters on Wednesday, May 8, 2013, in downtown Cincinnati. The group of 150 protesters are demanding that insurance giant Western & Southern Financial Group end a two-year court fight to stop the women's home from renovating and ultimately to get them to sell the property to make way for a boutique hotel. (AP Photo/Amanda Lee Myers)The Associated Press

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  Tatiana McCormick, 24, a former resident of the Anna Louise Inn, is pictured in front of a protest on Wednesday, May 8, 2013, in downtown Cincinnati. The group of 150 protesters are demanding that insurance giant Western & Southern Financial Group end a two-year court fight to stop the women's home from renovating and ultimately to get them to sell the property to make way for a boutique hotel. (AP Photo/Amanda Lee Myers)The Associated Press

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  Jim Luken, 69, of Cincinnati, parodies Western & Southern CEO John Barrett during a protest on Wednesday, May 8, 2013, in downtown Cincinnati. The group of 150 protesters are demanding that insurance giant Western & Southern Financial Group end a two-year court fight to stop the women's home from renovating and ultimately get them to sell the property to make way for a boutique hotel. (AP Photo/Amanda Lee Myers)The Associated Press

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CINCINNATI –  A major insurance company has bought out a nonprofit home for struggling women in Cincinnati in a deal announced Monday, ending a bitter two-year court battle over the home's historic property in a beautiful downtown neighborhood.

Western & Southern Insurance Group bought the 104-year-old Anna Louise Inn for $4 million, according to a joint news release issued by the formerly acrimonious pair.

Under the deal, the women now living in the Anna Louise Inn will remain where they are for two years as a new facility for them is built.

Once they move out of the neighborhood, Western & Southern will be able to accomplish its long-standing goal of turning the old property into a boutique hotel.

"Our stance has consistently been that this could be a win-win, and now it is just that," said Western & Southern CEO John Barrett in a statement.

The very public dispute began several years ago when the nonprofit rejected an offer from Western & Southern and the insurer sued to stop planned renovations, leading to a protracted legal battle. Owners and residents of the Anna Louise long have derided Barrett's efforts to convert the home into a hotel, saying they amounted to corporate greed and arrogance because the home was not for sale and the women didn't want to leave.

"It's like someone coming up to you and saying, 'I want to buy your house' and you politely say it's not for sale, and they don't understand that not for sale means it's not for sale," Mary Carol Melton, executive vice president of the nonprofit that operates the inn, had said in October. "We really do believe enough is enough."

In the news release, a short statement from Melton said she was "very pleased that this has come to a mutually agreeable conclusion."

"Now, as we move forward, our women will have a beautiful new home and will continue to enjoy safe and affordable housing for many years to come," she said.

Monday's deal came less than a week after about 150 supporters of the Anna Louise protested outside a downtown courthouse, demanding that Western & Southern give up on buying the home and vowing that the Anna Louise would never give up.

The protest was one of many that have been held in the last two years. Supporters of the Anna Louise also have made an online video parody portraying a Western & Southern spokesman as a corporate fat cat hell-bent on kicking the women out of the Anna Louise, and even crashed the company's title yearly event, the Western & Southern Open.

As the world's top tennis players battled it out on the court this past summer, a plane flew overhead, trailing a banner calling Western & Southern a bunch of bullies.

At one point, the Anna Louise had considered an offer from Western & Southern to buy the property for $1.8 million, less than half its value. The inn decided against it after winning $12.6 million in federal and state tax credits for a renovation, a decision criticized by John Barrett as a taxpayer "bailout."

Days before the inn was to begin renovating, Western & Southern successfully sued to stop them, arguing that they broke zoning codes.

The Anna Louise had appealed and was rezoned but had been prevented from beginning renovations until the court fight was resolved. New arguments had been set for last week, but the home's deal with Western & Southern ends that.

The Anna Louise Inn has been housing low-income, single women in the same building since 1909, after President Howard Taft's brother, Charles P. Taft, built it for ambitious types pouring into Cincinnati to work as stenographers, bookkeepers and secretaries.

Over the years, the inn has become a haven for women looking to make a new start. Some residents are just getting out of foster care, some are between jobs, some have fled abusive relationships, and others are escaping lives as prostitutes and drug addicts. Several have lived there for decades.

During their fight to buy the Anna Louise, Barrett and others at Western & Southern repeatedly referred to the home's former prostitutes and said its residents just don't belong in the serene and lovely neighborhood.

They argued that a boutique hotel was much more suited to the area, and pointed to a University of Cincinnati study commissioned by Western & Southern that showed a hotel there could generate $355 million in economic impact over 30 years.

"It is the right thing to do for Cincinnati," Barrett wrote in an October editorial in The Cincinnati Enquirer. "No one loses with our proposal."

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Follow Amanda Lee Myers on Twitter at https://twitter.com/AmandaLeeAP

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What to Cut: Excess federal property costing taxpayers billions

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A prime example of how slowly the federal government moves is a piece of prime real estate in Washington's tony Georgetown neighborhood -- an old steam-generating plant with a spectacular view of the Potomac waterfront. 

The government-owned building was finally sold to a private developer for $19.5 million this month. But it sat there for 10 years -- off the  market and vacant -- while taxpayers footed the bill for its upkeep. 

A for-sale sign only went up the day before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform dragged General Services Administration officials into the musty structure for a hearing last summer. Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Calif., berated a bewildered GSA official at that hearing, saying: "You can't get your job done! I don't care if it's a Republican or Democratic administration, the job is not getting done!" 

Congressional frustration may be warranted. The federal government owns or leases between 55,000 and 77,000 vacant properties. But it's impossible to tell exactly how many. No precise inventory has been kept. 

Selling them off, though, could save taxpayers between $3 billion and $8 billion a year, according to various analysts. That's nothing to scoff at as the government grapples with a mounting debt and sequester-tied spending cuts. 

"These properties could be used first to consolidate agencies that now are in leased buildings," D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton told Fox News. 

Tom Schatz, of Citizens Against Government Waste said: "This is a problem that has been identified for years, and every time someone in the White House says 'let's sell property,' the red tape is simply too much for this process." 

In 1987, amid media coverage of the nation's persistent homeless problem, Congress passed a law that said unused government properties first had to be offered to other federal agencies, then to state agencies, and, as a last resort, for use as homeless shelters before they could be put on the market. 

"We spend about 8 billion dollars a year maintaining properties that we have no use for. Now that 8 billion dollars is just thrown down the drain because we can't get past the homeless lobby to get a common-sense way to take care of their problems and also us to unload properties," Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., told Fox News. 

Former Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., notes that Congress is full of people who've never held private-sector jobs."There is nothing wrong with that. But it means they have never really been in the position of running something, of making hard decisions, of having scarce resources and having to set priorities." 

Schatz echoes that sentiment -- noting the way the government handles the excess properties is counter to common sense. "Rather than having the government get the first choice, the first choice should be to sell and then go back down the line. There are plenty of places for homeless shelters," he said. 

Legislation to require the federal government to expedite the sale of underused properties died in the last Congress. It was resurrected this year in Republican Rep. Paul Ryan's proposed budget, which the Senate voted down this month. 

But Norton has hopes Congress will begin to remedy the problem this year."The Oversight and Government Reform committee has just passed again its bill which I think has a good chance of getting all the way to the Senate," she said. 

Still, if Congress does pass a bill to sell excess properties, inventorying all of them would be a daunting undertaking given that they're spread across all government agencies.

View the original article here

What to Cut: Excess federal property costing taxpayers billions

A prime example of how slowly the federal government moves is a piece of prime real estate in Washington's tony Georgetown neighborhood -- an old steam-generating plant with a spectacular view of the Potomac waterfront. 

The government-owned building was finally sold to a private developer for $19.5 million this month. But it sat there for 10 years -- off the  market and vacant -- while taxpayers footed the bill for its upkeep. 

A for-sale sign only went up the day before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform dragged General Services Administration officials into the musty structure for a hearing last summer. Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Calif., berated a bewildered GSA official at that hearing, saying: "You can't get your job done! I don't care if it's a Republican or Democratic administration, the job is not getting done!" 

Congressional frustration may be warranted. The federal government owns or leases between 55,000 and 77,000 vacant properties. But it's impossible to tell exactly how many. No precise inventory has been kept. 

Selling them off, though, could save taxpayers between $3 billion and $8 billion a year, according to various analysts. That's nothing to scoff at as the government grapples with a mounting debt and sequester-tied spending cuts. 

"These properties could be used first to consolidate agencies that now are in leased buildings," D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton told Fox News. 

Tom Schatz, of Citizens Against Government Waste said: "This is a problem that has been identified for years, and every time someone in the White House says 'let's sell property,' the red tape is simply too much for this process." 

In 1987, amid media coverage of the nation's persistent homeless problem, Congress passed a law that said unused government properties first had to be offered to other federal agencies, then to state agencies, and, as a last resort, for use as homeless shelters before they could be put on the market. 

"We spend about 8 billion dollars a year maintaining properties that we have no use for. Now that 8 billion dollars is just thrown down the drain because we can't get past the homeless lobby to get a common-sense way to take care of their problems and also us to unload properties," Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., told Fox News. 

Former Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., notes that Congress is full of people who've never held private-sector jobs."There is nothing wrong with that. But it means they have never really been in the position of running something, of making hard decisions, of having scarce resources and having to set priorities." 

Schatz echoes that sentiment -- noting the way the government handles the excess properties is counter to common sense. "Rather than having the government get the first choice, the first choice should be to sell and then go back down the line. There are plenty of places for homeless shelters," he said. 

Legislation to require the federal government to expedite the sale of underused properties died in the last Congress. It was resurrected this year in Republican Rep. Paul Ryan's proposed budget, which the Senate voted down this month. 

But Norton has hopes Congress will begin to remedy the problem this year."The Oversight and Government Reform committee has just passed again its bill which I think has a good chance of getting all the way to the Senate," she said. 

Still, if Congress does pass a bill to sell excess properties, inventorying all of them would be a daunting undertaking given that they're spread across all government agencies.

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Ray Lewis lists Florida property, gets ready for ESPN

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  Exterior of Ray Lewis' Florida home.Zillow

Retired Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis may be relegated to the sidelines, but he’s hoping to make strides in real estate. The two-time Super Bowl champion is selling his Florida estate for $4.995 million, The Baltimore Sun reports.

The waterfront property at 3573 S Ocean Blvd, Highland Beach, FL, 33487 sits on a 10,890-square-foot lot in the middle of Highland Beach. As expected from a high-profile athlete’s home, the house is luxurious. Seven bedrooms, 8.5 baths, a gourmet kitchen, pool, Jacuzzi tub, rooftop deck and a wall of windows overlooking the ocean are just a few of the jaw-dropping amenities.

You might be wondering why Lewis would ever want to move, but with plans to join ESPN as an analyst this fall, it makes sense to sell the beachfront pad to move near the network’s headquarters in Bristol, Conn. According to property records, Lewis has owned the Florida home since April 2004, when he bought it for $5.22 million.

However, Lewis reportedly told USA Today he wants to be able to see his son, Ray Lewis III, play football at the University of Miami and, as a result, won’t make it to ESPN headquarters for every pregame show. Time will tell whether Lewis moves permanently to Bristol or buys another residence closer to his son.

Lewis isn’t the only Ravens player trying to sell his crib. Running back Ray Rice listed his modest Baltimore condo in August 2012. Originally asking $339,900, the home took a price cut of $20,000 in January 2013.

Lewis’ home is listed by Emily Roberts of Tauriello & Company Real Estate.

Related:

• Baltimore Ravens RB Ray Rice Lists Starter Home
• NFL Stars Score With Super-Size Homes
• Matt Hasselbeck Lists Bellevue Home for $3.495 Million

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