Former St. Joseph Community Center foreclosed on, faces demolition

LORAIN — The remains of the former St. Joseph Community Center will face a wrecking ball, the mayor said on Friday. The county has foreclosed on the property and will put it up for sheriff's sale in October, Mayor Jack Bradley said. The city has received credit for the funds it spent to remediate the site over the past 20 years. That credit will cover the $1.5 million local match required by the Ohio Department of Development to use the $6.5 million in brownfield redevelopment funds granted to the city for the central Lorain property. No matter what happens, the rest of the property will be cleaned up. "We are going to start cleanup immediately," Bradley said. Safety/Service Director Rey Carrion said there will be two ordinances related to the property going before City Council on Sept. 2, one related to a subrecipient agreement between the city and the county land bank, the other relating to professional services between the city and Verdantis, which had already been providing environmental services related to the brownfield cleanup. Bradley and Carrion said they doubted the property would sell at sheriff's sale in October, as the buyer would have to pay at least the $1.7 million in delinquent real estate taxes and assessments owed on the parcels. "I've got to get it cleaned up one way or another," Bradley said. "People are accusing me of sitting on my hands — we're not sitting our hands, we're moving forward." Once the city's main hospital, St. Joseph Community Center has sat in a state of blight since the city issued a stop work order on the demolition more than four years ago. A7 Development Corp. started demolishing the hospital in 2021 and the city halted work in March of that year after demolition company Earth Exchange Inc. failed to pull permits for all the buildings it had torn down. The company, which had ties to the demolition company it was using, sold the property to An Haoi Tran in 2023 for $150,000 — the same price A7 purchased the property from South Shore Development Corp. in early 2020. Since then, the skeletal remains of the hospital's parking garage, and the rubble left behind by the demolition have remained on the site, surrounded by a chain-link fence. Bradley said the city will have to abate any asbestos in the parking garage, and remediate the rubble and debris improperly disposed of during Earth Exchange Inc.'s demolition efforts, which saw the rubble from torn down buildings dumped into the former basement rooms and left there. Tied to the St. Joseph rehab is the Stoveworks property at West 13th Street and Long Avenue. Eventually, the city will use the dirt removed from the Stoveworks site as fill to level the St. Joseph lot. Carrion estimated work could start on the St. Joseph property by late October or early November. The demolition will only cover the former hospital site at West 21st Street and Broadway, not the former offices off Reid Avenue. Contact Carissa Woytach at (440) 329-7245 or cwoytach@chroniclet.com.