Westlawn site remains vacant as officials ponder its future

By PETER H. MILLIKEN
VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF
WARREN -- Ten years have passed since two community-minded local businessmen embarked on a vision to eliminate the blighted, high-crime Westlawn housing complex and make the neighborhood safer for children attending nearby schools.
Today, the 38-acre site in the city's southwest quadrant remains vacant, awaiting a rebirth, with the city owning 95 percent of the land and mowing the grass that covers the site, bounded by Westlawn and Union streets and Nevada and Loveless avenues.
Once again, the schools are pivotal in determining the area's destiny as school officials must decide where to locate the new kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school they plan to build in the city's southwest quadrant.
"If they choose to abandon Western Reserve Middle School, that huge parcel, along with Alden [Elementary] School and Westlawn can be proposed by the city for light industrial," said Mayor Michael O'Brien. "The area is suited for it. There's commercial property that abuts that area," the mayor added.
Industrial park
With the schools gone and with what he called "minor adjustments to zoning," the combined area could become a "prime industrial park," reviving the city's shrinking income tax base, the mayor said.
Green space buffers would shield the surrounding residential neighborhood from the industrial park, he added.
If a new school is to be built on the Reserve site, the mayor said he'd propose that the Westlawn area be used for light manufacturing and warehousing, instead of industrial. "I'm still interested in providing that land to a company as an incentive to relocate or to locate right in that site," he said. Light manufacturing, which wouldn't involve much heavy truck traffic, would be compatible with a school, he said.
The city schools are engaged in a $153 million project that will replace all 13 existing school buildings with five new ones -- a new Harding High School next to the existing one, and four new kindergarten-through-eighth-grade buildings, one in each of the city's four quadrants.
Sites have been selected for all of the new buildings, except the K-8 building on the city's southwest side.
Community background
The Westlawn community was built quickly during World War II as temporary housing for Ravenna Arsenal workers, and later became a blighted area that generated a disproportionate number of police and fire calls.
Using their own personal lines of credit, businessmen John Taylor and Clyde Cole bought 97 Westlawn lots and demolished 71 buildings containing 181 apartments in the late 1990s, receiving reimbursement from the city and breaking even on their expenses. Their goal was to make the neighborhood safer for children attending Alden and Reserve.
Although their ideas about how to redevelop the site differ, community leaders are unanimous that the vacant, grass-covered 38 acres is preferable to the blighted housing that previously stood there.
Many housing development proposals for the site have come and gone over the years, but none has materialized. The city's depressed housing market, coupled with the uncertainty over the new school building, has presented city officials with a dilemma concerning the area's redevelopment.
"Part of the problem we have now is we don't know what the schools' decision is going to be," said Michael Keys, the city's community development director.
"You couldn't build an industrial park next to a school," Keys explained. "Once you put an industrial park in there, it's not going to be residential," he said of the Westlawn area.
New school?
School officials are sending mixed messages about the suitability of the Westlawn area for a new school.
"That site has never been a consideration for a new K-8 building because of the proximity to the Warren [Recycling] landfill," said Linda Metzendorf, school board president, who is one of five school board members.
Westlawn could be suitable for construction of a new school, said Frank Caputo, schools construction project coordinator, but he added that a new school could be built on more than 35 acres the school board already owns at the adjacent Western Reserve Middle School. The board needs only 16 to 20 acres to build the new school, he explained.
Based on his talks with school board members, the mayor said he thinks the board will decide to build the new K-8 building elsewhere in the city's southwest quadrant because of the landfill issue.
But city Councilwoman Susan E. Hartman, D-7th, whose ward includes the Westlawn and Reserve sites, said the Reserve site is safe for children and "works well" for a new school.
The landfill is being cleaned up by the U.S. EPA, Hartman said, adding that school personnel have told her they've never smelled a landfill odor at Reserve. Hartman, who said she'd prefer that moderate-income housing be built at Westlawn, noted that the city now has industrial parks that aren't full.
Housing development
Over the years, city officials have received proposals from developers to build housing at Westlawn, but all have sought a subsidy from the city or from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Keys said.
The city and Sunshine of Warren -- a nonprofit housing organization -- commissioned a feasibility study completed in 2001, which recommended 152 dwelling units selling for $110,000 to $152,000 be built on the Westlawn site.
That proposed community, dubbed Alden Estates, would have been a mix of townhouses or four-plex condominiums and single-family dwellings subsidized by the city through a Community Development Block Grant or other funds.
The Alden Estates proposal would have been feasible only after upgrading of homes in the surrounding neighborhood, and even then, $152,000 new homes would have been too high-priced for the area, said Anthony Iannucci, a financial consultant to Sunshine.
For all practical purposes, "You can't build a house for under $100,000," Keys contended. Because surrounding homes on Warren's southwest side are only selling for $30,000 to $40,000, the new homes would sell for less than $100,000, making them a money-losing proposition, he said.
Empty houses
The other consideration is lack of an identifiable market. "The thing with Westlawn is not: Can we build housing there? It's: If we do, who would live there?" Keys said.
"Our problem is that, for us to build new housing in a market where we already have 2,000 vacant units really doesn't make a lot of fiscal sense," Keys said.
"The risk was way too high for the city to commit monetarily to a project that may end up where the city has more empty houses," he said of new housing proposed for Westlawn.
"If you can define a market willing to move there, it should be developed, but I think that's been the problem," said Don Emerson, executive director of the Trumbull Metropolitan Housing Authority.
"There's a reason for people to move back to Cleveland," Emerson said, referring to peoples' desire to live near work and entertainment in that city. "I don't see a reason for people to move back into Warren right now," he added.
With Warren's population having declined from about 70,000 to about 46,000 in the past 35 years, Emerson estimates 30 percent of TMHA's apartments in Warren are vacant.
Taylor, who is the city's outgoing treasurer, acknowledged the local housing market has deteriorated recently due to the WCI Steel and Delphi Corp. bankruptcy filings and uncertainty concerning the financial health of General Motors.
But he concluded: "I would think it would be in everybody's best interest if that land [at Westlawn] was developed somehow."