Owners find that old buildings come with strings attached

What is one to do with an old building?

That’s a question being asked throughout the Mahoning Valley every day, and, it turns out, there are almost as many different answers as there are kinds of buildings.

We’ve done any number of editorials about real and potential successes and failures in downtown Youngstown. But there are challenging issues facing buildings large and small throughout the Valley.

In Warren, Mayor Michael O’Brien is ending his last term in office in a tug of war over prominent pieces of real estate that once housed the Packard Electric Division of General Motors’ Dana Street operations.

Certainly ownership has privileges; but with ownership there are also responsibilities.

Cities dare not assume that a new owner of a major piece of property is going to act responsibly. Stripping a building of its valuable components and then abandoning the leftover hulk to the elements is not a right or privilege of ownership.

The new owner has said he intends to comply with all laws regarding the removal of salvageable material, demolition of buildings that are past usefulness and the reuse of sound structures at the site. That’s good news for the city, but city officials owe it to residents of the neighborhood and the city at large to see that the owners are true to their word.

Institutional issues

Meanwhile, in Youngstown recent events have shown that there’s cause for the public to keep an eye on how institutional owners of property behave.

Youngstown State University is responsible for a lot of real estate on the near North Side. Preserving and rehabilitating buildings can be an expensive proposition, and certainly university trustees must weigh the financial resources available against the benefit of preserving a building. At the same time, when the university buys a building or accepts it as a gift, it takes on a responsibility to protect that asset until a decision is made about its use. Allowing it to deteriorate to the point that demolition is the only option is not responsible behavior.

Trustees authorized the demolition of the Thompson-Sacherman House on Lincoln Avenue in December, citing its deteriorated condition, the cost to repair/renovate it and a lack of an identified educational use. They delayed action on an administration recommendation that the Peck House on Wick Avenue be demolished. And they’re faced with a need to address structural deterioration of an addition to Pilgrim Collegiate Church sooner rather than later.

A committee has been formed to consider alternatives to demolition, with input from the Mahoning Valley Historical Society.

That’s a step in the right direction. If the costs of refurbishing are too high, one or more of the buildings may yet be lost. But at the very least, with an impartial body involved, the extent to which mistakes may have been made in recent years in allowing these buildings to deteriorate should come to light. And from that, the university will be in a better position in the future to husband the historical real estate that falls into its possession.