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Linda Harris DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITY — Jefferson County Treasurer Ray Agresta and Jefferson County Land Bank Executive Director Tabatha Glover discuss plans for the Renforth Building on North Fourth Street.

STEUBENVILLE — For the right buyer, the old Renforth Building on North Fourth Street could be a bargain.

And the right buyer, said Jefferson County Treasurer Ray Agresta, will be a developer with concrete plans to finish the interior of the historic early 20th century property, which has been stripped of decades of debris, walls and floors have been repaired and the roof has been rebuilt.

The price tag for the shell – $43,000 – reflects the market valuation for the 2024 fiscal year: that’s low enough to spark more than passing interest among investors who are getting in over their heads and buying cheap in the hope of getting in later will come. who are able to sell in bulk and who often do not have the resources – or are unwilling to commit them – to do even the bare minimum to prevent a property from falling into disrepair, let alone to to put the finishing touches.

That’s not what the project’s sponsors — the Jefferson County Land Bank and the city of Steubenville — have in mind for the property, hence the sales restrictions they are considering.

“What we’re looking for is a developer who will come back and say, ‘Okay, this is what we’re going to do. These are the plans we have.” said Agresta, president of the land bank. “We want them to make a blueprint of what they are going to do. We don’t really care what the actual end use will be, we just want to know that they are going to do something, that something is going to be done with it.”

Agresta said they are making a good faith effort to meet pre-established performance benchmarks. Typical, “We give them a year to complete these projects, and if they don’t, we can come back and take over,” he said.

But he hopes that won’t be a problem, given everything that has already been done to save the property.

“The city of Steubenville approached us to see if there was anything the land bank could do to help them preserve this building because it is in a historic district,” said Agresta. “We got an estimate to reconstruct this building, and to tear it down and rebuild it cost us $2 million, which is hard to believe. But because of the restrictions – the neighbors on both sides were very concerned about water coming in above and below, from the roof and from the basement, because the water just came in here and had nowhere to go – so because it is in a historic building was located. all we could do was renovate it from within.”

Agresta said the price tag was high — well over $500,000 — but the city and the land bank worked together to keep the property on the tax rolls, potentially creating jobs and generating tax revenue down the road.

The land bank was able to secure grant funding to cover much of the cost, with the city covering the cost of reconstruction and the balance covered by grant funds secured by the land bank.

RSV Inc., owned by entrepreneur Steve Vukelic, won the contract, which turned out to be a fortuitous outcome: although he had never tackled such a conservation project, Vukelic has dedicated much of his working life to dismantling dilapidated and unsafe structures in even worse condition than the land bank project.

Agresta thinks Vukelic saw it as a challenge, an opportunity to try out how to save a building instead of demolishing it.

It was also a leap of faith for the land bank, because… “It was something we had never tried to do before,”Agresta said, and a misstep could have had disastrous consequences, given how the Fourth Street storefronts are structurally interdependent.

Agresta said the building “So much had to be demolished to make it structurally viable.”

“Everyone talks about ‘good bones’ in a building, but this building had a lot of broken bones,” he said. “RSV, they were the only contractor who was interested in this. I think at first Steve was like, ‘What am I getting into?’ because he’s more of a demolition guy and it literally had to be demolished by hand. They were just removing (the debris) piece by piece. At first it was very, very slow. I mean, you had a very unstable building, a very unstable second and third floor and there were workers here. And you know that every action has an equal and opposite reaction: they bring down one thing and hope it won’t affect another,” he said.

“But we’ve dealt with Steve on dozens, if not hundreds, of properties. You know, we’ve put bids on these projects and he’s always in the mix if he doesn’t get the majority of them. I don’t think we had any hesitation about going with him. And Steve and his team have done a fantastic job of literally taking this place apart piece by piece. I’m sure the two owners of neighboring properties are very happy that they now have no water intrusion – they don’t have to worry about the common walls becoming a problem – and because this building went bankrupt, no one would ever have anything to do with it participated.”

Agresta said RSV crews gave the building a new roofline, replaced crumbling floor beams, reinforced sagging walls and even exposed areas of the original masonry. Agresta said the land bank initially planned to redo the facade, but ultimately decided “To leave that up to whoever buys it, because it will have to meet the criteria of the historic district.”

Because it is a shell, the buyer will also finish the interior to his own taste. That includes installing and connecting water and sewer lines to city connections and wiring the building for electricity.

It sounds like a lot, but considering the $43,000 asking price and everything that’s been done to make the building structurally sound, there’s room for the right buyer to do what needs to be done without breaking the bank.

Agresta credits Chris Petrossi, Steubenville’s now-retired urban projects director, with selling the project’s board and land bank executive director Tabatha Glover for putting together all the moving pieces.

He served on the land bank’s board of directors, Petrossi said “was the one who was kind of pitching it.”

“I think he really saw it as the only way to do it because no one would come here and spend that much money,” said Agresta. “There is no private investor who would invest capital in this, that simply wouldn’t happen. My concern, my biggest fear, was the neighboring buildings.”

And Glover has developed the report card needed at the state level to get projects of this magnitude done.

“They trust that the information she gives them will be accurate, and that it’s just a flow back and forth,” he said. “And you know, one successful project leads to potential grant money becoming available to the province because you’ve demonstrated the ability to deliver, what you say you’re going to deliver.”

Now that the more than year-long project has been completed, “we are very satisfied with the results, how it turned out,” Agresta added. “Now I don’t know what the future holds for it – I mean, the land bank obviously doesn’t want to hold on to it – it’s not our goal to acquire and hold real estate. We want to repurpose it, get it out again and put it on the productive tax rolls.”

He thinks it is a large amount.

“I mean, this block of Fourth Street and a few (of others) are really on the rise, and I think someone has a vision and expertise” I’ll jump on it, Agresta said. “We’re not (necessarily) looking for someone to buy it, renovate it and then move into it – they could (then finish) turn it around and sell it themselves.”

“We have done our part. We brought the ball as far into the field as possible. We need someone else to get the ball over the goal line, and we don’t know who that will be.”

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