Abandoned northeastern Ohio industrial sites repurposed

By Josie Bixler

Name any city in Northeast Ohio and odds are there is at least one abandoned or underused industrial eye sore somewhere in town. 

These decrepit industrial sites incur property taxes and pile fee upon fee as they sit unused in the middle of towns. Spaces that once fueled the economy, now detract from it.

“A lot of people think of a brownfield as a contaminated site period, but that’s not what a brownfield is,” said Todd Peetz, the director of the Portage Country Regional Planning Commission. “A brownfield is a building or operation that has gone dormant or dead or mostly dead because it’s perceived to have contamination,” he said, but that, “doesn’t automatically mean it does.” 

As the Portage County planner, Peetz serves as a connecting point for the land bank or other investors to repurpose old industrial spaces in an effort to stimulate economic development. The majority of this work is funded through city memberships to the Portage County Planning Commission and grant writing, Peetz said. 

“The land bank can acquire properties, but they don’t want to spend the money to buy it, especially when there’s $200,000 owed in taxes on the property,” Peetz said. “They want to wait until the properties are condemned or foreclosed for tax reasons.” 

This waiting game can take years to process, which can leave abandoned or underutilized industrial sites vacant for years or decades. Another option to speed up the process is to show properties to investors who have the funds to repurpose and revitalize the industrial space. 

Industrial Realty Group (IRG) is one such company that renovates old industrial spaces and then rents them out to a variety of other companies or industries, like residential apartments, restaurants, shopping centers and modernized industrial sites. 

“We’re looking for projects that are underutilized and have often sat vacant for a long time that may even have environmental issues,” said Lauren Crumrine, the director of marketing at IRG. “A lot of other companies are really concerned about these things and rightfully so, but we’ve been doing this adaptive reuse of space and environmental clean outs for a really long time, so things that would scare other companies don’t scare us.” 

IRG was founded more than 40 years ago by the company’s president, Stuart Lichter. He bought and renovated his first industrial building in New York by opening a bunch of credit cards. Since then, IRG has invested in over 150 underutilized industrial sites across the United States with a high concentration in the Northeast Ohio area, including the former Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company headquarters in Akron, the Hoover District project in Canton and the Hall of Fame Village project, Crumrine said. 

“We definitely have this overlap of the public and private sector where we work together to get these things done and we couldn’t do it without them,” Crumrine said about working with local governments. “It has to be that collaborative effort between the two or it definitely doesn’t move at the speed that you would want it to.”

IRG is unique in its field, Crumrine said, since most adaptive reuse companies do not have the history, experience or funds to engage in the wide scale revitalization projects that IRG can invest in. Smaller companies are scared off by environmental issues and don’t have the buffer zone to absorb the cost of property taxes owed on abandoned industrial sites, leaving the Ohio rust belt still scattered with brownfields in every county. 

“Repurposing is ideally our number one goal. Demolition is our last resort, but in some cases it has to happen,” Peetz said. 

Recycling through Demolition 

The 100-year-old, four-story Redfern industrial plant spans 125,000 square feet in Ravenna, Ohio, from South Chestnut Street to South Prospect Street. The buildings that made up the Redfern plant were taken over and expanded by the Cleveland Worsted Mills company, which manufactured textiles there until the mid 1950s, when it was sold to Oaks Rubber Company.   

In the 1990s, the owner of Oaks Rubber Co died and production at Redfern came to a halt, said Dennis West, an economic development consultant in Ravenna. There was an attempt to find new uses for Redfern, like a community flea market, but the effort did not pay off. Since then, Redfern sat vacant with a mountainous list of unpaid taxes and a growing concern for its structural integrity. 

“You always want to try to save the building first if you can, but that is not always possible,” West said about the Redfern industrial site. “The issue was that vagrants were destroying the building more than the condition it was already in.”

Redfern was officially condemned by the city engineer this past year. Before demolition could happen, West and his team had to cover the bases by contacting every family member of Redfern’s previous owner to get them to sign off on any legal connection to the building. After this process was complete, the Old South Brick Company of Spanish Fort, Alabama, was hired to demolish the building. 

What would have cost the city of Ravenna roughly $650,000 in demolition costs was made up in an even exchange for the brick and wood materials that make up Redfern, West said. 

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“It’s kind of like you want the brick and the wood. We don’t want to pay, so if you want the material go ahead and do the work,” West said about the deal with the demolition company. “To cover the cost of demoing the building they can sell the recycled brick and wood to be used as construction material.” 

Despite the efforts to recycle and reuse old material from Redfern, some residents still don’t want to see a historic building come down, but West said the joint effort between him, the mayor, chief engineer, fire and police department all worked to try and save the building first. 

“Some people have called and said, ‘Are you kidding me, why are you taking an old building with a lot of history to it and knocking it down?’ But considering the integrity of the building and how much it’s going to cost aren’t easy decisions, so when it comes down to it, if a building is being razed there’s a very good reason why,” West said. 

The century-old Redfern industrial building in Ravenna is being demolished, BUT all of the brick and wood will be recycled and reused as construction material. Check out the rest of the story at https://t.co/NDwVD6C5OE #recycled #mdjrpp #worstedmills pic.twitter.com/tHgemHJuWn

— Josie Bixler (@BixlerJosie) October 26, 2021