Posted on May - 01 - 2010
Vacant Midtown buildings will be razed; city will act if Lehman Bros. doesn’t
One way or another, the vacant buildings bedeviling a Midtown neighborhood will be removed this year, city officials said.
Memphis officials will meet next week with representatives of Lehman Brothers Holdings, the firm that foreclosed on, and took ownership of, the 28 acres where a planned mixed-use development never got built.
But old apartments and houses that were vacated for the project now harbor blight, crime and even fires on the tract southeast of Poplar and Cleveland.
Earnest Dobbins, community enhancement director for Memphis, hopes to persuade Lehman Brothers Holdings not just to demolish and remove the problem structures, but also to spur the kind of construction that never got off the ground.
The city has a Plan B if the property owner doesn’t remove the buildings. The City Council capital improvements committee earlier this week approved $800,000 for the demolition work if the city has to do it, Councilman Jim Strickland and Dobbins said.
Lehman Brothers Holdings representatives “are willing to meet with us and come up with some type of solution in getting rid of this property,” Dobbins said.
Lehman Brothers wants to pay the city to do the demolition, Strickland said.
But that would set a bad example for other property owners, Dobbins indicated.
“We don’t want to get in the business of demolishing buildings that belong to other people who have the money to do it,” he said. “Especially if they don’t have intent to rebuild in the area.”
While the city has the money to raze the buildings, the work hasn’t been approved and no agreement with Lehman Brothers has been struck, Dobbins said.
The city will spend $6 million to $7 million this year on different demolition projects. But demolition that sets the stage for new construction gets a priority, Dobbins said.
Whatever happens, he said, “we don’t intend to let it go until next winter. We intend to move on that property one way or another in the next two or three months.”
It’s all promising news to neighborhood activist Candice Hawkinson. She lives nearby on Court and has spent many hours trying to get the problem solved.
She praised Strickland for “his quick response to the neighborhood. … It really did make an impression.”
WSG Memphis, owned by WSG Development of Miami, took out a $14 million construction loan from Lehman Brothers in 2007 for what was to be a $180 million development of retail, residential and office space.
The project was hurt by the plunge in commercial real estate and the tightening of credit associated with the recession.
— Tom Bailey Jr.: 529-2388
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