East Cleveland's long-vacant Huron Place Apartments is finally on a demolition calendar. The Cuyahoga Land Bank is leading the takedown of the former 254-unit high-rise, and the main building is expected to come down around Christmas.
The wait is the part worth sitting with. The complex has been empty for more than a decade, and in 2019, the city tried to recruit a film crew to bring it down, with costs and duties to be worked out. Officials hope the clearance becomes a major redevelopment site of roughly 10 acres. No developer has been named. Cleveland.com reported Friday that the land bank's immediate priority is still the plain one: bringing the building down.
Garage First, Then the Tower
The Christmas target comes with a sequence. The parking garage is expected to be demolished first. Crews will remove asbestos and complete other remediation before the main structure comes down. Even after the tower is gone, the site will still need substantial cleanup. A holiday demolition, if the timetable holds, removes a building. It does not hand the city a pad ready for a builder.
Mayor Sandra Morgan has said the deteriorated property is unsafe to live in or to use as a place of refuge. The complex has raised public-safety concerns, fire risk in particular, and she has described the decay as demoralizing for the community. Cleveland.com's account calls what remains a skeleton of the former building.
That is the condition the demolition is aimed at, not a rehab candidate. Morgan made removing the deteriorating high-rise a priority. The work in front of crews is abatement, a garage, a tower, and a messy site, in that order.
A Match Rate, and Two Prices
State money was never the whole obstacle. The Ohio Department of Development demolition program covers 75 percent of the cost. Local officials have to fund the other 25 percent. Huron Place sat in that gap. Funding was delayed while they looked for the match, and several attempts fell through. Ricardo Leon, president and CEO of the Cuyahoga Land Bank, has said the prospects once looked bleak.
East Cleveland worked with City Council and other partners to put a local share together. On April 7, council approved Resolution 29-26, authorizing an agreement with the land bank to share demolition expenses. Cleveland 19 reported then that the final price had not yet been determined.
The estimates that followed did not settle on one number. On May 19, Ideastream described a $3.2 million plan in which the city would spend $800,000, half from American Rescue Plan funds and half from community development block grant funding, with the land bank paying the rest. As the program requires, Ideastream reported, East Cleveland had committed to the 25 percent local match.
Leon told Cleveland.com the demolition will cost about $1.2 million, with the local match expected to provide about $300,000. Twenty-five percent of his figure is $300,000. Twenty-five percent of the May plan was $800,000. The match rule fits both estimates. The estimates do not fit each other.
From a 1961 Address to a Film-Crew Ask
Huron Place was built in 1961, and Morgan has said it was once among East Cleveland's desirable addresses. Over time the complex became functionally obsolete. The building people used to want is the one she now calls unsafe, a former address that stopped working as housing long before anyone booked a wrecking crew.
The ownership break is dated. News 5 Cleveland reported that the apartments went through tax foreclosure and state forfeiture in 2017. That March, Ideastream reported that demolition could run around $1.9 million, a third figure sitting between the two estimates circulating this year.
By summer 2019 the city still lacked the funds. Cleveland Scene reported that East Cleveland, with networking help from the Greater Cleveland Film Commission, was soliciting film crews to demolish the vacant 13-story building. The solicitation did not become the demolition plan.
The land bank took control of the property in 2024. Control was not a wrecking date. That waited on the local match council agreed to share this spring, and on a cost that is still being stated in round numbers.
One Tower on a Much Longer List
Huron Place is one line in a larger state-funded tear-down. News 5 reported that the land bank won $23 million in state grants to raze more than 1,100 structures, a package that includes this high-rise. Those grants are expected to help pay for 148 demolitions in East Cleveland.
The program writing the checks has been running since 2021. Since then, News 5 reported, the Ohio Department of Development has awarded more than $200 million in grants for nearly 5,000 projects. A 254-unit tower is a different job from a scattered house demolition, but it is being financed through the same kind of state demolition money, with the same requirement that somebody local cover a quarter of the bill.
East Cleveland's demolition ledger was already long. In August 2018, Cleveland.com reported that 80 blighted homes within a 15-block area were being torn down in a land-bank effort. Gus Frangos, then the land bank's president, said more than 1,500 East Cleveland homes had been demolished since the agency began its work about 10 years earlier.
The city's land-use plan recommends rehabilitation or replacement of deteriorated and abandoned housing as part of preserving historic areas, according to Cuyahoga County Planning Commission project materials. Huron Place is headed toward removal. What, if anything, replaces those 254 units has not been chosen.
Roughly 10 Acres, Unassigned
Once the building is gone, the site is expected to provide roughly 10 acres for development. That acreage is the most concrete future use anyone has put on paper. Cleveland.com reported no specific developer and no redevelopment plan.
Leon has kept the assignment narrow. The land bank's priority is completing the demolition and assembling the land into one cohesive site for marketing. Bringing the building down, he has said, is the immediate job. A marketable parcel is not a signed project.
City officials hope the clearance makes way for a major redevelopment site. Morgan has said there is already interest, and that she expects new development. She has also said the building's history and former prominence mark a chance for East Cleveland to begin a new chapter. Interest is not a builder, a site plan, or a closing. If the main building comes down around Christmas, the city will be marketing roughly 10 acres, not cutting a ribbon on whatever follows a 1961 high-rise.
