DEVLOPMENT 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. -- Linda Harris

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

And the right buyer, Jefferson County Treasurer Ray Agresta said, will be a developer with concrete plans to finish the interior of the early 1900s historic property, which has been gutted of decades of debris, its walls and floors repaired and roof rebuilt.

The price tag for the shell — $43,000 — reflects its market valuation for the 2024 tax year: That’s low enough to generate more than a passing interest among investors who get in over their head and buy cheap in hopes that down the road they’ll be able to sell big and who often times lack the resources — or are unwilling to commit them — to do even the bare minimum to keep a property from deteriorating, much less add the final 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 sale restrictions they are considering.

“What we’re looking for is a developer to come back and say, ‘OK, 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 blueprint what they’re going to do. We’re not so concerned about what the actual end use is going to be, we just want to know that they’re going to do something, that something is going to happen with it.”

Agresta said they look for a good-faith effort to meet pre-set performance benchmarks. Typically, “We give them a year to complete these projects, and then if they don’t, then we could come back and take it,” he said.

But he’s hoping that won’t be an issue, given all that’s already gone into saving the property.

“The city of Steubenville approached us to see if there was something that the land bank could do to help them preserve this building because it’s in a historical district,” Agresta said. “We did get an estimate to reconstruct this building, and to tear it down and rebuild it was $2 million, which is hard to believe. But because of the constraints — the neighbors on both sides were very concerned with water intrusion above and below, from the roof and from the basement, because the water was just coming in here with nowhere to go — so, because it was in an historical district the only thing we could do (was) remodel it from the inside out.”

Agresta said the price tag was steep — north of $500,000 — but the city and 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 fronting the reconstruction costs and the balance covered with grant money secured by the land bank.

RSV Inc., owned by entrepreneur Steve Vukelic, won the contract, which turned out to be fortuitous: While he’d never tackled a preservation project like it before, Vukelic has devoted much of his working life to dismantling dilapidated and unsafe structures in even worse condition than the land bank’s project.

Agresta figures Vukelic saw it as a challenge, a chance to try his hand at figuring out how to save a building rather than demolishing it.

It was a leap of faith for the land bank, too, because “it was something that we had never attempted to do before, “Agresta said, and a misstep could have had disastrous consequences, given the way the storefronts on Fourth Street are structurally codependent.

Agresta said the building “needed so much demolition inside and to make it structurally viable.”

“Everybody talks about ‘good bones’ in a building, but this one had a lot of broken bones,” he said. “RSV, they were the only contractor that took an interest in this. I think at the beginning, Steve was thinking, ‘What am I getting myself into,’ because he’s more of a demolition guy and it had to be literally hand demolished. They were just taking (debris) out piece-by-piece-by-piece. It was very, very slow moving at first. I mean, you had a very unstable building, a very unstable second and third floor and workers were in here. And, you know every action has an equal and opposite reaction — they’re taking one thing down and hoping it wouldn’t affect another,” he said.

“But we’ve dealt with Steve on dozens and dozens, if not hundreds, of properties. You know, we put these projects out to bid and he is always in the mix, if not getting the majority of them. I don’t think we had any hesitation going with him. And Steve and his crew, they did a fantastic job in taking this place apart, literally piece-by-piece. I’m sure the two adjoining property owners are thrilled that now they have no water intrusion — they don’t have to worry about the common walls becoming an issue — and because this building was in foreclosure, nobody would have ever done anything with it.”

Agresta said RSV crews gave the building a new roof line, replaced crumbling floor joists, reinforced sagging walls and even revealed patches of the original brickwork. Agresta said the land bank initially planned to redo the facade, but ultimately decided “to leave that to whoever buys it, because it’s going to have to meet historic district criteria.”

Since it’s a shell, the buyer also will be finishing the interior to taste. That includes installing and connecting water and sewer lines to the city tie-ins and wiring the building for electricity.

It sounds like a lot but, given the $43,000 asking price and all 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 Steubenville’s now-retired Urban Projects Director Chris Petrossi with selling the board on the project and land bank Executive Director Tabatha Glover with getting all the moving pieces together.

A member of the land bank’s board, he said Petrossi “was the one who was kind of pitching it.”

“I think he really looked at it as the only way to do it because nobody was going to come in here and spend that kind of money,” Agresta said. “There’s no private investor who was going to contribute capital to this, it just wouldn’t happen. My concern, my biggest fear, was the adjoining buildings.”

And Glover has developed the rapport that’s needed at the state level to get projects of this magnitude done.

“They trust the information she’s giving them is going to be accurate, and it’s just a flow back and forth,” he said. “And you know, one successful project leads to potential grant money being available to the county because you’ve exhibited an ability to perform, that what you say you’re going to perform.”

Now that the more than a year-long project is done, “we’re very pleased with the results, how it’s turned out,” Agresta added. “Now I don’t know what the future is going to hold for it — I mean, obviously the land bank does not want to hold on to it — it’s not our purpose to acquire property and keep it. We want to repurpose it, get it back out and put it on the productive tax rolls.”

He considers it a great deal.

“I mean, this block of Fourth Street and a couple (of others) are really on the upswing, and I think somebody that has some vision and expertise” will jump on it, Agresta said. “We’re not (necessarily) looking for somebody to buy it, renovate it and then occupy it — they could (finish it then) turn around and sell it themselves.”

“We’ve done our part. We’ve taken the ball as far down the field as we can go. We need somebody else to take it across the goal line, and we don’t know who that’s going to be.”