It seems the city is selling three of the four buildings they bought for $155k a few years ago for $80k. That’s a $75k loss plus the cost of tearing down the rear of one because it was structurally unsound.

They also paid $140k for the adult bookstore building, and was going to end that lease in April 2017. The $2,275 rent must be lucrative because the doors are still open. What happened to the promise in 2017 after getting a deal spending just $12k and $25k for asbestos and demolition when a wall of one fell in an alley, to spend $300k to fix the roofs and water damage on the other buildings? After spending tax payers’ TIF money on these properties, I guess this project was a bust. That money must have gone somewhere else.

Put the $300k into tearing the buildings down. Let a developer build a hotel or condos on it to service the overflow of cracker plant workers seeking housing. The buildings have been empty too long; four years is long enough. The bookstore has to go somewhere else. Clean up lower downtown; it will not come back to what it was during our bicentennial celebration in 1969, but it can be rejuvenated into something a lot better than it looks now.

Michael Hudimac

Wheeling