Denison Park Apartments, Cleveland, OH 44109

At the Denison Cemetery Memorial Day services this past Monday, we gazed out across the cemetery, past the fence to the asphalt parking lot of an apartment complex. I think that the apartments are these:

Denison Park Apartments

2239 Forestdale Ave

Cleveland, OH 44109

We should not confuse these units with the Park Denison Apartments at 4016 Denison Avenue, originally developed and built as senior housing by Fodor Realty in 1968; CMHA now operates the units, and they’re no longer just for seniors.

015-22-036
CLEVELAND METRO HOUSING AUTH 04016 DENISON

015-22-037
CLEVELAND METRO HOUSING AUTH 04016 DENISON

But back to Memorial Day. Looking across the cemetery, I recalled that these units off Forestdale  had always had structural problems because of the shifting, sinking terrain on which they had been built; as a matter of fact, some of them had such severe problems they had to be taken down. The current parcel number on the surviving garden apartments is 008-24-063, and the last transaction on it in 2003 was a transfer for $3,600,000, according to the Cuyahoga County Auditor’s site. This seems high to me, but just drive by, see for yourself.

I began to wonder if the NRP project somehow would involve a bailout of these troubled properties at some time, as well. Currently, the NRP project bails out the city on sinking, shifting land it holds as a result of another failed attempt at development a few years ago. We told them then, too, that the geography or topography was unsuitable for building, and nobody would listen. When I tried to research the identity of the previous developer, who made the city take the land back, the records for the Fern Court transactions on the Auditor’s site weren’t traceable back past January of 2005, and I thought that was odd, seeing that most of these transactional records go back to 1975.

These garden apartments are shorter than what is proposed by NRP and slightly higher up the covered-over ravine/garbage dump than the proposed NRP/Ziegler projects, which we now hear have a phase I and a phase II.

I’m also wondering whether Ziegler’s accredited investors and qualified purchasers know that their money is being spent building an improvement on land and in an area that has a deep and long history of problems. Ziegler may know all about finance, but do they know real estate? Or, perhaps more to the point, do they care?

See the link below for a map showing the proximity of these Denison Park Apartment units to the proposed NRP project.

Denison Park Apartments, Cleveland, OH 44109