The 60-year-old Riverview Apartments building at 250 Tod Avenue NW is blocked off from trespassers. Plans are in the works to demolish the apartment complex that has housed seniors and disabled residents over the last few decades.

WARREN — A contractor has been hired to demolish the unoccupied Riverview Apartment complex at 250 Tod Avenue NW in Warren.

Donald Emerson, Trumbull Metropolitan Housing Authority executive director, said their board in mid-March selected New York-based demolition contractor, Total Wrecking and Environmental LLC, to tear down the apartment that has stood on the city’s west side since 1964.

Emerson said the company beat out bidders from the Mahoning Valley as he said they sought the “lowest” and “most responsive” of bidders, with TWE LLC’s offer coming in at $906,004.74.

The company will be paid using funds from the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Capital Fund Finance Program, which allows public housing authorities to seek funding for improvements of public housing units, according to Emerson.

“Today (Thursday) was the first construction meeting with the contractor, so we’re going through all the paperwork so that they can begin the demolition,” Emerson said, explaining that there will be “some time” before crews are physically on-site, but a demolition date is coming.

The determination to demolish was made by HUD after Emerson said a third-party architectural firm performed a detailed physical condition assessment on the building that determined critical improvements and upgrades would be cost-prohibitive.

“It probably would have cost us close to $15 million to modernize the building, and HUD wasn’t going to fund that. But there’s so much that needs to be done in that building that it’s just past its life period,” Emerson said.

The 152-unit building has long since been vacant and boarded up as the authority completed its relocation process, moving out their last resident July 18.

Before that, a soft notice had been sent to residents in December 2022 explaining that TMHA would provide vouchers to help residents “ease and minimize” the stresses of moving. Emerson said many of the residents relocated to either another TMHA property or used the voucher for housing elsewhere.

Emerson says the relocation process cost around $38,000, including $9,000 to exterminate the building’s bed bug problem before moving residents out of the building, most of which Emerson said was funded through authority dollars.

Once the demolition begins and the cleanup of the site is completed, Emerson said a green space will take the place of the apartment complex.

Similar issues that plagued the Tod Avenue building also exist across the parking lot at the 700 Buckeye high-rise building, but Emerson says it will take time before deciding to go forward with plans to demolish that building.

Emerson said, “The problem is that you have to come up with the funding, and the way we have juggled the funding we can only do one building at a time. So we’re going to have to figure out how to come up with that moving forward.”

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