Vacant home on Bancroft (photos)

Not a home. It was a store front business up unroll 2-3 years ago.

Here is a 2007 Toledo Blade article on the building. Sounds like big dreams, no cash.

Apparently they also owe taxes on it: http://maps.co.lucas.oh.us/areis/areis.asp

This is a "fixer-upper" with an open floor plan, three bedrooms, part of a bath, a bomb shelter, and open air sunroom with excellent curb appeal. (it attracted your attention didn't it?)

lol max !!!

On the building there are several signs that are an orange square with the letters FTRD - does anyone know what this means? I presume it's some sort of hazard warning.

"Toledo Fire and Rescue Department."

Aries shows theyre about to owe more on taxes than the place is worth.

Based on the photo in the Toledo blade article...it looks like they have never done a thing with it since purchase. Perhaps it was just a front to get money and they never had any real plans for it?

Those signs are used for Fire and Police personnel. Floor, roof and/or sides are too unstable for emergency personnel to enter. DO NOT ENTER THE BUILDING. They will let it burn instead of entering the building due to the extremely unsafe conditions.

Fire Dept. is not "liberal" in posting these warning signs on just any building. So, when you do see them, heed the warning.

(I am a retired TPD officer)

Gud, thank you so much! I suspected as such! I updated my blog post about this location to include your quote.

Thanks for the detailed information, Gudshot. I knew that this had something to do with the FD inspecting vacant buildings, but I never knew the precise reason for these signs. Makes perfect sense now!

I suspect the current owners probably had good intentions but were relative novices to the intricacies of commercial development, especially in rehabbing a place like this. Now they are stuck with a property that probably needs $150K just to make it safe to occupy, and attracting investors with a dump like that would be quite difficult.

Moreover, they seem like the kind of people who remember better days when that stretch of Bancroft supported thriving businesses, but who are oblivious to the fact that developing a retail zone in an otherwise challenged and blighted stretch requires many millions of dollars to pull off. Simply making one nice building will not overcome many years of area decline, not to mention the higher gang/drug/crime activity levels in that BUMA neighborhood.

Who wants to start taking bets on if and when this place burns down?

Well, for the right odds... it looks kind of flammable, don't you think?

Not me on fire bets.

What surprises me, though, is that there is still a good deal of metal in this open and vacant building. In an age when scrap metal thieves steal manhole covers and try to strip metal from buildings that have occupants, I would not expect to see so much readily available metal in this place.

My favorite is the copper thieves that cant tell when there is a lot of juice still running through the wires when they take their bolt cutters to them.