CLEVELAND — Regina Weaver still can’t quite believe it when she walks into her apartment.
In April, she moved into the Arch at Saint Michael, a reimagined school building in the Clark-Fulton neighborhood, on Cleveland’s near-West Side. For the first time, she has a kitchen island. New countertops. Soaring ceilings. And neighbors who feel like family.
“I just turned 64 years old,” she said. “And this is the happiest I’ve ever been.”
This week, workers were putting the finishing touches on the renovated school and a former convent next door. Outside, a tenant tended bright flowers against a backdrop of conversation, a soft mix of English and Spanish.
Forty-six apartments for low-income seniors — age 62 and up — now fill the spaces where nuns once slept and children learned.
“This, here, is a dream come true,” Weaver said.
For the project team, that dream was more than six years in the making.
As city officials consider the future of 18 newly vacant school buildings, including several landmark properties, the Arch at Saint Michael shows what’s possible — but also how tricky historic preservation can be.
CHN Housing Partners, a nonprofit developer, started working on the project back in 2020. The building, which morphed from a school into offices in the early 2000s, was sitting empty. It had been through foreclosure, an unsuccessful auction and a private sale.
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“We thought this was gonna be a $17.8 million development,” Jennifer Chandler, the group’s vice president of real estate development, said during a tour of the project. “And we had all the sources lined up for it. That was not the case.”
Between the pandemic, soaring construction costs and other challenges, that price tag climbed to $23.8 million by late summer of 2024 — when CHN finally closed on the deal. Then the construction crew started opening up the walls of the school, built in 1906.
And the renovation bill climbed again, to $27.8 million.
In some places, mortar had turned into dust. Workers had to dismantle and rebuild exterior walls, while salvaging the original stone.
“This building, just because of the bones of it, there were so many challenges … the needs for structural repair and stabilization that no one will ever see,” said Brian Grambort, a principal with Hiti, DiFrancesco and Siebold, a Cleveland-based architecture firm.
“Working through a design, we do that as part of our job,” he added. “But it’s those unforeseens that really throw projects curveballs.”
Chandler said CHN isn’t making any money on the project. The nonprofit gave up its developer fee to plug a funding gap.
The deal also involves federal and state tax credits for historic preservation; low-income housing tax credits; $4.3 million in city loans; a $450,000 Cuyahoga County loan; and additional funding from sources including KeyBank and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD.
“It takes a village to make this happen,” Chandler said. “And we have a phenomenal village.”
Rents for the one-bedroom apartments are set at $674 a month. The tenants pay no more than 30% of their income. The rest of the money comes from HUD, which established the rent levels. The income cap for tenants shakes out to about $35,000 to $40,000 a year.
The apartments are fully leased. Many tenants, like Weaver, already lived in the area.
“I struggled most of my life, you know? Working two jobs, trying to pay bills, put food on the table,” said Weaver, who raised four children, cleaned apartment buildings and was a nurse’s aide.
At her old apartment building, she loved the manager. But she worried about safety, pest problems and making ends meet. Now, she can take a deep breath — surrounded by her plants, colorful artwork and the natural light that pours in through her windows.
“I wish everyone could see my face when I walked in here,” she said. “My daughter, she was with me, and she was like ‘Oh my God! Is this only for old people?’”
Chandler said some tenants have ties to the old school, which closed in 2003. The school was affiliated with Saint Michael the Archangel Church, which is still operating down the street.
“People were really, really excited when this opened,” she said. “And we actually had some residents that were brought to tears moving into this building, because they’ve seen this anchor in the community for years just falling into disrepair.”
Across the city, other former schools are waiting to be reimagined — or demolished. The Cleveland Metropolitan School District is preparing to raze a few historic schools after redevelopment projects fell apart because of economic changes and financing hurdles.
The Arch at Saint Michael was one of the last projects in the Cleveland area to use historic-preservation tax credits alongside tax credits for low-income housing. In late 2022, the General Assembly blocked developers from tapping both programs for the same deal.
At that point, CHN Housing Partners already had some funding pledges lined up.
Still, Chandler said, “there are a lot of things we would do differently.”
Now Cleveland and its school district are trying to find takers for 12 vacant school properties, including three historic buildings. The city solicited pitches from developers in May, and a selection committee is interviewing groups that responded.
City officials expect to bring a list of recommendations to the school district by the end of September. The city and the district also are exploring plans for a handful of vacant buildings that were not part of the request for developer qualifications.
“Our team has been working with CMSD and the broader community on repurposing many of those sites for housing, mixed-use development,” Mayor Justin Bibb told News 5 this week. “Some sites may be used for future city facilities, and so we want to make sure that we’re thoughtful, purposeful and they become new anchors of long-term community development.”
But, he cautioned, that will take time.
“It really is taking a structure that has so many memories, a building that has so many memories, and repurposing it — and bringing it back to life,” Grambort said during a tour of the Arch at Saint Michael.
Weaver never saw the building, on Scranton Road, when it was a school.
Now she’s living in part of a former classroom, in a neighborhood landmark reborn.
“I was lucky that I got picked,” she said. “It’s a very special place. It’s brand new. It’s beautiful.”
Michelle Jarboe is the business growth and development reporter at News 5 Cleveland. Follow her on X @MJarboe or email her at Michelle.Jarboe@wews.com.
