Lancaster Outbid on Unfinished Developments : Real estate: But plans remain to burn 22 partly built houses for a movie, freeing the city from demolition costs.
Lancaster has been outbid in its attempt to buy the remains of two partly built, abandoned housing tracts--but that doesn’t change plans to partially burn one of them for a movie, city and federal officials said Monday.
Officials of the federal government’s Resolution Trust Corp., which seized the tracts after the failure of the savings and loan that financed them, declined to reveal who submitted the winning bids.
The city of Lancaster last month offered an undisclosed amount to buy the properties, the never-occupied Legends tract and the nearly finished portion of the Silverado tract.
The RTC, however, has an agreement with Warner Bros. allowing the studio to set fire to about a dozen structures in the Legends tract--thus both ridding the city of eyesores that would otherwise need expensive demolition and providing the studio with a conflagration scene for the movie “Lethal Weapon III.”
RTC officials said Monday that the pending sale to the unidentified bidders will not interfere with the movie makers’ plans to use the uncompleted houses for the fire scene, for which the studio will pay the RTC $25,000. Consent to the RTC-Warner Bros. agreement was a precondition of the sales offer, the RTC said.
City officials received the news in a telephone call Friday from Graimark Realty Advisors of Philadelphia, the company managing the property for the RTC. The RTC does not intend to reveal the identity of the high bidders, or the price offered, until the sale closes escrow, said Dennis Davenport, Lancaster’s assistant city manager.
Lancaster had planned to demolish the 22 partly built houses at the Legends tract, at 30th Street West and Avenue J, to start a new project. Because the Silverado project at 30th Street West and Avenue L was nearly finished, the city had wanted to complete and sell its 21 houses and two lots.
Davenport said he assumed that the potential buyers of the two tracts have similar plans and would move ahead reasonably soon, given their potential investments. Davenport, however, acknowledged that the city has no guarantees of just how soon the private buyers might remedy the eyesores.
Graimark had set minimum bids for the tracts at a combined $6.1 million, $4.5 million for the 40-acre Legends site and $1.6 million for the Silverado lots. The RTC acquired them from Pennsylvania-based Hill Financial Savings Assn., which the agency seized and liquidated in 1989.
