After buying the historic State Theatre property in February and making some improvements, the city of South Bend is ready to look for interested developers. State law requires the city to first offer it for sale as is.
On Thursday the city administration will ask the redevelopment commission to publicly list the building for $830,000. That’s the average of two appraisals that were done. In a process spelled out in state law, if no one files a bid the city likes, it can then request proposals from developers that would involve incentives from the city.
The city bought the Michigan Street property for $800,000 and has spent nearly $200,000 to repair the roof and clean up debris from interior demolitions that were done by a prior owner.
Caleb Bauer is the city’s community investment executive director. He says ideally someone would return it to a performance venue but the city realizes that the profit margins in that might not be large enough to cover the renovation costs.
“It’s going to take a unique proposal to bring it back to life," Bauer says. "There have been discussions about a restaurant or other entertainment-style uses. We’ll see what interest there is and what ideas come forth through disposition and then through the request-for-proposal process.”
