Fourth time’s the charm? After other deals fell through, this ex-Columbus school is sold
The Muscogee County School District has agreed for the fourth time in the past eight years to sell the same Columbus property to a different developer.
During its monthly meeting Jan. 21, the MCSD board unanimously approved Superintendent David Lewis’ recommendation to sell the property containing the former Rose Hill School, 433 21st St., to Olympia Development LLC of Albertville, Alabama, for $100,000.
Minus the 7% commission to realtor Coldwell Banker Commercial KPDD of Columbus, the school district’s net revenue for this deal will be $93,000.
The Rose Hill property comprises 1.9 acres and includes a 135-year-old building covering 25,547 square feet on three floors (two stories and a basement).
The MCSD board previously approved a sale agreement with the following buyers:
- In 2017, for $535,000 from a limited partnership called Rose Hill Redevelopment, led by principal partner Celadon Holdings of Chicago.
- In 2020, for $350,000 from Oracle Consulting Services of Louisville, Kentucky.
- In 2022, for $375,000 from Peak Partners of Atlanta.
Why those buyers didn’t close on their purchase, or why the newly agreed upon price was significantly lower than previous agreements, was unclear. Lewis, MCSD Chief Operations Officer Travis Anderson and MCSD communications director Kimberly Wright didn’t reply before publication to the Ledger-Enquirer’s questions emailed to them Jan. 21.
Although the MCSD board unanimously approved the recommendation without public discussion during the Jan. 21 meeting, District 6 representative Mark Cantrell asked about the steep drop in price at the board’s Jan. 13 work session.
Cantrell asked, to no avail, for the buyer to pay the realtor commission instead of MCSD.
“We go from $300,000 down to $100,000 — that’s a $200,000 drop there from the asking price,” Cantrell told his fellow board members. “That’s a big drop in anybody’s book. … I’m not saying that to make it or break it, but I would like to clear 100 grand on the property.”
According to the document attached to the MCSD board’s agenda, Olympia Development plans to build a “multifamily community” on the Rose Hill property by using “competitive funds provided by the Georgia Department of Community Affairs” through its housing credit program.
Abandoned school’s impact, hope for its future
Neil Richardson welcomes this news.
Richardson is executive director of SafeHouse Minisries, which helps homeless, addicted and formerly incarcerated residents. Headquartered at 2101 Hamilton Road, SafeHouse is a 2-minute walk from Rose Hill, so he has been concerned about the abandoned school’s impact on the neighborhood.
“The school board got better at securing the building in the last year or two,” Richardson told the Ledger-Enquirer. “But before then, people are jumping the fence, breaking the windows, staying inside anytime that you can find an abandoned place to go.
“And it doesn’t even mean that they’re all going to be homeless, but you get drug addicts or low-level drug activists looking for a place that they can just get their customers and keep them nearby. That’s horrible. It’s horrible for the whole community, but it puts a stress on us because, if we’ve got drug dealers trying to use certain properties or abandoned buildings, then that just means that they’re preying on our clients, and we might have some people who are not completely into recovery yet.”
That’s why Richardson hopes this fourth attempt for a buyer to close the deal and redevelop Rose Hill comes to fruition.
“Having that turn into something that will be positive for the community, it’s not the only apartment complex, if you will, that would be like that in this area,” he said. “But as we get our clients to save enough money, and we can use some HUD vouchers to help them get into housing, that can be a source for us to take some of our clients and get them into housing and still be able to come over here and share their testimony with somebody who’s still struggling. So this is going to work out great for I think us in the neighborhood.”
Richardson considered trying to have SafeHouse buy the property, but it ultimately didn’t make sense for his organization.
“I went in there with an architect, and the cost of fixing that building, rehabbing, changing the plumbing and all the wiring was just way more than we think we could have come up with,” he said. “I mean, that kind of a capital project, I don’t think (would have been getting) a bang for the buck. What we would do in services from there wouldn’t have been a smart investment, but we looked.”
This story was originally published January 23, 2025 at 8:56 AM.
