In Lackawanna, St. Barbara faces uncertain future
Lackawanna city officials explored converting St. Barbara Catholic Church on Ridge Road into a new City Hall but determined it would be too costly for taxpayers.
A proposal for a performing arts center in the church didn’t advance very far, either.
So the majestic church, which sits slightly elevated over the empty houses and grassy lots in the surrounding neighborhood, remains unoccupied, waiting to be reused.
“We’ve had bites on the rectory, we’ve had bites on the parish center,” said the Rev. John F. Kasprzak, pastor of Queen of Angels, the parish that formed from a merger of St. Barbara, St. Michael the Archangel, Our Lady of Grace and St. Hyacinth. “The church is going to be tough.”
The large stone church served as the backdrop to a symposium Tuesday on future possibilities for reusing dozens of former Catholic worship sites closed within the past year by the Diocese of Buffalo.
The diocese has sold several smaller churches, including a few rural sites that will be converted into single family homes.
But grand churches in struggling urban areas are often difficult and expensive to maintain, and they face significant obstacles to adaptive reuse.
“The bigger places you’re going to have a problem with, such as St. Barbara’s,” said Lackawanna Mayor Norman L. Polanski Jr. “Yes, I’d like to see something done there — that was the church of my grandparents and my parents. But reality is reality . . . I’m looking to get the city the best building I can at the least amount of money. It was too costly to try and retrofit the building for our needs.”
The symposium, sponsored by the diocese, attracted about 100 people, including architects, developers and heads of nonprofit agencies.
Rosalinda Lamberty and Wayne Willard gave an overview of federal funding available through the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for supportive housing at the sites, and Thomas Van Nortwick, assistant commissioner of the Buffalo regional office of the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal, provided an explanation of possible state funding sources.
They all offered the same caveat: Don’t expect funding to be simple.
“Today, you’re not going to do a project without multiple sources of funding,” said Van Nortwick.
The state and federal funding generally comes from capital budgets, meaning they shouldn’t be affected heavily by the current budget problems in Albany and Washington, D. C.
But Van Nortwick noted that investors in the state’s tax credits programs “are much more leery about everything today, including investing in low-income housing.”
Tax credit programs induce companies to redevelop properties by offering tax credits in return.
Christine Cappella-Peters of the state Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation and Jason Yots of Preservation Studios and Yots Law Firm discussed the use of state and federal historic tax credits to help pay for adaptive reuses.
The state’s Environmental Protection Fund has awarded $62 million in tax credits to 420 adaptive reuse projects, leveraging a total investment of $187 million, said Capella-Peters.
The investor market for historic tax credits has remained vibrant, despite the stock market turmoil, Yots said.
But he also cautioned that there are limits in federal tax credits for tax-exempt property uses, and eligibility must be determined prior to the completion of the project.
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