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Warren has spent two years trying to keep a hospital on East Market Street. That effort was right. A city this size should not have to send its emergencies, its births, and its paychecks somewhere else.
It is time to say out loud what a lot of people already know. The building we still call Trumbull Memorial Hospital is not, at this moment, on a path back to being a hospital.
The TMH campus has passed through Forum Health, Steward Health Care, and Insight. Steward's bankruptcy closed the doors. Insight took over, closed, briefly reopened an emergency room, then surrendered its Ohio hospital license earlier this year. The real estate is not the city's. It is owned by Medical Properties Trust. City Council cannot vote the buildings back into an operating hospital, and it cannot vote them into a subdivision. Anyone who tells you otherwise is skipping the hard part.
Silence is not a strategy. Mayor Franklin has already put that in writing. In mid-September, he sent urgent letters to Medical Properties Trust about vacancy, the company's duty to maintain the campus, and the condition of a building that continues to deteriorate. Since the hospital closed, Warren police have answered more than 30 service calls there. Left empty, that number is more likely to rise than fall. An unsecured medical campus of that size is not a quiet landmark. It is a public-safety problem on East Market Street.
The large systems people name when they talk about a rescue have not taken this campus. University Hospitals has said it has no plans to expand into Trumbull County, or buy the buildings. Mercy Health is building emergency capacity in Champion and adding walk-in care in Warren. The Cleveland Clinic has physicians and outpatient visits in the Valley and has shown no interest in operating TMH. If one of those systems has a signed plan I have not seen, they should put it on the table. Until then, "someone will take TMH" is a wish, not a schedule. The city is not a real-estate developer. That work belongs to the private sector. We are still left with the mess.
An empty hospital is not neutral. It costs the city the wage-tax receipts that used to come from the people who worked there. That hit showed up in the city's own numbers after the closure. It costs the neighborhood in appearance and morale. It costs families in longer drives when minutes matter. And it costs us the habit of waiting for a partner to change its mind.
I was elected at-large. The whole city is my district, including people who still hope that campus can be a hospital again. I respect that hope. I do not speak for the mayor, for Council, or for the county. I am putting one idea in public because the public should hear it before it hardens into a rumor.
Here is the idea. Think in phases, not in a single wrecking-ball vote.
The houses I have in mind are not duplexes and not apartments. They are single-family homes of the size and finish Trumbull Neighborhood Partnership has already built on Drexel Avenue N.W., on the old Emerson Elementary ground -- houses meant for owner-occupants, not a rental complex. A project of that kind is how a private builder puts in a new street and underground utilities. Once those improvements meet city standards, the city would take them over as public streets and public lines.
Phase one: start that kind of housing on the former East Junior High grounds next to the hospital and leave the hospital buildings standing while the first street is built. That school land is an estimate -- about 5 to 6 acres -- and I will not pretend a survey is already in hand. On a yard that size, the first phase should be only as many Drexel-style houses as the lot can carry well. Warren City Schools have already started this reuse. Emerson is the example. East Junior High can be the next conversation -- with the school board, through the same surplus-land path Warren has already used with the Port Authority and the Land Bank.
Phase two: if no qualified hospital operator comes forward, take the hospital buildings down and add the same kind of single-family homes on that 9.16-acre campus. The two civic sites together are about 14 acres. That is the land that can grow into a neighborhood on the order of 60 homes -- streets, yards, tax parcels, people who buy groceries in Warren and send children to Warren schools.
Homes will not replace a hospital. Without an interested operator, there will be no hospital on that site either. Homes will not restore every job that left with Steward and Insight. They would do something two boarded civic sites cannot do. They would put the land back to work. Warren already knows how long a closed hospital can sit and become an eyesore. We lived through that, on Tod Avenue with the old St. Joseph Riverside buildings that sat empty for many years before it was torn down. We should not need a second lesson with a vacant schoolyard next door.
I am not naive about the work. Hospital demolition is expensive. There is asbestos. There is remediation. There is a landlord that has to sell or partner. There is a school board that has to declare land surplus if it has not already. There is zoning, water, sewer, and a builder who can finish houses people can afford. None of that is a Council press release. All of that is why this has to start as a public conversation instead of a back-room sketch.
There is also a fairness question. People who work at Kimberly-Clark, at the plants still coming online such as Foxconn, and in the shops that already run in this city need a place to live that is not a 40-minute drive. If we keep every large parcel in reserve for a use that may never return, we should at least admit that choice. Land that produces nothing is not a memorial. It is a vacancy.
I want the conversation to be honest about healthcare, too. Losing inpatient beds in Warren is a serious loss. Mercy Health -- St. Joseph Warren Hospital, at 667 Eastland Ave. SE, is carrying more of the load. Mercy's Howland Medical Center on State Route 46 and the Champion emergency project will add capacity. That is not the same as a full hospital on East Market Street. Anyone who tells residents that housing on that site solves the medical problem is selling a different product than I am. Housing would address a land problem, a blight problem, a security problem, and part of a tax-base problem. The medical problem still has to be argued with the systems that actually run hospitals.
That is why I am asking, not announcing.
If you believe a hospital can still return to that site, say so -- and say who you think will run it, with what license, and on what timetable. If you think the honest next use is a first street of Drexel-style houses on the old East Junior High land, then more of those houses on the hospital ground if TMH never reopens, say that too. Write the paper. Write me. Come to Council. This is not a vote. It is the beginning of one.
I will take what I hear back to my colleagues. Some of them will disagree with me. That is the job. First-term or fifth-term, an at-large member is not required to wait for a perfect consensus before asking the people who live here what they want done with the empty civic land they pass every day.
Warren does not have to choose between remembering TMH and having a future on that ground. We can honor what the hospital and East Junior High were and still refuse to let empty buildings set the city's ceiling.
Gregory Thumm is an at-large member of Warren City Council. The views expressed are his own.