A one-time buyer for the closed Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Roseville is back with a new plan for a self-storage facility that includes preserving the historic building.
Brighton-based Roseville Storage Center has submitted plans to the city’s building department that call for the former Sacred Heart church and school to be rehabilitated. Plans also call for the purchase and redevelopment of the old Christian Financial Credit Union into a sister-storage facility.
“We are working on purchasing the property from the Archdiocese of Detroit and then we have a rezoning request in front of the city for next month,” said Todd Clark , a managing member of Roseville Storage Center.
Holly Fournier, a spokesperson for the Archdiocese which owns the church and school, said she can confirm the Sacred Heart building is under contract with a potential buyer. “We can share more if/when the sale is completed,” she wrote in an email.
The purchase price for the church and school were redacted from the city documents sought under a Freedom of Information request.
Closed since 2017, the property has become dilapidated, with bricks falling from the crumbling structure and trash scattered behind an outdoor wall and elsewhere.
According to rezoning applications filed with the City Clerk’s Office, the renovations will include indoor self-storage units, enclosed outdoor storage, administrative offices and retail uses. Some new construction would also be included.
Site plan documents show the former Christian Financial, residential building, school building and tower building will all remain with various proposed improvements.
Christian Financial had a branch at Utica Road and Gratiot for many years. It merged with Motor City Co-Op Credit Union in 2020.
After our merger with Motor City Co-Op Credit Union, it made sense to consolidate our two locations since they were very close in proximity,” said Rebekah Monroe. “In addition, the former Motor City location at Gratiot and Brohl Street was newer, so we kept that location and closed the one at Gratiot and Utica.”
Both the church and the former credit union headquarters are on Gratiot Avenue, separated by two-lane Utica Road.
Roseville Storage officials acknowledged they were going to purchase the land in 2020. Then the Covid crisis struck and the company backed out of the deal. In the meantime, the costs of most construction projects escalated and other developers lost interest.
“Now we’re going back to Roseville,” Clark said. “This time around, we’re going to work to preserve the existing building, which is a church.”
Roseville Storage goes before the Roseville Planning Commission on Aug. 7 to formally request approval for the change in zoning from office space to conditional B-3 for the credit union and single-family residential to conditional B-3 business for the church.
Sacred Heart Catholic Church, a pillar of the Roseville community for decades, was closed in 2017 in a consolidation plan inspired by declining attendance and related finances. An agreement to convert it into a storage facility with a retail center was reached in late 2020.
The City Council in January 2020 approved a conditional rezoning for a $9 million, 116,700-square-foot storage site. My Space Self Storage, as the company was known then, presented drawings to the council that showed the bell tower of the building would possibly be retained in a development plan.
There was a public outcry over the church’s closure in 2017 and more when word leaked out about it being replaced by a self-storage facility. Supporters had their hopes renewed to save the building when news broke that the storage plan had fallen through.
A second anticipated buyer who later backed out apparently had started to work on the building without gaining approval from Roseville officials, and the city has issued a stop-work order for the property at the corner of Utica Road and Gratiot Avenue.
It turns out whoever those workers were, they had failed to apply for building permits and were not authorized to be in the structure. In September, Roseville affixed orange stickers and stop-work orders to the church’s doors.
