When Scott Nichols moved into his condo on the eighth floor of the Park Building, a sense of optimism carried him and his wife through the $373,000 purchase.
It was 2016. Cleveland was on the national stage, its downtown on the upswing. They could see a renovated Public Square right outside the bedroom and living room windows.
After a 2009 takeover and conversion into 21 luxury condos, the Park Building, with its turn-of-the-century wood trim and brass stylings, fit the elegance those seeking city center living were willing to pay for.
At least until they discovered how bad of shape the building was actually in.
“My wife and I decided, ‘Well, let’s buy it, and then, you know, if we really don’t like it, you know, we can sell it even if we lose a little money,’” Nichols, a retired federal investigator, recalled recently.
“After we bought it, that changed,” he said. “I didn’t do the proper due diligence on the physical state of the building like I should have.”
“People assumed the building was structurally sound,” Kyle Tipton, a retired anesthesiologist who moved to the fourth floor in 2016, added. “But that obviously wasn’t the case.”
As years of litigation against the building’s then owner, Howells & Howells, unveiled, the Park Building’s façade, roof and basement garage were in need of repairs. The penthouse suite originally planned for its ninth floor had not been touched since Howells opened the building for tenants in 2009. They would sell most of the property about a decade later (and keep the ninth floor). In their place, a revised Master Association, a collective of tenants, took control of the building.
When it came down to brass tacks, the 122-year-old structure became mostly the responsibility of the Park Building Condominium Association. Today, it’s an HOA on urban steroids. Most suburban homeowners groups deal with lawn-care disputes or front-yard signage rules. But, in an age when most downtown buildings are maintained by large management groups, the Park Building has had to rely on the hope and pockets of a handful of tenants.
Which has put the condo owners of the Park in a bit of a predicament as they trudge through their third court case in 12 years: how to come to terms with who pays when, as a 2023 engineering survey revealed, its brick is breaking off, its masonry is bowing, its lobby and garage are flooding and its roof is in dire need of fixes.
“When I heard that, I wanted to cut my throat,” Nichols said. “That’s just how I felt.”
“We’ve spent a lot of money to stay downtown. We really made a financial commitment,” he added. “Some of us have put in over half a million dollars in these condos.”
“We weren’t leaving,” Nichols said.
Park’s 21 condo owners were told it could cost some $2.5 million to finish the roof, redecorate the lobby and keep the façade from collapsing onto the sidewalk. An untold amount would need to go into the basement garage to remedy its peeling paint, cracked floors, leaking water lines that formed puddles and crumbling posts now wrapped in duct tape.
The only problem was that the garage’s owner, a Miami-based real estate investment group, was unwilling to pay for it.
On October 23, 2025, all of Park’s condo owners received a letter in the mail informing them they had a week to move their cars out. They were shocked. After all, a master agreement dictated that not only did the garage owner, MK Park Investments, LLC, owe 10 percent towards the façade repair; it also could not simply push Park’s condo owners out of the garage it owned, according to a complained filed in Nov. 2025.
Meanwhile, Cleveland’s Department of Building & Housing was working on its own case. All of Park’s garage problems—floor to ceiling—were in violation of city code that would result in MK Park being charged with “multiple” first-degree misdemeanors, Building and Housing Chief Sally Martin O’Tolle told Scene.
Charges that ultimately stem from Park’s scattered responsibility.
“They have this convoluted ownership structure that makes it somewhat challenging,” Martin-O’Toole said. “They’re litigating whose responsibility is it, they’re pointing fingers at each other. And so I’m sure that is creating some struggles.”
“Either way, they need to fix the garage,” she said, “and the falling façade.”
An appeal for the code violation listed a Christina Rubbiero, a Miami-based realtor, as signatory. When called, Rubbiero told Scene she would have to consult her laywer, Stephan Babik, about speaking to press.
In a phone call, Babik told Scene that mediation is to be attempted to resolve the case. “Beyond that,” he said, “I can’t comment any further.”
For now, Nichols and Tipton, the condo owners, seem resolute they’ll have to cover a decent portion of costs to keep stable the building they want to live in indefinitely. Those costs over the past three years, Nichols said, have been “about $100,000 per unit.”
“We got to fix the roof. We got no choice,” he said, sitting across from Tipton at his kitchen table overlooking the square. A faint jackhammering wafts in, but for the most part its quiet. “We got to fix the facade,” Nichols said. “We’ve got no choice.”
At least that’s what those two have decided. Three other tenants, they said, are planning to leave their Park Building homes in the near future, strung out on its ownership structure and legal drama.
“No one wants to sell until the scaffolding is down,” Tipton said.
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