Downtown Blacksburg Building Remains Vacant for 20 Years, Continues Strong Commitment to Doing Absolutely Nothing Tradition

BLACKSBURG, VA — In the middle of one of the busiest, most expensive and most relentlessly discussed downtowns in Southwest Virginia, a four-story building has spent more than two decades performing the economic function of a very large boarded-up object.

The property at 210 N. Main Street formerly housed Sharkey’s Wing & Rib Joint before the restaurant moved next door in 2005. More than twenty years later, the building remains largely vacant and visibly deteriorated, with boarded windows, peeling paint and interior rot conspicuously occupying prime real estate in downtown Blacksburg’s historic district.

It is difficult to find a better physical metaphor for the phrase “housing and commercial space are desperately needed, but the numbers don’t work.”

This is not unlike a statement that we got from a passerby who said, “no one [including buildings] wants to work these days,” as he shook his head and walked away from us muttering angrily and aimlessly about the times we live in.

The building is currently owned by Mao Zijiao, who acquired it in 2023 through a transaction recorded as a deed of gift. Fengs Group Real Estate had purchased the property for $700,000 in 2017. As of May, Blacksburg assessed the property at approximately $676,000, meaning a deteriorating building that has generated little visible activity for decades remains worth considerably more money than most people who walk past it will ever possess simultaneously.

Real estate remains the fascinating economic system where an abandoned building can be worth $676,000 because of all the things somebody could theoretically do with it, while a human being working inside one of those theoretical businesses is advised to cut back on coffee.

The vacancy is especially striking because the building is not some anonymous cinder-block shell on the edge of an industrial park.

It was constructed in 1920 and became home to the original Lyric Theatre in 1922, before the theater relocated to College Avenue in 1930. Its location within the Blacksburg Historic District makes rehabilitation eligible for several forms of assistance, including a partial real-estate tax exemption on added value from renovations, a revitalization grant of up to $20,000, density incentives and tourism-zone rebates.

The town would, in other words, quite like somebody to do something with the damn thing.

Officials have tried.

Blacksburg planning director Andrew Warren told Cardinal News the town wants to see the property “activated,” although the ultimate decision remains with its private owner. Town and Montgomery County officials have discussed incentives, while a state-supported flood study may clarify development conditions because the property sits within floodwaters associated with the creek running beneath downtown Blacksburg.

“Activated” is municipal language for “Please, for the love of God, put a business in there.”

The central obstacle is not difficult to understand.

A 2019 historic-preservation application estimated rehabilitation at approximately $1.5 million. Deputy Town Manager Matt Hanratty explained that prospective buyers face a simple financial mismatch: purchase price plus rehabilitation costs can exceed what the finished property could reasonably return through rents while carrying construction and permanent financing. A previous proposal to renovate the building into an Asian restaurant ultimately went nowhere.

That is the dark little punchline beneath much of modern real estate.

A community can desperately need a building.

A developer can theoretically make the building useful.

Customers can theoretically support businesses inside it.

The town can offer incentives.

And the bank can still look at the spreadsheet and say:

Nah.

Meanwhile, deterioration has become sufficiently serious that Blacksburg has issued maintenance violations. In 2024, after concerns that glass and debris might fall onto pedestrians, the town hired a contractor to board upper-floor windows and perform other repairs, then billed the owner $1,500. Warren said inspectors focus particularly on conditions presenting health, safety and welfare risks rather than routine cosmetic neglect.

Thus taxpayers have reached the familiar American arrangement where private property remains private right up until pieces of it begin threatening to fall on the public.

Then everybody becomes a stakeholder.

The story carries more weight locally because Blacksburg spends so much time discussing growth, housing shortages, redevelopment and graduate retention.

Virginia Tech continually replenishes the town with students, workers, researchers and visitors. The surrounding New River Valley is trying to transform that transient population into something more durable: residents who graduate, find work, make art, start businesses, raise families, go out at night and decide that Southwest Virginia is somewhere worth remaining rather than merely somewhere they once had an email address ending in .edu.

That requires places.

Not merely housing units, but storefronts, studios, bars, restaurants, offices, venues and the ordinary semi-public interiors where a collection of people gradually becomes a community.

And right in the middle of downtown sits four stories of potential.

Potential is wonderful.

It has very low maintenance costs as long as nobody expects it to become reality.

The property also illustrates why simplistic arguments about development rarely survive contact with actual development. It would be easy to blame an absentee owner, banks, preservation rules, floodplain constraints, construction costs, taxes, rent expectations or municipal bureaucracy.

The irritating answer appears to be all of them, in varying amounts.

Historic buildings cost money to rehabilitate.

Flood risks complicate construction.

Financing costs matter.

Owners control their property.

Towns cannot simply confiscate buildings because they look shitty.

And leaving a major downtown property to deteriorate for twenty years is still an absurd outcome for a community that simultaneously insists it needs more usable space.

The market has spoken.

Unfortunately, what it said was:

“Board up the windows and wait.”

For the moment, 210 N. Main remains for sale.

Its future is uncertain.

Its past includes one of Blacksburg’s historic theaters, a restaurant and a century of downtown life.

Its present contribution is mainly providing residents with something to point at while explaining the phrase “What the hell is going on with that building?”

In a town urgently debating what it wants to become, perhaps the most conspicuous property downtown remains the one still waiting for somebody to decide what it is.