Hot property

Valerie Russ has a Daily News article about land growing less valuable:

A controversial parcel of land for which the Nutter administration wants to pay more than seven million dollars was once the site of a scrap-metal firm that dismantled a ship exposed to atomic-bomb tests in the Marshall Islands after World War Two, the Daily News has learned.
The USS Niagara (photo), a wartime naval-transport ship, in July of 1946 became a "target ship" in Operation Crossroads, in which the US conducted atomic-bomb tests "using nuclear devices very similar to the one dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in August of 1945," according to a document obtained from the Defense Department's Defense Threat Reduction Agency. The US wanted to see what impact the nuclear blasts would have on its own ships and on captured vessels.
Earlier this week, a spokesman for the agency confirmed that the Niagara was sold to a Philadelphia company for scrap metal after the nuclear tests.
"The USS Niagara was sold to Northern Metals" in February of 1950, Daniel Gaffney, a public-affairs official at the agency wrote in an email. He said military records show that "the Niagara was categorized as 'lightly contaminated' after the test."
Following the blasts, the Niagara was decontaminated at sea and later used for conventional weapons testing in the Chesapeake Bay before it was sold to Northern Metals. At the time, Northern Metals was located at 7777 R State Road, the site for which Councilman Bobby Henon introduced a bill to authorize the city to begin talks to buy the waterfront parcel from a company known as 7777 Philadelphia Loan Associates LLC. "Our office is generally aware of the history of the site, but not of specific instances of environmental damage," Henon's spokesman Eric Horvath told the People Paper in an email last night, adding that one "of the reasons the authorization to purchase was important was to allow the city to do due diligence."
In 2007, a company called Churchill Residential Development bought the land for eight million dollars, with plans to build homes. After Churchill defaulted on a thirty million dollar loan, BNP Paribas Bank, of New York City, acquired the property at auction for a hundred dollars in early 2014. Bank spokeswoman Cesaltine Gregorio said she could not elaborate on who owns the land.

Rico says and that's how you make money in real estate...