A year ago, the Cuyahoga Land Bank announced big plans for its Circle East development in East Cleveland: a $12 million laboratory and coworking space bringing 100 high-paying jobs to a city in desperate need of new money. 

The lab project would breathe new life into the Mickey’s building, a vacant car dealership on Euclid Avenue, not far from University Circle. East Cleveland contributed nearly $2.3 million in federal stimulus funds for the $3.5 million renovation, according to the land bank. 

Artwork made from recycled mushrooms was installed on the outside of the building. In a July 2024 news release, a land bank official celebrated the project as “the spark needed to jumpstart investment that will fuel the beginning of the revitalization of this historic city.” 

The spark hasn’t caught yet. 

The land bank planned to close the deal in the fall of 2024. But more than a year after the announcement, the Mickey’s building still hasn’t sold. 

A spokesperson told Signal Cleveland that the land bank was “waiting on the buyer’s financing to come through.” In late July, the spokesperson said the deal was expected to close at the end of the month. Calls and emails to the land bank Aug. 1 went unreturned. 

The developer, Doug Medvetz, told Signal Cleveland in an email Aug. 2 that he was still finalizing the financing and aimed to buy the building by the end of August. 

Meanwhile, investors have sued Medvetz and his company, Verdynt Bio, over a proposed lab project in the Boston area, Massachusetts court records show. 

Medvetz is a chemist and real estate developer from Elyria. His company aims to “build buildings from the scientist’s perspective,” he told Signal Cleveland in a phone interview in mid-June.

He said that he intended to pay his investors back once he secured money for his lab developments. But lining up financing for life science projects has been such a challenge that Verdynt has had to look outside the United States, he said. 

“My goal here is twofold: Build good buildings and get my investors paid back,” he said. 

The land bank was “aware of a legal dispute between Verdynt and some of its investors,” spokesperson Rachel Trem wrote in an email to Signal Cleveland.

“We do not anticipate that those lawsuits will have any impact on Verdynt’s ability to do the project,” she wrote.

One of the investor lawsuits against Medvetz was filed in 2023. A suit naming Verdynt was filed two months before the land bank announced the Mickey’s deal in 2024. Another suit against Verdynt was filed two days before the announcement. An architecture firm sued earlier this year.

Lawsuits ‘do not define’ Verdynt, principal says

On a website that is no longer active, Verdynt billed itself as “revolutionizing life science real estate” and “building adaptable spaces for groundbreaking discoveries.”

Verdynt proposed an 11-story lab in Chelsea, Massachusetts, in 2022. It hasn’t gone up. A 2023 project in nearby Medford also hasn’t materialized, according to that city. Three investors and one architect have sued over the Chelsea project, court records show. 

This January, a judge awarded one of those investors a default judgement of nearly $1 million, including attorneys’ fees. Medvetz did not file an answer to the complaint in court, although he did appear at a January hearing, according to court filings.

“These lawsuits do not, they do not define a single ounce of who we are,” Medvetz told Signal Cleveland. “They are investors who are wanting to get paid back, which is fair. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t have filed the lawsuits. What I’m saying is they have gotten a little bit antsy and there’s nothing I can do about that.”

Medvetz said that the original financing fell through for the Chelsea project. But he is now working with another investor “and the funding is going through,” he told Signal Cleveland in an email. 

He said that he has stayed in contact with the land bank — and with attorneys for the investors suing him — as he sought money for the projects. He has put money down with the land bank as a sign that he intends to follow through with the project, he said. 

The East Cleveland project is now in the $9 million to $10 million range, he said. 

The lawsuits against Verdynt and Medvetz do not involve the East Cleveland building. But Medvetz’s work in Cleveland recently came up in a Massachusetts legal dispute that dates back to 2017, before his lab projects. 

In that case, Medvetz promised to make a down payment on his debt to a pair of investors after closing on “a significant transaction in Cleveland, Ohio,” according to a June 2025 joint pretrial filing that appears to have been signed with Medvetz’s initials. 

Medvetz told Signal Cleveland that he did plan to pay those plaintiffs, but “never said from a project in Cleveland.” The lawsuit settled for almost $531,000 in late July 2025, days before the start of trial, records show.

In that case, the plaintiffs’ attorney also filed a May 2025 email exchange in which Medvetz wrote that he had little money to spare.

“Until we have a closed loan there is really nothing to discuss as I do not have the capability to make any payments at the moment,” Medvetz’s email read. “I am aware that I am personally liable but I do not have a bunch of money sitting around and I do not own anything of value.”

Another Boston company called SKYLIIT was set to invest the $12 million in the development and manage the East Cleveland lab, according to the land bank’s news release. A representative from SKYLIIT did not return an email seeking comment, nor did Medvetz’s business partner, Khadijah Hindi.

A ‘new neighborhood’ in East Cleveland

A nonprofit overseen by public officials, the Cuyahoga Land Bank was founded in the wake of the 2008 foreclosure crisis to turn dead real estate to productive use. It demolished thousands of vacant homes across Cuyahoga County and has since turned its attention to rehabilitation and development.

The Mickey’s development anchors the land bank’s Circle East District, which has been advertised as a “new neighborhood” found “at the eastern gateway to University Circle.”

A prior tenant in the building, a coffee shop called Loiter, left following a 2024 legal dispute with the land bank. The shop moved down Euclid Avenue to a former Wendy’s building.

Development can be a sensitive topic for people in East Cleveland, where there are fears that an expanding University Circle will encroach on the historic, if struggling, community that has remained in the city. 

Che Gadison, a former East Cleveland City Council member, described mixed feelings in the city about the project. Some who are “in the know” are supportive of Circle East, she said. Others, including Gadison, feel that their concerns haven’t been addressed. 

Gadison leads the Millionaire’s Row Neighborhood Association, which represents people who live off of Euclid near the Mickey’s building. 

“Residents really don’t know, at least in this area, what’s really going on,” she said.

Reached for comment, a representative in Mayor Lateek Shabazz’s office said that they wanted to gather more information about the project first.

An 11-story tower is proposed in Chelsea

In 2022, Medvetz pitched Chelsea, a Boston suburb, on his plans to build a $267 million laboratory tower on the site of a vacant family-owned restaurant named Floramo’s.

The building wouldn’t be far from a high school, and the company saw an opportunity to work alongside the school district. Verdynt would set aside space for science learning, according to a letter the company submitted to the city’s planning board. 

“Verdynt has offered to spear-head an effort to raise money for the Chelsea Schools Science department,” read the letter, which Signal Cleveland obtained from the City of Chelsea through a public records request. 

When a member of the city planning board asked about Verdynt’s financing at a public meeting, Medvetz offered to share letters from funders.

“We already have institutional financing that will cover 70% of the cost of this building,” he said. 

The board member questioned whether Medvetz had the experience to build such a tower. His past projects were condominiums, she said. 

It was a fair question, Medvetz replied. But he wasn’t doing this alone, he said; he had partners working alongside him. 

“Yes I have not built anything like this,” Medvetz said, “but we already have the team in place.”

That was in July 2022. The Chelsea planning board signed off on the project. Three years later, a fenced-off restaurant still sits on the property.

Medvetz told Signal Cleveland that he had planned to sell the project to a larger developer who could help him learn the ropes — but the market changed. There’s an oversupply of lab projects in the Boston area, and vacancy rates have been rising for years, the management company Colliers reported.

“The market kind of tanked for developers coming in and buying up approved projects like that, as we call them shovel-ready,” Medvetz said. “So we had to pivot and figure out a way to finance the project.” 

Medvetz said that he still planned to develop the Chelsea project and to support the schools.

The planning board member who questioned the project, Sharlene McLean, described her doubts about the proposal in a recent interview.

“There were so many big promises made that I just did not understand how this unproven, residential real estate guy was going to pull off something, a project of this size,” she said. 

Verdynt faces legal judgment and lawsuits

By 2023 and 2024, investors were questioning Verdynt. 

One of the investors, Steven Kelly, sued Verdynt and Medvetz days before the land bank announced the East Cleveland project in July 2024. According to the complaint, Kelly invested $300,000 in the Chelsea project, only to see delays.

“No part of Medvetz’s purported investment opportunity is, or ever was, legitimate,” Kelly’s complaint said.

Medvetz, who is representing himself in the suit, denied that claim in a court filing. He told Signal Cleveland that Kelly’s claims haven’t been proven in court.

“They’re going to say things that make themselves feel better or try to make me look bad,” he said. “That’s their goal because they want me to react in an emotional fashion, and I just don’t do that.”

Kelly filed an amended complaint in March of this year, alleging that Medvetz had failed to pay on a $330,000 legal settlement from the first lawsuit. The case is ongoing. 

In another of the investor lawsuits, brought by a company called Port Development LLC, Verdynt and Medvetz did not answer the complaint in court. A judge awarded the plaintiff a default judgment of just shy of $992,000, including attorneys’ fees and an investment return.

Medvetz, who appeared at a January court hearing in that case, told Signal Cleveland that it would have been a “waste of money” to fight the lawsuit in court. 

“It wasn’t because we were afraid to fight it,” he said. “It’s kind of, no offense, not the highest and best use of my time and resources.”

Since then, Medvetz has agreed to make a $300,000 payment on the judgment once he secures financing from the lender Swiss Providential Trust, according to a recent court filing. 

Medvetz also faces claims from a third investor and an architecture firm from the Chelsea project.

“At the end of the day, these are investments, they are not guarantees,” he said. 

Attorneys for the investors and the architecture company did not return requests for comment.

Medvetz said that he could have walked away after the pandemic and after the Chelsea project didn’t sell, but instead decided to stick it out. 

“I have a business that’s succeeding,” he said. “I am going to pay back the people that helped me get there, and they know that.” 

He added that he wouldn’t stop his work, even if he is “mistreated” in East Cleveland. 

“We love East Cleveland, but there’s about 350 cities that we would invest in,” he said. “So if East Cleveland pushes us away, we’ll just take our money and invest it elsewhere.”