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In real estate terms, the Alberta government’s mothballed remand centre in downtown Edmonton is a stigmatized property — one that has sat mostly empty for three years come April.

With the prospects of finding new life for a building with a dark history and specialized construction no clearer than when it closed in April 2013, calls are growing to demolish the old jail.

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“We’ve taken a look at it for a couple of different things, and it is a very difficult building to repurpose, just because of the way it was built,” Mayor Don Iveson said Friday.

“Generally, I don’t like replacing buildings if they have useful life left in them, and structurally it’s got lots of life, but it’s really hard to imagine a good use for that building that doesn’t come with a ton of cost to repurpose and a lot of issues of trauma for people who’ve been in that building previously.”

Three years after prisoners moved to a high-tech replacement facility in suburban northwest Edmonton, the province still does not know what to do with the old centre.