It was just too late for Detroit's Woodland Apartments.

The building near Highland Park at 31 Woodland St., which has been vacant since the 1990s, will be torn down after an ultimately futile effort to spare it from the wrecking ball.

This comes after the city issued a request for proposals to redevelop the property off Woodward Avenue a little over a year ago and received a bid from one of the largest affordable housing developers in the nation, The Michaels Organization out of Marlton, N.J.

"When we received the property from the Detroit Housing Commission, in a transaction that improved the performance of the commission, it was already approved by HUD for demolition. The building's roof had caved in and the appraised value of the property was zero," said Arthur Jemison, director of city services and infrastructure under Mayor Mike Duggan.

"But we wanted to see if it was possible to sell the property at a low cost for redevelopment. We had a proposal from a capable developer, but when we revisited the property with them, we both decided that the property was too damaged and that it would not be a strong enough candidate for low-income housing tax credits. Now, the city is moving forward with the demolition to remove the blighted structure from the neighborhood."

The 44-unit, four-story building was constructed in 1923. The RFP said the city was looking for developers to rehabilitate the building, or tear it down and redevelop the site. It sits on 0.86 acres and is 36,000 square feet, according to CoStar Group Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based real estate information service.

The City Council is considering a funding request of $506,523 in federal dollars to tear down the building by Detroit-based Gayanga Co. A timeframe to tear the building down has not yet been determined, although the Detroit Building Authority is working on that, according to a city spokesperson.

The building was the less prominent of a pair that were offered for redevelopment in December 2017, with the other being the hulking Lee Plaza tower on West Grand Boulevard at Lawton Street. After some hiccups, including a crop of bids that the city did not deem to be viable, it ultimately tapped Detroit-based The Roxbury Group and Ethos Development Partners to turn the long-vacant high-rise into a 180-unit apartment building in a project that's expected to cost north of $50 million.