A church that has competed to buy the long vacant Oak Grove Elementary School property in South Side has been eliminated from contention — leaving an apartment developer as the only bidder with an offer still under review.

City Hall has notified the Redeemer Assembly of Jesus Christ that it has rejected its bid for the building in the 2200 block of Ingram Avenue, Frank Wilson, a church member, disclosed Monday night at community meeting the Richmond NAACP organized on the building’s future.

Mr. Wilson, also the newly installed vice president of the Oak Grove Civic Association, told the 25 people who attended the meeting at Hickory Hill Recreation Center that the church wanted to use the building to provide needed expansion space for the growing day care and Head Start programs that it now hosts at the sanctuary on nearby Fairfax Avenue.

Those programs have taken over most of the space and required the church to limit or reduce other programming for working adults and retirees, he said.

The church in February offered to buy the building for $275,000, with a plan to invest $1.5 million to renovate and improve the childhood education facilities, while also providing space for a community center with senior programming.

Mr. Wilson said that if the community wants more child care services and more space for its events, they must rally to have their voices heard.

Though no decisions have been made, City Hall is still reviewing the second bid from Lynx Ventures, a developer that has been involved in South Side for at least two decades.

The company has proposed to buy the property for $500,000 with the goal of transforming the building into 240 units of affordable or rent-restricted housing that also is in high demand in this part of the city.

Bernard Harkless, a principal in Lynx Ventures, along with father and son Rick and John Gregory and Kelly Roberts, said 15

townhouses also are proposed to be built on the site. John Gregory said the townhomes would potentially be targeted to households whose annual incomes are 40 percent of the annual regional median income, or in the $30,000 to $35,000 range.

Mr. Wilson acknowledged that Lynx Ventues had offered to provide room in the building for the child care programs, but said the church had to decline the offer because the company’s proposed development would wipe out the outdoor recreational space that the children also would need.

Barbara Starkey-Goode, newly installed president of the civic group, said the association opposes the apartment proposal and believes it would bring unwanted noise and traffic to the surrounding single- family neighborhood that is predominantly Black.

Still, Mr. Gregory noted that the Lynx proposal is in tune with the city’s goal of boosting the number of rent-restricted units that could enable lower earning households to remain in the city.