Thomas Breen file photos
LCI Board Member Nadine Horton (left): "Rewarding bad behavior." LCI Director Arlevia Samuel (right): "Investing in community.”
Nora Grace Flood photo
The derelict former Monterey Jazz club on Dixwell.
A debate about how to revitalize the Dixwell neighborhood without rewarding a megalandlord for bad behavior has delayed a key vote on the Elicker Administration’s plans to buy four rundown properties for a combined sum of $1.3 million.
That was the outcome of the latest Livable City Initiative’s (LCI) Board of Directors meeting, which was held online Wednesday evening via Zoom.
The board was scheduled to take a vote on the city’s plan to pay $1.3 million in federal funds to affiliates of Ocean Management in order to publicly acquire 262, 263, 265 and 269 Dixwell Ave. — at a price well above the properties’ appraised value and previous purchase price. Those properties include two occupied multi-family homes as well as two vacant residential-commercial buildings, one of which is the former home of the famed Monterey Jazz Club.
The Elicker Administration has pitched this purchase as a way to get the properties in a key commercial corridor out of the hands of a megalandlord that has let them languish for the past half-decade — with the goal of ultimately converting the buildings into safe, renovated, affordable housing. (Click here to read a detailed previous article about the proposed deal.) The plan now needs a series of public approvals to proceed, first from the LCI Board of Directors and then from the Board of Alders.
Wednesday evening the LCI board decided to postpone its own vote on the matter until a special meeting in January.
The commissioners came to that decision in order to give city officials more time to collect updated appraisals for the properties in question, and to provide more details on how and by when the federal Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds must be spent.
The commissioners also delayed their vote to seek ethical and public-policy clarity around the implications of paying so much to a landlord that has consistently been fined in housing court for code violations at other local rental properties, and that failed to follow through on long-in-the-works plans to rehabilitate these Dixwell Avenue buildings.
“That’s insane,” LCI Board Member and former Whalley-Edgewood-Beaver Hills Community Management Team Chair Nadine Horton said about the proposed deal on Wednesday. “That is beyond a ridiculous return for a property owner that has done nothing but sit on it until they’re ready to make a profit.” Several colleagues joined her in raising concerns about the deal.
LCI Director Arlevia Samuel, who arranged the tentative deal with Ocean Management, defended the public-purchase proposal as an opportunity to invest in the revitalization of a community that has been ignored for so many years by the city.
“I totally understand everything you’re saying,” Samuel responded to Horton’s and other board members’ concerns. “But I went into this thinking about the community, not about the money. It’s about the community I grew up in… It’s about investing. Investing in the community, not investing in Ocean.”
LCI’s Property Acquisition and Disposition Committee (PAD) and the City Plan Commission have already separately endorsed the proposal, which would see the Elicker Administration pay the Ocean affiliates $350,000 more than those properties’ combined city-appraised value and $800,000 more than what the megalandlord paid to buy those same buildings six years ago.
Ocean is one of the city’s largest landlord-property management-real estate investment outfits, controlling over 1,000 mostly low-income apartments across the city. Its principal was recently fined $6,250 in state housing court for the third time so far this year for housing code violations at various Ocean rentals across town.
Part Of A Broader Dixwell Uplift Plan
The former famed Monterey jazz club, one of 4 Ocean-owned buildings on Dixwell Ave. that the city is looking to buy for $1.3 million.
The deal under scrutiny would see the city pay Ocean Management $1.3 million to pick up four Ocean-owned properties that the megalandlord purchased in 2016 and 2017 for less than half that amount.
Ocean bought 262, 263, 265 and 269 Dixwell Ave. — a shuttered deli and the old Monterey jazz club, both of which are stacked under vacant residential space, and a couple of multi-family homes currently home to renters — for just $500,000 while boasting public intentions to transform the properties into three- and four-bedroom units, 40 percent of which would have been subsidized for low-income renters. But they never put that plan into action, and instead opted to include those four Dixwell properties in a broader portfolio of land they’re seeking to sell this year.
The city would place deed restrictions on all of those properties to ensure each was utilized for affordable housing, according to Samuel, though no clarification was provided Wednesday regarding what degree of affordability would be required by the city. LCI has shared hopes of moving those homes into the hands of nonprofits that could rehabilitate the apartments while the city could hang onto the commercial properties to potentially renovate the buildings, bring business into their ground floors, and ensure the upper stories become low-income housing.
LCI Executive Director Samuel said Wednesday that when the city first broached the idea of buying the properties, Ocean asked for $1.8 million. She said she negotiated that asking price down to $1.3 million.
The city is waiting for updated appraisals that would express the properties’ current worth. LCI Acquisition & Disposition Coordinator Evan Trachten said on Wednesday it will take at least a few more weeks before the city receives that information, which may reopen negotiations with Ocean.
The city would pay Ocean using federal Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds. Samuel and Trachten said the city received that money around 2019. They stressed that the city will have to return those dollars if it does not spend them within a bureaucratically-determined time frame that they said closes in the near future. They were not able to provide this reporter by the publication time of this article with an exact date by which that money has to be spent.
Trachten described the deal as an opportunity to continue broader revitalization of the Dixwell corridor, a process which so far includes the redevelopment of the nearby former Joe Grate’s site, the planned redevelopment of the former Walt’s Cleaner’s site, the renovation of an adjacent church, the planned development of 308 Dixwell Ave., ConnCORP’s rebuilding of Dixwell Plaza, and the recently opened new Q House community center.
In other words, Trachten concluded, the city has “dedicated funds” for such an acquisition; the acquisition represents “the last pocket of blight” along Dixwell Avenue that the city doesn’t currently control; and if the city doesn’t purchase the properties, Ocean could sell to yet another investor standing in the way of potential community and economic evolution.
"It Doesn't Sit Good With Me"
Thomas Breen file photo
Fair Haven Alder Ernie Santiago (right): Can't say yes "in clear conscience."
Fair Haven Alder and LCI Board Member Ernie Santiago was the first board member on Wednesday to express distaste for the deal.
“I know my colleagues are in favor,” he said, “but I don’t see how in my clear conscience I can give a raise of $800,000 to a company that’s been in violations of so many other properties … It doesn’t sit good with me,” he said.
Horton agreed. She described Ocean Management as a perpetual “thorn in the side” of affordable homeownership, safe rentals, and solid property management.
“I would use the word slumlord,” she said.
“I know there’s a philosophical struggle,” Trachten acknowledged. “I would ask folks to try to remove that person as the owner from the property — because this is bigger than who the current owner is … The city is stepping up so that we can create a community benefit with these CDBG funds.”
Wednesday's virtual LCI Board of Directors meeting.
“It’s sometimes worth paying someone to get rid of them,” Board Member Taneha Edwards pitched in. She recalled growing up in Newhallville hearing stories from her godparents and grandparents about attending shows at the Monterey Jazz Club, which pulled musical talents like Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday into New Haven. “When I’m driving past it and see it I think, ‘Gosh, it’s so much history’ — and it could look so much better,” she said.
Samuel affirmed Edwards’ stance: “The city owes the community some love, some money, some revitalization,” she said.
“The city owes a lot of neighborhoods. Including mine. It’s not just Dixwell,” Horton replied. If the CDBG funds had to be invested in a main street, as Samuel suggested, why not invest in other commercial corridors, such as Whalley Avenue? she asked.
“There are other places we can spend this money,” Horton repeated. “What we would be doing if this deal goes through is rewarding bad behavior. They [Ocean] can use this money, go buy more properties, sit on those, and wait for the city to come up and buy those up.” Horton warned that the transaction would set a precarious “precedent” for other megalandlords to keep buying up and sitting on New Haven housing stock.
Samuel contested that logic. First of all, “everyone” is making money on real estate right now, she claimed, as Horton shook her head at the fact that Ocean could earn more than twice as much selling historic properties they allowed to age and crumble than the original price they paid to originally acquire the land. “Right now if I sold my house I’d get twice what I paid for it” as well, Samuel argued.
Markeshia Ricks file photo
LCI Board Chair Seth Poole: "All we can do is act within the scope of our power."
LCI Board of Directors Chair Seth Poole supported Samuel’s statement. “The economy doesn’t sit well with any of us,” he said. “All we can do is act within the scope of our power,” he said. If the city doesn’t buy these four Dixwell parcels, the city would be “left without control and subjected to the open market.”
Plus, he said, even as Horton worried about “rewarding bad behavior,” Poole maintained that LCI is simultaneously “penalizing bad behavior.” Ocean, he said, “has had to pay up recently” for various housing code violations.
Samuel likewise asserted that while she was willing to partner with Ocean for the sake of community betterment, she and her team “also go very hard against Ocean” when it comes to holding them accountable for poor management of their rental properties.
“The fines are pocket change to them,” Horton responded. The head of Ocean’s most recent appearance in court on Dec. 7 ended with a $6,250 fine. “That’s nothing to them,” Horton said. “It’s pennies in a couch cushion.”
Just as LCI is charged with working towards revitalization of many blighted and underfunded areas around the city, Horton argued that LCI could improve the strategies they rely on to hold landlords themselves accountable.
“We could go after them for the blight, fine the heck out of them. Don’t just throw money at them!” she exclaimed.
“I would rather give the money back,” Horton said, as board members tossed around concerns about a tight timeline to expend federal funding, “than give it to someone like an Ocean.”
Meanwhile, included on the agenda for Monday’s full Board of Alders meeting is a communication from Samuel calling for “an informal workshop” with local legislators about the proposed Dixwell property deal.
Although I am not a part of the bash the landlord socialists club, I do think landlords like this need accountability. When your level of greed exceeds your humanity it's time to take stock of your self as a person.