In 2023, Ocean Got Out, Mandy Got Better, & HANH Got More Ambitious

One of New Haven’s largest landlords of low-income housing sold off 65 rental properties this year, was dragged again and again into court, and grappled with new tenants unions.

Another invested in expanding its real estate empire and improving its business and reputation under a second generation of leadership.

A third doubled down on constructing lots more affordable housing — and swooped in to save long-stalled developments that it will now have to convert into new places to live.

Those were some of the biggest housing stories of 2023, and point towards a shift in how three of the city’s largest landlords — two private, one public — will continue to shape the city’s housing landscape. 

Three major players in the housing market made substantial changes to their businesses this year: The private megalandlords Ocean Management and Mandy Management, and the government public-housing agency the Housing Authority of the City of New Haven. 

How these three property owners’ 2023 pivots will affect New Haven’s housing market in the long run is still to be determined. Given how large these organizations already are, one thing is for sure: thousands upon thousands of New Haven renter households, present and future, will be affected.

Ocean: 65 Sales; 9 Court Cases; 4 Tenants Unions

Ocean, a megalandlord-real estate investment outfit-property management company founded and run by Shmuel Aizenberg, had the most embattled year of any property owner in the city. It also raked in cash selling rental properties.

According to the Independent’s review of city land records, the company’s many affiliate LLCs sold 65 properties containing 170 units of rental housing for a total of $26.6 million. Ocean’s ​“For Sale” signs dotted Newhallville and Dixwell and other neighborhoods across the city, as the company sent tenants packing.

Ocean didn’t sell all of these properties to just one buyer, as it tried to do with hundreds of their apartments last year. Instead, these properties went to 60 different buyers, including individual homeowners and investors from New York and Connecticut. 

Ocean’s major selloff does not mean that the company is out of the New Haven housing market altogether. Far from it. Back in March 2022, Aizenberg told the Independent that Ocean owned around 1,400 New Haven apartments. That means that the company still controls plenty of New Haven rentals — as well as long-stalled developments on Chapel, Foster, and Blake Streets — even as it continues to sell and sell and sell and sell.

Meanwhile, the company’s owner found himself dragged to criminal housing court for a total of nine different code-violation cases related to health and safety concerns at Ocean’s rentals.

A state judge fined Aizenberg $1,500 in February for six subsequently-fixed housing code violations at three of Ocean’s New Haven rental properties.

Aizenberg most recently appeared back in criminal housing court in late November for six other pending code-violation cases – including a Class C Misdemeanor stemming from a water-damaged kitchen ceiling and walls in a first-floor Ocean apartment in Hamden. A state judge denied Aizenberg’s accelerated rehabilitation application for that misdemeanor case in September; Aizenberg and his attorney will have another chance in January to try to convince the judge to reverse his decision and let him participate in the criminal record-clearing program.

2023 wasn’t the first year that Aizenberg has spent time in housing court responding to code-violation cases. He was hit with court-ordered fines worth $6,250 in December 2022, $2,500 in August 2022, $3,750 in May 2022, and $500 in October 2021, all related to separate delayed-maintenance cases.

Tenants unions have also formed citywide to protest conditions at Ocean’s properties. The first such tenants union officially filed with the city in December 2022 at Ocean’s 311 Blake St. rental property; the second in June of this year at Ocean’s 1476 Chapel St. property (which has subsequently been sold by Ocean); the third in August at Ocean’s 1275 Quinnipiac Ave. rental property; and the fourth in November at Ocean’s 195 Lenox St. property.

Click here to read a previous article about Aizenberg’s critique of the city’s Livable City Initiative (LCI); he accused the housing code enforcement agency of communicating poorly with landlords about what needed to be fixed and when. He also spoke about investing millions of dollars in his company buying, repairing, and maintaining New Haven rental real estate. 

Click here to read a previous article about Aizenberg’s plan to sell off part of Ocean’s New Haven rental portfolio in order to transition his business more fully into developing new apartments.

And see the bottom of this article for a full list of Ocean property sales in 2023, as recorded on the city’s land records database through Dec. 21.

Housing Authority: "Breaking Ground," Ready To Build

While Ocean shrank its local real estate portfolio over the course of 2023, the city’s public housing authority made some major moves to significantly grow its own.

The largest such move was the housing authority’s purchase in November of more than eight acres of vacant land across from Union Station for $21 million.

Those long-empty properties used to be home to the now-demolished, privately-owned, government-subsidized 301-unit Church Street South complex. The housing authority plans to transform those properties into a dense new mixed-use development dubbed ​“Union Square.”

The exact size and scope of that prospective new development are still to be determined. The previous owners of the property, a Massachusetts-based company called Northland Investment Corp, tried but never followed through on building 1,000 new apartments, 300 set aside at affordable rents.

Housing Authority Executive Director Karen DuBois-Walton and her team have not tied themselves to replicating Northland’s plan exactly. They said they are committed to building a new housing complex that is much denser than what stood there before. They also plan to knock down the extant, adjacent Robert T. Wolfe public housing apartments as part of this larger redevelopment project.

The housing authority has already kicked off a year’s worth of community conversations about what should be built on the ex-Church Street South site next, with the help of a $500,000 federal planning grant. It intends to apply for more federal grants to help make constructing this new development a reality.

Church Street South wasn’t the only big move by the housing authority this year to resurrect a long-stalled development.

In August, the housing authority reached an agreement with an Oregon-based developer to purchase the dilapidated former New Haven Clock Company factory building at 133 Hamilton St. for $4.5 million and convert it into more than 100 mixed-income, mostly-affordable apartments. That deal hasn’t closed yet, but recent public filings in the clock factory’s foreclosure proceedings show that it is moving forward.

Over on Whalley Avenue in late October, DuBois-Waton joined a host of state officials and St. Luke’s church leaders to celebrate a $7 million infusion of state cash that will help make another housing authority-related new construction project a reality. That project will see 55 new apartments, 49 affordable, built at the site of the to-be demolished Papa John’s pizza restaurant and adjacent parking lots at 117 and 129 Whalley Ave., 12 Dickerman St., and 34 and 36 Sperry St. 

In October, the housing authority announced plans to construct 50 new low-income elderly housing units at the site of an abandoned nursing home on Level Street in West Rock.

In December, the housing authority board OK’d the purchase of two properties by the Quinnipiac River on East Grand Avenue for $1.42 million for the planned development of around 40 new apartments and ground-floor retail space in Fair Haven Heights.

And in April, the housing authority brought on former top city building inspector Jim Turcio to be the public housing agency’s new vice president for construction.

According to the housing authority’s 2022 annual report, the government agency served 933 households residing in Low-Income Public Housing (LIPH) and another 5,311 households residing in Housing Choice Voucher (HCV)-subsidized housing last year. That makes the agency the largest owner of rental housing for some of New Haven’s lowest-income residents. As DuBois-Walton has stressed repeatedly over the years, the need is much much greater, as there are tens of thousands of families from across the state on the housing authority’s waitlist. 

Click here to read a previous Independent article about the housing authority’s efforts to rebuild local public housing over the past decade-plus under DuBois-Walton’s leadership, in part through cobbling together funding through an Obama-era initiative called the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program. 

Click here to read about the housing authority’s ongoing redevelopment of one such public housing complex on Valley Street. 

And click here, here, and here to read about a series of community conversations the housing authority held in 2023, resulting in a policy-recommendation-rich ​“Breaking Ground” report all about how to address New Haven’s affordable housing crisis.

DuBois-Walton told the Independent that the housing authority shifted its focus this year towards housing production rather than rehabilitation after making considerable headway on the latter and realizing a dire need for the former.

“Our first focus for redevelopment was on the stuff we already own,” she said, pointing to two decades of work spent repairing mid-twentieth century public housing stock in need of revitalization.

“That had to be our first priority — that’s what we initially were responsible for, and that’s what we had actual people living in,” DuBois-Walton stated. Today, she said, ​“We are at a point where we can sort of see the end of that pipeline – there are now many more projects behind us than in front of us.” 

At the same time, the director said that her agency has been researching the roots of New Haven’s particular housing crisis — and pinpointed that ​“if you have to sum it all down to what’s driving unaffordability, it’s just housing underproduction in the community that goes back decades.”

New Haven has recently benefited from job growth and seen an uptick in overall population, but DuBois-Walton said that average household size has also been decreasing as more people opt to live alone, resulting in the low vacancy rate that has allowed landlords to keep upping their rental prices.

DuBois-Walton said the authority has sought to step up and help create more housing by reorienting their attention to land acquisition opportunities. 

The Housing Authority had first considered acquiring part of Ocean’s portfolio of one- and two-family homes across the city, but the idea was scrapped after realizing the too-high asking prices for such properties as well as the amount of work necessary to renovate the spaces: ​“It didn’t make good sense of public dollars to do that,” DuBois-Walton said.

Instead, individual, larger-scale housing developments have popped up for the authority’s taking — at the former Church Street South site, and at the former clock factory site on Hamilton Street. 

“We’ve got a good track record now,” she said. ​“It’s a good influx of new units, and the thing you never have to question with us is whether there’s gonna be affordability.” 

Mandy Grows, Improves

Meanwhile, Mandy Management, the megalandlord-real estate investment outfit-property management company that has been by far the fastest growing landlord in New Haven over the past half decade, continued to expand its local real estate holdings in 2023 — albeit at a slower pace.

One of their biggest buys of the year came in November, when a Mandy affiliate paid Albertus Magnus College $7.4 million to purchase 20 units of student housing and related office and meeting space, which it then leased back to the Prospect Hill Catholic college. Mandy also spent $1 million in July buying a six-unit apartment house on Sachem Street right in between Yale’s hockey stadium and health center.

But Mandy didn’t just buy properties in 2023. Unlike in previous years, it also sold — including parting with seven rental homes containing 23 different apartments in the Hill, Fair Haven, and Newhallville in July for a total of $2.2 million. 

During a wide-ranging interview with the Independent in September, Yudi Gurevitch, Mandy’s 29-year-old CEO and the son of the company’s founder, emphasized how Mandy Management is invested in doing right by its tenants and properties and the city it’s called home for the past two decades. 

Over the past five years that he’s run the company, he said, he has striven to hire enough staff and have enough supplies on hand to respond to the needs of the thousands of renters living in Mandy’s more than 4,000 apartments across roughly 800 buildings in New Haven, West Haven, East Haven, and Hamden.

Mandy’s leadership has in the past been dragged into housing court to be fined for delayed maintenance and persistent housing code violations. The company hasn’t been back in court in well over a year — a testament, Gurevitch and the city’s top housing code inspector told the Independent, to the company’s emphasis on responding quickly and adequately to housing quality concerns.

See below for a full list of Ocean Management property sales in 2023.

Nora Grace-Flood contributed to this report.