Thomas Breen photos
Maintenance manager Wilden Bunting: Remodeling underway.
One of the city’s largest investor-landlords has snapped up a Fitch Street apartment building that once housed previously homeless families, after a middleman flipped the property at a $875,000 markup.
That eight-unit, red-brick apartment building is located at 192 Fitch St.
According to the city’s online land records database, on Sept. 30, an Ocean Management-controlled holding company called 192 Fitch LLC purchased the residential property for $2.2 million from New Haven Fitch LLC. The now-previous owner is a holding company controlled by Long Island-based landlord Meshulam Haas. The city last appraised the property as worth $1,063,400.
The late September sale of 192 Fitch St. comes a year and a half after Haas’s company purchased the two-story, mixed-use property for $1.325 million from the local homelessness services nonprofit New Reach Inc. in January 2021. Before putting that property up for sale, New Reach used that building to provide housing for eight formerly homeless families.
Even before Haas’s company formally owned the building, in August 2020, his company won site plan permission from the City Plan Commission to convert the property’s ground-floor office space into six new apartments – thereby bumping up the total number of residential units at 192 Fitch from eight to 14.
192 Fitch St.: Formerly homeless housing, now megalandlord.
That ground-floor office-to-apartments conversion never happened, however. At least, it didn’t happen under Haas’s company’s ownership, according to the city’s building permits database.
Instead, Haas’s company sold the formerly nonprofit-owned, homeless-family-housing apartment building for $2.2 million to a holding company controlled by Ocean Management’s Shmuel Aizenberg, who runs one of the city’s largest investor-landlord-property management companies — and who has been fined in housing court three times over the past 12 months because of city inspector-found housing code violations.
“We’re going to renovate the whole building,” Aizenberg told the Independent in a Thursday phone interview about 192 Fitch.
He said that his company plans to add a new gym to the property as well as “upgrade all of the” apartments. He cited his company’s renovation of 1455 State St. into new apartments as an example of Ocean’s successful creation of new housing.
Thomas Breen file photo
Bunting.
Ocean Management maintenance manager Wilden Bunting said the same.
He was busy attending to the Fitch Street apartment building’s front door on Thursday when the Independent came by for an interview.
Speaking over the landscaping cacophony of a maintenance crew blowing fallen leaves from the front lawn, Bunting said that he and his Ocean colleagues were “cleaning up” the property and “making sure everything’s going to be good.”
That means fixing the doors, adding new security cameras, upgrading the laundry room, and, most likely, converting some of the empty ground-floor office spaces into apartments.
Bunting said that five families currently rent out the building’s upper-floor apartments.
He also said that he’s relatively new to his manager-level role at Ocean.
He started in the position several months ago, and said he now oversees a team of 15.
“Ocean didn’t really have somebody that cares” before he joined on as maintenance management, Bunting said. “I care about the people in New Haven. I want Ocean Management to be the best for the people who rent” its apartments.
Born and raised in Jamaica and now a homeowner on Pine Street in Fair Haven, Bunting said that he used to be a police officer in Jamaica. He also he used to run seven hotels on the island.
Why did he move to the United States and switch professions to work in rental real estate?
I needed a “change of life,” Bunting said. If he had stayed in Jamaica, he said, he’d likely be rich, but also perhaps dead. Bunting said he previously worked for Ocean Management as an electrician.
Bunting said he’s proud of the work he’s done for Ocean Management so far.
“When people call, somebody answers, and their complaints are met,” he said.
He also added the following comment with a smile before this reporter headed off to the next assignment: “It’s about time somebody writes something positive about Ocean Management.”
Progress Promised On Stalled 500 Blake Project
At the long-stalled 500 Blake St. development site.
Just a half-mile west of Ocean’s newest residential property at 192 Fitch St. sits a quiet fenced-in “development” site at 500 Blake St.
That’s the site of the former home of the popular 500 Blake Street Cafe.
An Ocean-affiliated holding company bought that property and a handful of adjacent Tour Avenue properties in 2019 for over $2.5 million.
Then, in May 2020, Ocean won site plan approval from the City Plan Commission to construct 129 new market-rate apartments in its stead.
At that same May 2020 City Plan Commission meeting, Ocean’s project manager for 500 Blake, Melissa Saint, said that the new apartment building should be built by early 2022.
Ocean then demolished the former restaurant building and began construction … only to leave the expansive dirt pile-lined construction site apparently abandoned and quiet and unbuilt for months and months and months.
A sign showing a Newman Architects design rendering of the planned new apartment complex has subsequently fallen from the chain-link fence that runs along the site’s perimeter. When the Independent visited the site on Wednesday, the sign — which still reads “Coming Fall 2022” — appeared to have been run over by a car or two on its way into the adjacent property’s parking lot.
Meanwhile, according to the city land records database, some of the construction contractors working on Ocean’s 500 Blake St. project have filed liens against the megalandlord for allegedly unpaid labor.
Most recently, on Aug. 8, OSR Steel Corporation LLC filed a mechanic’s lien for over $958,000 in unpaid construction work at 500 Blake St. That lien states that the subcontractor supplied and installed steel for the general contractor Axela Construction LLC between November 2021 and July 2022, but never got paid.
Then, on Sept. 16, Deomenico Calandro PE LLC filed a separate mechanic’s lien against the Ocean-controlled 500 Blake Development LLC for nearly $5,000 in unpaid work.
Thomas Breen file photo
Ocean Management's Shmuel Aizenberg.
So. What’s going on with this project? Is Ocean still building 129 new apartments here, or is that plan now bust?
According to Aizenberg, that new apartment plan is still very much moving forward.
“We are about to continue next week,” Aizenberg said. That’s because, at long last, his company has been able to line up all of the needed financing for the new construction project.
“This is a challenging” time to secure such large amounts of funding, he said, referring to rapidly rising borrowing rates. He said that his company is about to close on a roughly $20 million loan that will allow the 500 Blake St. construction project to continue.
In a separate phone interview, Saint confirmed that Ocean is indeed about to close on financing for this apartment project at 500 Blake St. She said that neighbors should expect to see 500 Blake as an “active construction site” again in the next few weeks.
Aizenberg also said that both mechanic’s liens are now resolved and should be released soon. He pointed out that the first lien was actually filed by a subcontractor against the general contractor, while the second lien was the result of a “misunderstanding,” he said.
Aizenberg said the 500 Blake St. apartment building should now be built and open by the end of 2023.
When asked by the Independent why his company bought 192 Fitch St. for $2.2 million at the same time that Ocean appeared to be having such trouble moving forward with the 500 Blake St. apartment project, Aizenberg pushed back on the premise of that question.
Trouble? What trouble? The construction project is moving forward, he said, and the financing will be in place as of next week.
Nothing to see here, move along says Ocean. Meanwhile a housing development that was embraced by the community sits dormant. And a housing development that helped people who were previously homeless have a home is being turned into a mega landlord property. Soon Ocean, Mandy, etc will have a monopoly on housing in the city.