Thomas Breen photo
The former St. Rose School on Richard Street.
An affiliate of the local megalandlord Mandy Management plans to convert a former Fair Haven Catholic school and a nearby ex-convent into 18 new apartments.
The addresses of those planned church-to-residential conversions are 22 Richard St. and 81 Saltonstall Ave.
Both properties are currently owned by St. Rose Church.
The Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) voted unanimously this past Wednesday night in support of the church’s application for a special exception to convert the former St. Rose School on Richard Street into 10 residential units. At July’s BZA meeting, the zoning board voted in support of the church’s application to convert the former convent building on Saltonstall Avenue into eight new apartments.
Local attorney Ben Trachten presented the Richard Street special exception request to the zoning board. In his written application to the BZA for the project, he signed as an authorized agent of Netz USA LLC.
Netz is a real estate private equity firm that is publicly traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and that is owned in part by Menachem Gurevitch, the founder and president of Mandy Management.
The former St. Rose convent on Saltonstall Ave.
When reached by email for comment Friday, Mandy Management’s Yudi Gurevitch confirmed that Netz plans to buy and develop the ex-school and ex-convent buildings.
“Mandy Management is a management company for many different investors, one being Netz USA, LLC,” Gurevitch told the Independent. “Netz USA, LLC and potentially other investors will be developing this project. The final entity and investors are not yet known.
“Netz and its affiliates have done millions of dollars in renovations to buildings in this city and elsewhere. Netz USA, LLC will use a local contractor to work on this project. Netz is buying the properties from the Church and the timing for the project has not been set.”
A representative from St. Rose Church who did not share her name for this article, said during a brief phone call Thursday that the former Catholic school and convent buildings are “are old, and they cost a lot to fix. Unfortunately, as a parish, it wasn’t able to maintain them, and it was financially expensive to keep up.”
She said that the ultimate buyer of the properties will decide what the future use of those properties will be. The church, she said, is not going to undertake the residential conversion itself.
Zoom
Wednesday’s BZA meeting.
At Wednesday night’s BZA meeting, attorney Trachten told commissioners that the Richard Street building formerly housed St. Roses’s school.
Since any conversion that results in more than three new units of housing requires a special exception, he said, the church needed the zoning board’s approval before any residential conversion could move ahead.
The building has over 10,000 square feet of gross floor area, he said, so the conversion would meet the local zoning ordinance’s requirement that there be 1,000 square feet of gross floor area per dwelling unit.
Thomas Breen photo
Trachten said the Richard Street school conversion will be developed in conjunction with eight additional new apartments at St. Rose’s former convent building at 81 Saltonstall Ave. The BZA granted approval in July for that latter proposed convent-to-apartments development.
“The surrounding area is predominantly residential already and the adaptive reuse of this structure is the only logical plan,” Trachten wrote in the Richard Street zoning relief application. “This application is consistent with all standards of the ordinance and is consistent with the comprehensive plan of development.”
As a parishioner at Our Lady of Guadalupe (formerly St. Rose of Lima), I am deeply depressed by the sale of the property to Netz/Mandy Management. This is not the first parish in the Hartford archdiocese to sell property to N/MM. On a parish-by-parish basis, MM presents itself as Netz, so that even parish decision makers who would recognize MM as a slumlord don't make the connection.
Then, too, parishes that are running deficits are tempted by Netz offers that will always make sure to be more than competing offers. I feel that now it is properly the moral and social justice responsibility of these parishes to follow the fate of these properties and hold N/MM to the promises they make to the churches that they will be good stewards.
Morally, the worst of it is the preferential relationship that N/MM has with the archdiocese itself. This allows N/MM to come into a parish and tacitly suggest that they are a responsible entity by pointing to the fact of their having done multiple deals in the archdiocese.
The institutional church, including this diocese, is corrupt and indifferent in so many ways that it defeats the efforts of the faithful on the ground to hold church officials to account. We know that the church only addresses it crimes when forced to by secular state authorities, and unfortunately, who they're doing real estate deals with is several notches down the list of scandals.