nothin Mandy Pulls Out Of St. Michael’s Project | New Haven Independent

Mandy Pulls Out Of St. Michael’s Project

Buchanan Architects, LLC

An aerial-view rendering of Mandy’s proposed conversion of the old St. Michael’s Church school buildings.

A local mega-landlord has pulled out of a deal to purchase and convert three vacant Wooster Square church buildings into 23 high-end apartments, citing environmental clean-up costs as the project’s primary obstacle.

On Monday afternoon, Netz Group Chief Investment Officer Frank Micali confirmed that Netz has decided not to purchase three vacant Greene Street buildings owned by St. Michael’s Church and convert them into 23 upscale apartments.

Netz, a real estate private equity firm chartered in Connecticut, based in New York, and publicly traded on the Tel Aviv stock exchange, is owned in part by Menachem Gurevitch. Gurevitch is the founder and owner of the local real estate empire Mandy Management, one of New Haven’s largest owners of low-income rental apartments, which are owned by affiliated Netz-hatched partnerships.

Netz Chief Investment Officer Frank Micali.

Micali told the Independent that mainly the costs of clean-up” had pushed Netz to pull out of its planned deal with the Wooster Square church. He said the interiors of the the three vacant buildings at 234, 240, and 250 Greene St. require ample asbestos and lead paint remediation. He said Netz had also discovered via radar four tanks buried beneath one of the Greene Street properties. He said those tanks would have required further analysis and remediation on Netz’s part.

We knew about the environmental,” East Rock Alder and St. Michael’s Church Trustee Anna Festa said. There’s asbestos.” She said the necessity of substantial environmental remediation should not have come as a surprise to the prospective developer.

I think it would have been a good thing for the neighborhood,” she said of Netz/Mandy’s’s proposed project.. But now, she said, the three former school buildings are back on the market and available for purchase.

Micali declined to comment on whether or not a contentious recent neighborhood meeting on the project influenced Netz’s decision to pull out of the St. Michael’s deal.

At that meeting, a half dozen Wooster Square neighbors voiced concerns about the project’s parking proposal and about its ambiguous connections to Mandy Management.

I consider Mandy Management, who is a New Haven management company who provides affordable housing in New Haven, to be one of the better [property management] groups,” Micali said.

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