Thomas Breen file photo
ConnCORP’s Clemons, McCraven: Rebuilding Dixwell Plaza (below).
Dixwell Plaza’s redevelopers are one key storefront closer to gaining site control of the decaying mid-century shopping strip — after paying $1.3 million to buy out a Black-business support agency that can now relocate to Chapel Street.
According to the city’s online land records database, on June 1, a holding company called 192 Dixwell Avenue LLC paid $1,336,000 to Greater New Haven Business and Professional Association Inc. to purchase the three-unit commercial property at 192 Dixwell Ave.
The city last appraised that 10,000 square-foot, basement-and-first-floor property as worth $401,100 — less than a third of the latest sale price.
The new owner of the property is the Connecticut Community Outreach and Revitalization Program (ConnCORP), which is a for-profit subsidiary of the Science Park-based job training nonprofit Connecticut Center for Arts and Technology (ConnCAT).
Dixwell Plaza today…
Over the past few years, the locally-based redevelopment team has steadily bought up various publicly and privately owned parcels in the fraying Dixwell Avenue commercial complex between Webster Street and Charles Street.
ConnCORP
… and renderings of the future ConnCAT Place on Dixwell.
That’s where they plan to build an estimated $200 million mixed-use project that will include a grocery store, 150-plus apartments, an office tower, a performing arts venue, and more.
The purchase of 192 Dixwell Ave. means that ConnCORP now owns “between 93 and 95 percent” of the Dixwell Avenue properties they need in order to have total control over the site they plan to build on, ConnCORP President and CEO Paul McCraven told the Independent.
Some of the addresses the redevelopers already own on that strip include 87 Webster St., 156 Dixwell Ave., 172 Dixwell Ave., 180 Dixwell Ave., 190 Dixwell Ave., 206 Dixwell Ave., and 230 Dixwell Ave. Earlier this year, the alders voted to sell the current Stetson Library building at 200 Dixwell Ave. and the city police substation building at 26 Charles St. to ConnCORP for $750,000 to allow for the proposed redevelopment to move ahead. (Stetson will be moving across the street to the soon-to-open new Q House.)
“Closing on this property brings us one step closer to realizing the vision we brought to the community last year,” McCraven said in an email statement.
“We have been very intentional about ensuring that key fixtures in the community will still be here to serve residents. For our part in doing that, we helped facilitate their relocation to Chapel Street. We are and have always been committed to bringing this project to life and we’re grateful to the community partners who have supported us in doing that.”
Harp: GNHBPA Moving, Expanding
Thomas Breen photo
Rey Harp at his current Dixwell office.
McCraven’s mention of a “relocation to Chapel Street” refers to the local nonprofit from which ConnCORP bought 192 Dixwell.
That’s the Greater New Haven Business and Professional Association (GNHBPA). The half-century-old agency supports local minority and female-owned businesses and that is run by Rey Harp.
On June 2, one day after selling 192 Dixwell Ave. for $1,336,000, GNHBPA bought a two-story office building at 1294 Chapel St. from New York-based landlord Eyal Preis for $1,136,000. That commercial property last sold for $625,018 in 2017, and the city last appraised it as worth $589,700.
During a recent interview at his soon-to-be-former Dixwell Plaza office, Harp told the Independent that GNHBPA will be moving to the newly-bought Chapel Street building by the end of the year.
“It is much more efficiently laid out,” Harp said about the Chapel Street office building. “We anticipate we will be able to get as much if not more” business-support programming done at that new site as they currently provide on Dixwell Avenue.
While Covid-19 put a pause on much of their in-person work, Harp said, the GNHBPA provides networking sessions, OSHA training, and construction job certifications and other trainings for minority and women-owned local businesses. He said that six small construction firms are currently based out of GNHBPA’s Dixwell offices, and will be moving with the nonprofit to Chapel Street.
“We’ve been here since before [small business] incubators were popular,” Harp said.
On Chapel Street, “we’ll continue to do our core programming around the construction industry,” while also adding additional services for other types of small businesses in fields like home healthcare.
“This gives us a great opportunity to reimagine ourselves as an agency, to become more effective” in supporting local minority- and women-owned small businesses.
And how does he feel about fetching over $1.3 million for a Dixwell Plaza condo that the city values at a third of that amount?
“We were never interested in the price,” Harp said. “Our sole consideration was suitability of a new place. We couldn’t leave until we knew where we were going. We essentially had a building swap,” with the almost all of the proceeds from the Dixwell Plaza sale going into the “hard and soft costs” of buying and fitting out the Chapel Street property.
“It was tough to find a building that met all of our criteria,” he said — in the city, adequate parking, usable office space. “Prices have skyrocketed” in New Haven real estate, he added. “We’ve been looking for over 18 months.”
When asked about the price that ConnCORP settled on for 192 Dixwell Ave., McCraven said, “From the beginning, we knew completing this project would require deep investments both in property and in the businesses that are housed in them. We are pleased to support Greater New Haven Business and Professional Association through this transaction and help support their mission of assisting minority businesses.”
Mandy Buys 52 More Apts. For $6M+
Google photo
191 Wooster St.
In other recent property transactions, affiliates of the local megalandlord Mandy Management continued to grow by leaps and bounds by spending over $6 million buying eight different residential properties containing 52 different apartments in the Annex, Fair Haven, Fair Haven Heights, West River, and Wooster Square.
Those new Mandy acquisitions include:
• 191 Wooster St., a 16-unit apartment complex that Mandy’s Re Fund II NH LLC bought for $2.8 million on June 1.
• 104 Lexington Ave., a 16-unit apartment complex that Re Fund II NH LLC bought for $1,330,000 on May 27.
• 30 Pardee St., a six-unit apartment building that Mandy’s SFR 2 DE LLC bought for $582,000 on June 8.
• 75 Lenox St., a four-family house that SFR 2 DE LLC bought for $500,000 on May 27.
• 67 Market St., a three-family house that SFR 2 DE LLC bought for $310,000 on June 4.
• 30 Greenwood St., a two-family house that Mandy’s Gur New Haven III LLC bought for $200,000 on June 1.
• 62 Clifton St., a three-family house that SFR 2 DE LLC bought for $185,000 on June 2.
• 387 Blatchley Ave., a two-family house that SFR 2 DE LLC bought for $110,000 on June 1.
I'm repeating myself. But the recent sales prices of medium and large apartment buildings have been substantially higher than the buildings' appraised values. This has real implications for tenants. As Tom notes, 191 Wooster sold for $2.8 million; its appraised value as of 2019 was less than $1.2 million. 104 Lexington sold for a bit more than $1.3 million; its appraised value was a bit over $700,000. Tom's earlier stories have noted that similar buildings have sold for substantially more than they did a few years ago.
Mandy and the other buyers are making business decisions. They likely believe they will be able to recover the purchase prices with higher rents. And this trend will affect tenants in other buildings. The city uses the sales price of comparable buildings as one of the factors in assessing multifamily buildings. So even if your building has not sold recently, taxes on it will likely rise as a result of revaluation. The landlords I know are decent people. But if their costs go up, they will eventually pass them on to their tenants.
City Plan is proposing an affordable housing mandate for new developments. It has the potential of creating 100 or so new affordable units per year (a good thing). The phenomena I described above have the potential of reducing affordability for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of tenants.