Tenants Brace For Greerville Sell-Offs

Blindsided.

That’s the word tenants are using to describe how they feel as incarcerated sex offender Rabbi Daniel Greer’s nonprofits seek to sell off a host of multi-family houses in the Edgewood neighborhood — leaving those renters worried about potential orders to move, and prompting them to start organizing to protect their positions at a time of uncertainty.

That’s the latest with various Greer-controlled housing nonprofits that own nearly 50 affordable multifamily rental properties in the Edgewood neighborhood.

Through a review of real estate listings and ​“For Sale” signs posted on front lawns, the Independent was able to find 12 such Greer-controlled properties either for sale or already sold to new buyers. 

The ones currently on the market or reportedly under contract are at 439 Edgewood Ave., 865 Elm St., 868 Elm St., 168 Ellsworth Ave., 178 Ellsworth Ave., 96 Hubinger St., 155 Maple St., 179 Maple St., 193 Maple St., 153 Norton St., and 51 Pendleton St. 

The only property that shows up in city land records so far as having officially sold is the single-family house at 63 Hobart St. The Greer-controlled nonprofit F.O.H. Inc. sold that property on July 11 to Robert and Laura Combs for $535,000, more than double its tax-appraised value of $264,700.

The other Greer-nonprofit houses up for sale are also listed in the $500,000 to $700,000 range, well above their latest city appraisals.

These properties have hit the market several months after Greer’s same housing nonprofits received roughly $12 million in mortgages, backed by three dozen Edgewood rental properties, from a mystery lender.

The loans coincided with separate agreements marking the end of several longstanding lawsuits filed by Greer’s former student and sexual-abuse victim, Eliyahu Mirlis, who had been seeking to collect on some of the mostly unpaid $22 million owed to him from a separate 2017 civil judgment against Greer and the Elm Street Yeshiva.

The withdrawal of those lawsuits appeared to mark a global resolution to Greer’s and Mirlis’s outstanding legal disputes, and allowed one of Greer’s nonprofits to retain ownership of the previously-in-foreclosure yeshiva building at 765 Elm St. 

The $12 million in loans from an unnamed lender, meanwhile, also came with an 8 percent interest rate that kicks in in September, and a repayment date within a year and a half of issuance.

All the while, Greer — who is still listed as president/treasurer/director of his various local housing nonprofits, including Edgewood Village Inc. and F.O.H. Inc. — remains in prison, serving a 12-year sentence after a jury found him guilty in 2019 of four counts of​“risk of injury to a minor.”

The Independent spoke to seven Edgewood Village Inc. tenants in the course of reporting for this article. 

They included Charles Nixon and Julie Jaus, who said they came back from vacation on June 20, when they ran into Sarah Greer, Daniel Greer’s wife and secretary/director of Edgewood Village Inc, in the yard of the home they rent at 193 Maple St. She told them the house was for sale.

“The next day,” Jaus said, ​“I got a call from the realtor” asking if Jaus would be around to show a prospective buyer in.

Nixon, a landscaper, and Jaus, who works in various roles at liquor wholesaler Slocum & Sons, moved into the first-floor Maple Street apartment last year. They were planning on renewing their lease, which expires at the end of July. They had just taken a set of red patio tables and chairs out of storage to put on their front porch. 

Andrea Sanchez and Mikaelle Oliver, who live together at another property on Maple, have been on a month-to-month lease since theirs expired in the spring. They didn’t get a new lease, but didn’t think much of it, Sanchez said, because ​“it’s not the first time that’s happened.” For Sanchez and Oliver, who have lived at their home for four and five years respectively, the new lease has been sent months after the expiration of the old one. 

Sanchez and Oliver learned their house was for sale through a call from the Edgewood Village office telling them to ​“prepare the house” for showing. After asking for physical notification, they received a letter on July 10 asking for their ​“cooperation” with realtor Jennifer Tebbetts. 

Tebbetts did not respond to a request for comment from the Independent. Neither did Sarah Greer nor Greer’s longtime secretary Jean Ledbury.

Nixon and Jaus told the Independent that they still haven’t gotten official notification that they’ll have to move out or that the house they live in is being sold. They have, however, gotten visits and texts from the prospective buyer, Raphael Fakiro, notifying them of his plans to move his family in. According to Zillow records, the house was listed on June 20, and the seller accepted a buy offer on June 25. 

Fakiro told the Independent that, while he hasn’t completed the purchase, he plans on buying the house because the Edgewood area seems like a nice place to live: ​“I really enjoy that area and that’s why I bought that house,” he said. 

Another Edgewood Village tenant, who asked to remain anonymous, said they have lived in their current home for 20 years.

“We were like family” with the Greers, they told the Independent, but ​“there is no relatives to them. Business is business.” They live at their property with two children, their spouse, and their parents. Like the others, they learned the house was going to be sold from a ​“voice message asking [them] if [they] could let the realtor in” for a showing. 

That tenant, who receives Section 8 assistance for rent, said they called the Housing Authority of New Haven to see if there was anything they could do. That’s when they learned that they’d been on a month-to-month lease since 2014. The tenant said they were told by Edgewood Village that ​“whoever buys the house has to honor the lease,” but once the lease is up at the end of July, there will be no lease left to honor. 

Now, tenants are looking for places to live and facing the realities of the New Haven rental market. ​“You can’t even look at anything without putting in an application,” one tenant said. ​“Weekends are really bad for me,” they added, ​“I wake up and start crying.”

Jaus and Nixon are looking all over Connecticut, but are facing the possibility of having to retire early and move out of the state entirely if nothing opens up. 

Mostly, residents are frustrated about the lack of communication. ​“If I don’t laugh, I’ll cry,” Jaus said, adding that the sales are ​“pushing [tenants] out on the street.” 

“It would be incumbent on them to notify us as tenants,” Nixon said. ​“It doesn’t make sense to me, legally, that they can do this to us.” 

“We’re up in the air,” Oliver added.

The anonymous tenant expressed anger that Greer’s supposed punishment is mostly affecting his tenants. ​“This is benefitting him,” they said, ​“people don’t see that through him, we are being punished.” 

Now Nixon and the other tenants are making a last-minute push to fight back. A cohort took to the streets Wednesday evening, knocking on doors to try to gather signatures and solidarity. 

A tenant named Kevin (who asked to be identified only by his first name) came out of his car as the canvassing party approached. The Greer-nonprofit tenants, Kevin said, are being ​“kicked out of the last area that’s affordable for a working class person” in New Haven because ​“someone did something very terrible.”

Kevin said the buyers of his home told them they’d be closing on Aug. 16, and that he’d have two months after that to find a new place.

“I’ve paid my rent on the first of the month every month for 10 years,” only to be pushed out, he said. ​“It’s really upsetting.”

He told the Independent that the new buyers told him they were trying to negotiate Greer’s nonprofit’s asking price down in order to save money for extensive repairs. 

“That was the Greer thing,” Kevin said, ​“lease it cheap and don’t ask us to fix things,” which led to tenants spending their own resources on upkeep. 

Part of Nixon’s spiel on the doors was a glimmer of tenant organizing: ​“We’re actually considering starting a tenants union,” Nixon said, primarily to ​“get [Edgewood Village] to take a step back and be accountable for what they did wrong.”

Thomas Breen contributed to this report.