Thomas Breen photo
The Whit sold for .... The What??
Two Wooster Square lots that languished for years amid landlord lawsuits — and then burst forth into 230 high-end apartments amid a neighborhood building frenzy — have now sold to a pair of real estate investment firms for $71 million.
That’s the latest with The Whit, a 230-unit apartment complex spread across two buildings on either side of Chapel Street on the downtown edge of Wooster Square.
A holding company called Rarebit Whit Owner LLC paid $71,718,000 to a holding company called Chapel Street Residences Owners LLC to buy the properties at 630 and 673 Chapel St., according to a warranty deed posted to the city’s land records database on Thursday. (Hearst’s Alexander Soule first reported on the sale earlier this week, before the price went public.)
The city most recently appraised the two Chapel Street properties as worth a combined sum of $59,033,400 for tax purposes.
The Whit’s new landlord is a partnership between the Stamford-based True North Management Group and the Jenkintown, Pennsylvania-based Scully Company. The seller is the Houston, Texas-based development firm Hines. None of those companies responded to requests for comment by the publication time of this article.
Hines has owned the properties since 2019, when it paid the Stamford-based Spinnaker Real Estate Partners a combined $15 million for the development sites. Spinnaker, in turn, had worked with city government to fight off years of lawsuits from the Philadelphia-based owner of the Strouse Adler apartments across the street seeking to stymie new residential construction at the long-vacant former Comcast site.
Hines broke ground on the 230 new market-rate apartments and ground-floor retail space in 2020, amid an ongoing building boom that has seen hundreds of new rentals built along a two block stretch of Olive Street between Chapel and Union. The Building Department issued certificates of occupancy for the two finished apartment buildings in July 2023. “This is a strong sector in a strong submarket, and it’s getting stronger,” Hines Senior Managing Director Tommy Craig said at the time of the 2020 groundbreaking about building apartments in New Haven.“We felt great about New Haven going into the pandemic. We feel even greater after the pandemic.”
That was then. Now, Hines is out, True North and Scully are in.
Scully’s online rental listings for The Whit as of Friday show eight apartments currently available, with another slated to open up in late March.
The apartments currently available for rent include a 695 square-foot studio, at $2,125 per month; a 890 square-foot one-bedroom, at $3,126 per month; and a 1,389 square-foot two-bedroom, at $4,322 per month. The apartment that will be available in late March is a 1,649 square-foot three-bedroom, at $5,307 per month.
Several employees at The Whit on Friday declined to comment about the sale, though a leasing manager said that current renters should expect new charges if they own pets.
630 and 673 Chapel (above), now under new ownership.
Building Boom Square, looking east on Chapel from Union.
