Slumlord’s Successor Vows To Do Right

“Look at this,” implored Mendy Katz, opening the door to a second-floor apartment. ​“It’s safe. It’s clean. There’s no roaches.”

Katz was showing off a once-trashed home that the fast-growing real-estate company he manages, Ocean Management, recently took over from a notorious New Haven slumlord. It is one of about 100 New Haven apartments an investor affiliated with Ocean purchased in recent months from the slumlord, prominent Bethany nephrologist Jianchao Xu.

City inspectors hounded Xu for years, to no avail, to clean up the rundown, rodent-infested apartments he rented to government-subsidized low-income families. Finally Xu sold dozens of the multi-family properties to Ocean-affiliated companies.

Katz, a kinetic 40-year-old native New Havener, invited a reporter to check out the second-floor apartment at 56 – 8 Blake St. to make a point: He has a lot to work to do to turn the units in the Xu portfolio from hovels to nice homes. And his crew is working hard at it. Step by step.

“Look at the tile,” he said, leading a tour into the bathroom. ​“It’s gorgeous! It’s nicer than my own house.”

Elsewhere in the empty apartment, walls were painted. New smoke detectors were installed.. The ragged carpet was gone, replaced by glistening hardwood floors.

Ocean spent about $16,000 renovating the apartment, Katz estimated. He was ready to rent it out again once new appliances arrive.

“This apartment was destroyed,” he said. ​“It smelled really bad. The fridge was full of maggots. The stove was so destroyed it had to be removed.”

Outside, new cement covered formerly cracked, dangerous steps. The building had new siding.

“So far, so good. It looks 99 percent better,” said the daughter of a first-floor tenant. Then she asked Katz when he would get to the leaks in her mother’s apartment.

Soon, Katz said.

“It’s a process,” Katz continued. ​“You clean a place out. You go unit by unit. We’re taking crappy properties which we’re buying at a discount — I won’t lie about that — and making them livable apartments. We want to do everything by the book.

“It’s a big undertaking. It’s going to take some time,” he said. ​“We’re ready to hit it hard.”

“We’re Watching”

Serena Neal-Sanjurjo, Jim Turcio and Bobby Doyle vowed to make sure Katz makes good on his vow.

They agree Katz has assumed a big undertaking. In general, they haven’t liked what they’ve seen when companies such as Mandy Management and Levitin snap up hundreds of rundown properties in neighborhoods all over town, and continue renting to poor people.

Neal-Sanjurjo runs the city’s neighborhood anti-blight agency, the Livable City Initiative (LCI).

“When you have too much property, you’re not going to take care of it,” Neal-Sanjurjo said in an interview. She said that a small number of real estate firms have amassed well over 1,000 blighted properties and continued renting them to poor households, too often with bad results. Katz’s Ocean is the newest player to join those ranks. Since Ocean got into the business two years ago, it has acquired about 500 units of housing, according to Katz, including the recent 100 or so Xu hovels.

Neal-Sanjurjo wants LCI to start competing with those outfits to purchase blighted properties from foreclosure so the city or not-for-profit builders can renovate them and sell them to homeowners rather than cede them to large-portfolio absentee landlords. ​“There are a lot of folks in the city who want to buy homes,” she said. LCI has applied for state and federal programs that will enable the city to purchase foreclosed-upon homes that would otherwise go to private investors. Neal-Sanjurjo has submitted a proposal to the Board of Alders to authorize LCI to buy foreclosed properties.

Doyle, the city’s fire marshal, said his staff has been sitting down with Katz to go over planned renovations. A two-alarm fire last week at an Ella Grasso Boulevard building Ocean recently purchased from Xu left 28 people homeless (including people who lived next door). In that case, ​“it appears” Katz wasn’t at fault, according to Doyle; the fire appeared to have started when someone lit a couch on fire on an exterior deck.

Overall, Doyle said, he intends to have his staff ​“stay on top of” not just Ocean, but all the large poverty-building managers.

“A lot of them take on too much with too little help,” he said. ​“I get it: You fix up something. [There’s] a tenant-landlord dispute; someone breaks something. You have to fix it.”

Doyle said he has developed a productive relationship with a longer-established management company, Mandy Management. He’d like to do the same with Ocean’s Mendy Katz, he said: ​“I think he’s on the right track.”

Jim Turcio, the city’s building official, remains in need of convincing, in the wake of two other fires that occurred at Ocean-managed buildings that followed permitting disputes.

“I’ve got a list of his properties. My guys go by there once a week,” Turcio said. ​“We’re watching him.” Turcio said Katz did take out required permits for his recent exterior work on a number of previously Xu-owned buildings.

That work impressed Beaver Hills Alder Richard Furlow, who had pressed the city to crack down on Xu.

Furlow, too, said he has met with Katz. He complained about the way tenants in the Xu era were leaving trash scattered on the ground and stuffing non-recyclables into recycling bins, causing public works to leave it there. Katz has solved that problem and made the Blake Street property look better, Furlow said. ​“So far I’m happy. He’s making good on what he said he would do. It’s like night and day with the previous owner. I’m hoping this will continue.”

Non-Stop

A visit with Katz is a whirl of simultaneous conversations and interruptions.

Bzzzzz….

“What property had a hot-water tank problem?” Katz asks into his cellphone. ​“199 – 201 English? Hot-water tank is there already?”

No. It didn’t arrive.

“We’ll do it first thing in the morning. We’ll do three or four.”

Click.

Katz, who grew up attending New Haven Hebrew Day School, lived and worked for a while in Brooklyn before returning home with his family to buy a home and settle. He said Ocean has taken on management of about 500 units of housing in New Haven since a Rehoboth, Israel-based investor, Shmuel Aizenberg, set up the company in February 2014 and began purchasing properties through limited-liability corporations. That’s how a number of New Haven property-management firms grew into giants. Out-of-state and/or foreign investors see a lucrative market in New Haven, put up the money, rely on a local person to handle the day-to-day tsuris.

Katz said he believes that he and his nine to ten staffers and additional outside contractors can handle that big a portfolio — ​“if you have a good team and you’re set up for repairs.”

A tenant fails to show up at home to let a repair crew in. Another tenant needs extra time to line up a government housing voucher. A contractor checks in about plans to pick up. Except for on holidays and his weekly day of Sabbath rest, Katz pretty much runs from early morning into well into the evening.

It’s worth it, he said, when he sees the properties look better. Like when he drives by 522 Elm St., where his crew has transformed the exterior in a few weeks. Now it’s working on the inside.

It takes more work to retrofit the interiors. Every Xu property needs major work, he said. Katz estimated he’ll spend $10,000 on average renovating individual apartments. He’ll start on vacant units, like the second-floor apartment at 56 – 8 Blake. Meanwhile, he has to work out problems that arise daily, whether it’s problems he inherited from Xu like pest infestation or money woes with tenants trying to scrape by in difficult circumstances. ​“Most tenants are decent people,” Katz said. A few, he added, cause headaches.

“Mice Are Running”

Who causes the headaches, of course, depends on whom you ask.

Hilcia Martinez, who lives with her three young children in an apartment on Truman Street, blamed Ocean Management for problems forcing her to move. Katz told a different story about what happened.

They both agreed that her apartment had a mouse problem.

Martinez started a pile outside her doorway this week: rugs, boxes, mattresses, children’s toys — all of it destined for the trash. Martinez’s makeshift dump — a sprawling trash heap that could be mistaken for a frantic, belated attempt at spring cleaning — is filled with the casualties of ongoing bedbug and rodent infestations that have bedeviled her apartment over the last eight months.

Martinez, a single mom with a streak of red dye running through her jet-black hair, moved into the apartment in November. She has been complaining for months about the mice.

She recounted her recent travails Tuesday as she leaned on a balcony in the vast atrium outside the housing court at 121 Elm St. She was waiting for her lawyer, Amy Marx of New Haven Legal Assistance Association, to negotiate a settlement with Ocean, which took her to court after she refused to pay the $950 monthly rent on an apartment infested with insects and rodents.

She said she saw mice scurrying about the apartment when she moved in, but figured they’d be a minor inconvenience. Then the inconveniences began to worsen: mice in her year-old daughter’s crib, bedbugs crawling all over the furniture, electrical malfunctions in the kitchen.

She said that when she reported the problem to Mendy Katz of Ocean Management, he gave her a set of mousetraps, saying ​“it would take time for the situation to go away.” According to Martinez, after the infestation continued to spread, Katz said he would hire an exterminator, but never followed through on the promise.

Martinez’s 10-year-old daughter has a liver disorder, and her son was born with eyesight issues that have required multiple surgeries. Last month, she had to take her younger daughter to the hospital after the child accidentally ingested mouse feces. Her other children wake up most mornings with bedbug bites on their arms, legs and back. Last month, she said, hospital officials became so concerned about the health of the children that they reported Martinez to the Department of Children and Families.

After nearly an hour of waiting at housing court Tuesday, Marx informed Martinez that the lawyers had agreed to a ​“mutual termination” of the lease. Martinez will receive cash compensation as long as she leaves the apartment by July 25. 

After hearing the news, Martinez wrapped Marx in a tight embrace. It looked like her ordeal was finally coming to an end.

“Hopefully, I get my feet back,” she said.

Martinez — who dropped out of community college after a year to take care of her ailing children — quit her job at Dunkin Donuts in February, hoping to get better hours elsewhere. She now works at Goodwill in Hamden. At some point, she hopes to return to school to complete an associate’s degree in criminal justice. For now, she hopes she will be able to move her family without having to stay temporarily in a homeless shelter.

Mendy Katz told a different version of the story.

Martinez stopped paying rent when she lost her job, he said. He served her an eviction notice. At that point she complained about the mice to the city and went to legal aid.

Katz said he tried hard to address the mice problem. When mousetraps didn’t work, he kept sending exterminators to the apartment. But Martinez wouldn’t be present or let them in to work, he said. Other times she would remove mousetraps to protect her kids as they played in the apartment. He said he also replaced her bathroom floor.

At court, he said, he agreed to pay Martinez $2,500 as well as to release a $1,900 state-paid security deposit.

“I lost six months of rent. We’re not money-hungry people. But I’m the bad guy? We tried to work it out with the tenant. Sometimes we’re successful. Sometimes we’re not.”

Martinez’s attorney, Amy Marx, disputed Katz’s version of events and said he should have contacted the city and legal aid if his crew couldn’t get into the apartment. ​“This excuse is lame,” Marx said. She said legal aid’s housing unit is keeping a wary eye on how Ocean Management fares with Dr. Xu’s properties: ​“Out-of-state owners should not profit on vulnerable low-income tenants, leaving them to live in unacceptable conditions. If Ocean Management is going to be the in-town turnaround agent, then they need to do a better job than we’ve seen so far.”

Martinez has until July 20 to move. She receives the money once she turns over the keys, Katz said.

After she moves, he said, ​“the apartment will be fixed.” One unit at a time. He knows eyes are on him.