Thomas Breen photo
501 Fountain St.: Sold by Ocean to Continuum of Care.
One of the city’s largest landlords sold another 22 of its New Haven rental properties during the first two-plus months of 2024, continuing to dump large swathes of its local real estate portfolio.
According to filings posted to the city’s land records database between January 1 and March 11, affiliates of the megalandlord Ocean Management sold 22 residential properties containing a total of 69 different dwelling units.
Those 22 different real estate transactions with 22 different buyers added up to a combined sum of $9,490,850 in sales, for properties most recently assessed by the city for tax purposes as worth $7,224,300.
Some of the properties recently sold by Ocean include:
• A single-family house at 49 Henry St. in Newhallville, sold for $240,000 to Krystal Amaker of New Haven;
• A two-family house at 13 Valley Place North in West Hills, sold for $280,000 to Hakam Abdalla of Hamden;
• A three-family house at 89 Clinton Ave. in Fair Haven, sold for $395,000 to Hugo Gonzalez and Rosana Vives of Bridgeport;
• A four-family house at 186 Sheffield Ave. in Newhallville, sold for $535,000 to Jordan Rodriguez and Lizeth Cardona Ramirez of East Elmhurst, New York;
• A five-unit apartment house at 183 Townsend Ave. in Morris Cove, sold for $625,000 to a holding company controlled by Hugh Baker of Fairfield;
• An eight-unit apartment building at 76 Fulton St. in the Annex, sold for $960,000 to a holding company controlled by Eliezer Rooz of Brooklyn, New York, Yehuda Afergan of Davie, Florida, and David Dvash of Deerfield Beach, Florida;
• A 10-unit apartment building at 93 Judith Ter. in the Annex, sold for $1.35 million to a holding company controlled by David Dvash of Deerfield Beach, Florida and Henya Grossman of New York City.
See below for a full list of Ocean properties sold so far in 2024.
These most recent Ocean sales follow a year in which the local megalandlord-real estate investment outfit-property management company sold 65 of its New Haven properties containing 170 units of rental housing for a total of $26.6 million in 2023.
Shmuel Aizenberg, who founded and runs Ocean Management, did not respond to a request for comment by the publication time of this article. Back in March 2022, Aizenberg told the Independent that Ocean owned around 1,400 New Haven apartments at that time. That means that the company still controls plenty of New Haven rentals — as well as long-delayed developments on Chapel, Foster, and Blake Streets — even as it continues to sell and sell and sell and sell.
City land records data
Long-Term Supportive Housing To Stay On Fountain
One of Ocean’s more recent sales was of a single-family house at 501 Fountain St., which was purchased by Continuum Management Corp. for $295,000, per a filing posted to the land records database on Feb. 9. That property last sold for $105,000 in 2017, and the city tax assessor most recently appraised it as worth $227,700.
The new owner of that Fountain Street home is an affiliate of the local supportive housing and homelessness-combatting nonprofit, Continuum of Care.
Continuum CEO Patti Walker told the Independent that her organization has been renting 501 Fountain St. since 2019 and has used that property for a small residential support program funded by the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS).
Since 2019, she said, three women who need “lots of assistance” have lived at that property. Through the Continuum-run program, those three residents receive “assistance with daily life skills, transport to doctor’s appointments, case managing,” as well as help cooking meals, going shopping, and other “basic residential care for people with special needs and disabilities.”
Walker said that Continuum purchased 501 Fountain St. simply because Ocean was looking to sell. She said that Continuum plans to keep the use of 501 Fountain exactly the same as it’s been since 2019 — that is, as permanent supportive housing for three residents with special needs.
“It’s much better to have site management than it is to rent,” Walker said about the appeal of buying 501 Fountain. Now they don’t have to worry about a different landlord buying the property and potentially discontinuing Continuum’s rental. “In this case, we were able to maintain stability for these young” residents.
This isn’t the first time Continuum of Care has purchased a property from Ocean. In March 2023, Continuum paid $375,000 to buy a three-family Ocean-owned house at 310 Winthrop Ave. Continuum later won permission from the Board of Zoning Appeals to convert that property into six “crisis beds” for people whom the city’s COMPASS non-cop crisis response team interact with and determine are in need of immediate short-term housing. COMPASS is run by Continuum, and responds to certain 911 calls related to homelessness, mental health, and substance use.
Walker told the Independent that, a year later, those six crisis beds on Winthrop are not yet open, as the ex-Ocean project required a “major, major renovation and rehab.” The building “was very not in good shape. It required a full rebuild on the inside. … It was not habitable the way it was.”
When that Winthrop property is open, ideally later this spring, “it’s going to be really lovely inside,” Walker said. It’s “going to allow us to provide medical assistance, case management assistance, have all of our services there,” in addition to providing beds for six individuals in need of a place to sleep indoors.
She stressed that the Winthrop Avenue property and the recently bought Fountain Street home will be put to very different uses. Winthrop will focus on short-term housing, medical assistance, and case management, she said, while Fountain will continue to provide long-term supportive housing for a small number of residents.