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Co-living, the roommate-pairing service, offers a double-barreled promise. Tenants can enjoy reduced rents by paying just for rooms rather than entire apartments. And landlords can rake in more revenue by squeezing more paying customers into buildings.
But the bankruptcy this month of nine-year-old Common Living, the country’s largest co-living provider and one backed by a notable $113 million in venture capital, suggests the business still has some kinks to work out.
Indeed, for all the praise the industry has won for offering short-term and affordable housing options in a tight market, co-living has also come under fire from tenants over poor sanitation, bad chemistry and lax security.
And some critics worry that the renovations necessary to create “dorms for adults,” which tend to be located in Black and brown neighborhoods, provide landlords with cover to skirt the 2019 rent reform law. A major construction project can be a rationale to remove a site from New York’s rent-stabilization program.
One thing seems clear, however: As creditors pick over Common’s remains, a rival firm, Outpost Club, is using the opportunity to grow. The Queens-based company snatched seven buildings away from Common in recent months by convincing landlords to go with it instead. And Outpost, whose CEO is Sergii Starostin, is now angling to acquire another 10 sites through Common’s Chapter 7 liquidation process.
The properties, which have functioned as co-living spaces for years, are thus touchpoints for the industry’s evolution that also may reveal clues about where it’s headed.
Among them is 125 W. 138th St., a building on a block that has played a major role in the Black cultural, political and ecclesiastic history of Harlem, especially given that it is home to the influential Abyssinian Baptist Church.
About 15 years ago, the five-story Italianate building had boarded-up windows and seemed vacant, based on old photos. Developer Garbo & Co. bought the site from its longtime owners for $3.2 million and began renovating the rent-stabilized property in 2014, according to Department of Buildings records.
Though No. 125 does not appear to have been an official co-living space in the years afterwards, its units, all four-bedrooms, were designed to share with roommates, according to old ads.
In 2020 Garbo sold the building to the developer Duke Properties for $6.3 million, doubling its money with the transaction. Duke filed plans to reconfigure the building’s 10 apartments by removing and installing partitions and doors, according to a permit. In 2021 Duke hired Common, which could not be reached for comment, to operate the building. But tenants complained about rats and leaks during Common’s tenure, records show, and Duke, which did not return a call, dropped Common for Outpost two years later.
Today, rooms at the building, known as the Clark House, start at $1,550 a month, according to Outpost’s website.
125 W. 138th St.
The five-story stoop-fronted brownstone that was seized by the city for back taxes in the 1970s and has appeared abandoned in more recent years is newly revitalized after several renovations, a few owners and a couple of co-living providers. The prewar walk-up has 10 apartments, according to city records, but it is unclear how many people actually live at the address. In 2023 owner Duke Properties dropped manager Common Living, which was criticized for allowing rodents at the site, and hired Outpost Club, which like most co-living providers operates buildings but does not own them. Founded in 2001, NoHo-based Duke is headed by Albert Dweck, whose 500-unit portfolio includes small rentals in Upper Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, including other sites with co-living units, which can reportedly increase a building’s rent rolls by as much as 30%. “We have found a way to do what Common could not,” Starostin said in a statement. Dweck did not return a call for comment.
121 and 123 W. 138th St.
These two weedy sites served as parking lots for years and are currently fenced-off and vacant. In 2015 real estate investor Albert Rabizadeh acquired them for $2.8 million and offloaded the pair three years later for $3.8 million. Their buyer was the Lamb’s Center for Urban Ministry, a group linked to the Church of the Nazarene, according to the city register. The evangelical Protestant denomination is perhaps best known as the owner of the former Lamb’s Club at 130 W. 44th St. in Times Square, which it bought at auction for $500,000 in 1975 before leasing it in the mid-2000s to the 76-room high-end Chatwal Hotel. Rev. Bruce Barnard appears to oversee real estate deals for the church, which has 120 locations in the metro area, and is seeking “other ways in which to develop Manhattan properties for non-profit and religious work,” according to the church’s website. No building permits are yet on file for the West 138th Street properties.
135 W. 138th St.
This well-kept 5-story prewar building and similar offerings at Nos. 131 and 133 make up a 25-unit rental complex owned by Janus Property Co., a Harlem-based developer that principal Scott Metzner founded in 1989. These three sites, which had been seized by the city for tax delinquencies, were some of Metzner’s earliest holdings, having been acquired in 1990. The city appears to have enlisted Janus to rehab them into affordable housing and provided public financing for the project. Units in the buildings, which also enjoy J-51 tax breaks, are rent-stabilized. The other principal of Janus is Jerry Salama, who formerly worked as a commissioner at the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development. In 2022 Janus completed a $700 million, 350,000-square-foot life sciences center at the site of a former bakery on West 126th Street. The science center is part of a 1.2 million-square-foot office campus Janus owns in the Columbia University-adjacent Manhattanville enclave. Ragtime composer Scott Joplin reportedly briefly lived at No. 131 in 1916.
132 W. 138th St.
One of the oldest and most influential Black parishes in the country, Abyssinian Baptist Church, was founded in 1808 and developed this Gothic-style site in 1923 after a string of previous sites in other parts of Manhattan. This included one on Thompson Street in Greenwich Village, which in the mid-19th century was part of “Little Africa.” The pastors of the Protestant congregation have included Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the first African American to be elected to the City Council in 1941 and the namesake of the street at the corner that was once Seventh Avenue. Powell, a Democrat, later represented Harlem in Congress for 14 terms. A subsequent Pastor, Calvin O. Butts III, founded the Abyssinian Development Corp. in 1989, a real estate force behind schools, stores and affordable housing that has developed $600 million worth of Harlem projects. Butts, who died in 2022, has yet to be replaced. Designated a city landmark in 1993, the 19,700-square-foot column-free, stained glass-adorned space is a regular stop for politicians courting the Black vote. In 2022, the Abyssinian also hosted a packed memorial service for former fashion editor Andre Leon Talley. Sunday services, which are livestreamed, generally start at 10 a.m. and last two hours.
108 W. 138th St.
The locally prolific Abyssinian Development Corp. created this 17-unit market-rate condo, which has one- to three-bedroom units, in 2013. The project hauled in $7.5 million in sales, according to its offering plan. One of the principals who guided it was lawyer and nonprofit developer Sheena Wright, who today serves as a deputy mayor in the administration of Mayor Eric Adams. The building’s official name, the Odell Clark Place Condominiums, pays tribute to an advisor to Powell. The block on which the condo is located has been known as Odell Clark Place since 1980. (There is another Odell Clark-named condo around the corner between West 138th and West 139th streets.) A three-bedroom penthouse at No. 108 is currently being offered for $1.4 million.
2351 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard
This 8-story, 134-unit condo, which spans the length of the block, is called the Rennie in homage to the previous structure on the site, the Renaissance Ballroom and Casino, a cultural hub during the mid-20thcentury Harlem Renaissance. A Black-owned in-house basketball team, the Rens, often played between musical acts. But the complex, which was never awarded landmark status, closed in 1979 and fell into disrepair. In 1997 the Abyssinian Baptist Church purchased the low-slung site for $3.7 million and in 2014 unloaded it for $10 million to BRP Companies, a Black-owned development firm co-founded by Geoff Flournoy and Meredith Marshall. The Rennie, which includes tax-abated units, expects to pull in $105 million for its 106 market-rate studio to three-bedroom homes. (The rest of the apartments are income-restricted affordable housing.) But Flournoy and Marshall still have several sponsor units to sell, six years after marketing began. The least expensive unit for sale in mid-June was a studio asking $550,000, according to StreetEasy.
553 Malcolm X Blvd.
This address actually applies to four side-by-side prewar properties that were combined as part of a 2007 condo conversion called The Savoy West. The 32-unit offering was from Tahl Propp Equities, a prominent Harlem landlord and developer headed by Joseph Tahl, who worked as an attorney for the Trump Organization in the 1990s, and Rodney Propp, a former investment banker. The building continues to benefit from J-51 property tax abatements given its status as a multifamily development that underwent capital improvements. Though the program expired in 2022, some apartments continue to receive the breaks. No. 1B, a one-bedroom on the market for $615,000, currently has a $322 monthly tax bill and will enjoy discounts until 2032. (Its common charges are $1,418 a month.) The City Council is now considering reinstating the J-51 program with a narrower scope for condos than the previous version. The brick-and-limestone site also contains four retail berths, which Tahl Propp controls. In 1987 the street was named for slain civil-rights leader Malcolm X. For about a century prior to that it was Lenox Avenue. And before Lenox it was Harlem Lane, a wide thoroughfare in a rural area popular with horse and buggy racers. When Gen. Ulysses S. Grant visited New York after emerging victorious in the Civil War, “one of his first requests was to be taken out to Harlem Lane,” according to the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s report for the nearby St. Nicholas Historic District.
C. J. Hughes , 2024-06-19 12:03:03
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