Coming Back the 19th Floor: Ocean Village Complex Gets New Owner, and New Lease on Life

The sole occupant is a photograph of a hugging couple; it is adrift on a floor of linoleumlike tiles, some curled back like potato peelings. The snapshot was probably here even before Hurricane Sandy kicked off about a month of waterless, heatless darkness in these buildings, where inhabitants were left in squalid conditions, feeling trapped, abandoned and afraid.

But soon that forgotten photo will be swept away by teams of builders who, beginning a few weeks ago, flooded the complex, even as its transformers remain knocked out, and are in the process of rehabbing each apartment. They are starting with the hundreds of vacant, mostly decrepit ones. It is the first phase of repair to Ocean Village by a real estate development company that assumed ownership of the property just last month, at last closing a deal that began well before the storm.

Once the vacant apartments are repaired, people displaced by the storm will be given priority to rent them, as part of a deal the new owner made with the city last month, said Ron Moelis, a founder and the chief executive of the company, L+M Development Partners.

“People said we were crazy when we closed on this” just after the storm, Mr. Moelis said in an interview. Talks to take over the property began last March, and were nearing completion the day the storm hit. Mr. Moelis cited what he called “a double-bottom line” of both commitment to residents suffering in a long-mismanaged building, and a financial obligation, as why the company went forward with the deal, even as the peninsula was brutalized by the storm.

“We are a for-profit company and we hope to make money doing this,” Mr. Moelis said of the building purchase. “But we didn’t shy away from doing this when it became much more difficult in the last few weeks.”

The company’s ultimate plan — a multimillion-dollar effort to re-clad the Brutalist buildings in warm-toned siding; rehabilitate unsightly common areas; and add social service centers, solar paneling and maybe even a bowling alley — will take two years, the developers say.

They hope to attract new renters to the abandoned apartments, as well as eventually fix apartments that have made residents miserable for years with mold, leaks and infestations, after decades of what critics say was mismanagement by the site’s former owners, Ocean Village Associates.

That company said the blame for the conditions lay with being unable to raise rents enough to cover necessary improvements and upgrades, because the building is part of the city’s Mitchell-Lama affordable housing program, according to a spokesman. “With the rents collected, we were barely able to provide essential services, such as heat, water, electric and security,” Donald Miller, the spokesman for Ocean Village Associates, said in a statement.

In early December, Mr. Moelis sat in a completed “model apartment” in one of the lower-slung buildings in the complex, a representation of what he said would be the finished product for every apartment in about 24 months. Renovations will cost $35,000 to $40,000 for each of the building’s 1,093 apartments.

It was crisp and new, an oasis from the stench of urine that perpetually fills the complex’s staircases. It is a far cry from just about any other apartment in the complex, said Keywan Cohen, 30, who stays at Ocean Village with his girlfriend. Mr. Cohen ducked into the model apartment at a reporter’s request, and found himself agog at the closet’s nonsticking sliding doors, and the fresh, corrosion-free kitchen fixtures.  

“If they make all the apartments like this and they kick all the knuckleheads out, it will be a lot better,” Mr. Cohen said. Violence is a frequent occurrence in the complex, and came to a head when a bodega in the courtyard was bashed and robbed shortly after the storm. In the near month without power that followed, a young man was shot to death on Nov. 28 in one of the buildings. He was a friend, Mr. Cohen said, adding, “They’ve got to change more than the apartments.”

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