Last May, local landowner Tenacity Group announced the auction a batch of seven large, rent-controlled apartment buildings, under pressure from banks to get them off the books. Ultimately, none of them sold. On Tuesday at 1:00 p.m., Tenacity will try again with two buildings: The Park Lee at 1630 Park Road and the Concord Apartments at 5807-5825 14th Street NW, both slated for Alex Cooper’s auction block.
Why didn’t the whole group sell originally? Hard to say with any certainty, since neither Tenacity nor its property management firm, Cap City Management, have returned calls or emails. But organizers working with the buildings have provided a rough picture of overly optimistic investments that didn’t work out the way Tenacity expected, creating an albatross that the company has struggled to unload.
“The plan was not to own rent controlled properties, but convert them to condos,” says Farah Fosse, director of affordable housing preservation at the Latino Economic Development Corporation. “They were thrown for a loop that the tenants didn’t go for it a few years ago.”
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