🔒Investor’s West End apartment buildings spotlight Hartford’s fight against blight

Nobody builds apartment buildings anymore like the four-story, brick structure at 467 Farmington Ave., in Hartford. With its intricate brickwork and cornices, the century-old, nine-unit apartment building reflects the aesthetic of its era. Mark Twain’s former mansion is located just a couple blocks down the street. On a recent Tuesday morning, owner Oz Pariser had to evict squatters from eight of the building’s nine apartments just hours before showing it to a potential buyer. Pariser, who is based in Manchester, recently acquired a 69-unit portfolio in Hartford’s West End that includes 467 Farmington Ave., along with three nearby vacant and boarded-up buildings of similar vintage. He gained control of the properties by purchasing and then foreclosing on delinquent loans held by the previous owner. Pariser owns 92 apartment units in Hartford and New Britain, along with 100 mobile home park lots in West Virginia and Ohio. He initially planned to renovate the historic buildings at 467 Farmington Ave., 249 and 258 Sisson Ave., and 28 Girard Ave., all clustered in Hartford’s West End. But after extensive damage from squatters and vandals — including stripped copper pipes and destroyed electrical meters — he chose instead to put the portfolio up for sale. The four-building package is listed with Horvath & Tremblay for $3.45 million. “Whoever buys them will be renovating them and keeping them for the long term,” Pariser said. “These properties have been sitting vacant and condemned and blighted for several years now, and we’ll see them revitalized and back as real valuable housing stock for the City of Hartford.”

Pariser has taken steps to secure the properties, boarding up windows and access points, clearing trash, doing light landscaping, and sealing garages that had been used by the homeless. His efforts come amid a broader push by the city to tackle blight. Under Mayor Arunan Arulampalam, Hartford has leaned on blight citations and other enforcement measures to pressure absentee landlords, while offering incentives to those willing to reinvest. The strategy is beginning to shift neglected buildings into new hands with the goal of stabilizing them and adding back much-needed housing. For Pariser, city support has been critical: on Sept. 26, officials erased more than $500,000 in blight citations left by the prior owner and reduced a $54,000 lien on the 15-unit building at 18 Girard Ave. to $5,400, which he has since paid. “It wouldn’t have been a feasible deal for me if they hadn’t agreed to do that,” Pariser said. “The properties would have sat for God knows how much longer. This made it feasible for me to pass it off to the next person who will completely revitalize them.”

Problem landlord

After buying mortgage notes on the properties last December, Pariser filed two foreclosure suits against their owner, Paxe Hartford Portfolio LP, and its principal, New Jersey investor Aron Puretz. In court filings, Pariser’s attorney said Paxe’s debts and interest had grown to more than $5.4 million. City records show Paxe had acquired the buildings for $4 million in February 2022. That same month, Arulampalam launched a crackdown on housing violations, naming Paxe and Puretz among the city’s top three “problem landlords.” At the time, Paxe controlled 357 units in 24 Hartford buildings, many of which were vacant due to unsafe conditions; 13 were already in foreclosure or receivership tied to code and blight violations. In April, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Puretz was one of four real estate investors sentenced for a scheme that defrauded lenders on commercial and multifamily properties. He received a five-year prison sentence and was ordered to pay $22.2 million in restitution. Attempts to reach his attorney were unsuccessful.

Carrots and sticks

Arulampalam credits the city’s use of blight citations with pushing Paxe’s West End portfolio into new hands. His crackdown has sharply increased the penalties levied on landlords: the city issued $725,000 in citations in 2024, compared with $4.7 million through mid-September of this year. The goal, Arulampalam said, is to force negligent landlords to “shape up or ship out of Hartford.” “Our blight division has been very aggressive but also targeted in going after the worst landlords, and also trying to work with … those landlords who are trying to do the right thing,” Arulampalam said. “I think that strategy is bearing out.”

Hartford currently has about 350 vacant structures, mostly residential but some commercial, according to Mike Perez, the city’s blight remediation director. That’s 60 fewer than at the end of 2023, after those buildings were renovated and issued certificates of occupancy. Perez emphasized that the city prefers to work with owners before issuing fines. Officials start with outreach and recognize some landlords face financial constraints. Incentives include tax breaks for correcting blight and access to a community loan fund. Citations and liens, Perez said, come only after those options are exhausted. “What we want is compliance,” Perez said. “Our enforcement paradigm is not built for revenue collection.” Paxe didn’t respond to repeated outreach from the city over “a ton of issues” at its properties, Perez said. The city ultimately cleared residents from Paxe’s 36-unit building at 249 Sisson Ave., because of fire code violations and mechanical problems. Several other Paxe buildings deteriorated into dumping grounds, requiring the city to board them up multiple times to keep squatters out. “The big, overarching problem was that this owner had no property maintenance staff attending to these buildings in any meaningful way,” Perez said. Hartford’s stepped-up use of blight citations, which can turn into liens, is expected to put more neglected properties into the city’s hands, Perez said. If liens are smaller than a property’s value, foreclosures must be resolved through a sale — a risk that troubled buildings could end up with new negligent owners. To avoid that, city staff are preparing strategies to return seized properties to productive use, potentially in partnership with the Hartford Land Bank, Capital Region Development Authority and other groups. “We don’t want to be the largest owner of blighted properties in the city,” Perez said. “We are not just taking them away from bad landlords and sitting on them ourselves. Over the past year, we have ironed out a process for our endgame.”