Power Player
by Cara Buckley
THERE are times when Maurice Vaughn, the former major league baseball player universally called Mo, is treated like a businessman — usually when he is deep in talks to buy ratty apartment buildings and make them habitable again.
Then there are times when he is treated like catnip — usually by women, like the ones who spotted him strolling through the cleaned-up courtyard of one such apartment complex in Brownsville, Brooklyn, called the Plaza, that Mr. Vaughn and his partners bought in 2007.
“How ya doin’ Mo Vaughn,” they crooned in near-unison. “Mo Vaughn? Mo Vaaaauuuuugghnn.”
Mr. Vaughn, 42 — and married with a 5-year-old daughter — cuts an unlikely figure in New York’s real estate world, not just because women are drawn to him, or because he is 6-foot-2 and 280 pounds under his custom-made suit, Donald Pliner loafers and diamond studs. Charismatic and massive, enduringly famous and comfortably rich, he brings a dose of glamour to the decidedly unsexy world of low-income housing.
This is where Mr. Vaughn, a star slugger for the Boston Red Sox who quit baseball in 2003 after a lackluster run with the Mets, decided to build what he called his “afterlife” from the ashes of his baseball career. His six-year-old company, Omni New York LLC, is on its way to becoming a major player in the low-income housing world. It has acquired 4,000 apartments, most of them in New York State’s scrappiest neighborhoods, housing the poorest of tenants (98 percent of them qualify for Section 8 rent subsidies).
In a city obsessed with the gilded cocoons of the rich, the company has forged a reputation for turning around properties once deemed untouchable in the caste system of New York real estate — like the Plaza, where drug dealers once openly sold their own brand of heroin, guarded by pit bulls whose food was laced with gunpowder.
Mr. Vaughn, both teddy-bearish and intimidating, is the leader of an unlikely triumvirate. His Omni partners are a Russian expatriate named Eugene Schneur, 38, his lawyer and friend since baseball days, and Robert Bennett, 46, who has years of experience financing low-income housing. The firm began buying in 2004, focusing on so-called acquisition rehabs — older properties in various stages of decrepitude, often with absentee landlords and teetering finances.
Since then, it has bought and rehabilitated 23 sites in New York, Massachusetts and Wyoming for a total of $503 million. Other deals worth $205 million for 1,000 units, most in the Bronx, are scheduled to close in September.
“Is he a big deal in New York real estate? He’s becoming a big deal,” said Harold Shultz, a senior fellow with the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, a research group.
“It’s unusual to have someone famous; usually this field is small operators,” Mr. Shultz added. “But Mo, he was serious.”
Other professional athletes have become developers in retirement — Tate George, a former guard for the Nets, has spearheaded projects including affordable housing in places like Newark and Bridgeport, N.J. But many more have gravitated toward flashier, more commercial ventures, like movie theaters and restaurants (Magic Johnson); grilling devices (George Foreman); barbeque sauce (William Perry, “the Refrigerator”); and bars or nightclubs (too many players to count).
Mr. Vaughn, who was born in Norwalk, Conn., and now splits his time between a 3,000-square-foot rental at 52nd Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan and a five-bedroom home in Coral Gables, Fla., said he chose this field because it seemed like a way to both do some good and make some money, with minimum risk. And though he spent the high points of his baseball career in Boston and was largely lampooned as an overweight has-been while with the Mets, Mr. Vaughn said he chose to make this city the center of his business interests because he “felt bad how it ended for me in New York.”
“I always had dreams of coming to New York, driving through the boroughs, and knowing people through baseball,” Mr. Vaughn said from his office on the 31st floor of the Dag Hammarskjold building on the East Side. “Now I know people in the boroughs for different reasons. Good reasons.”
Looking out over the United Nations building and the East River below, he added, “I knew the test of a man was what he’s going to do with his afterlife.”
Read the Full Article @ The New York Times
by Cara Buckley
THERE are times when Maurice Vaughn, the former major league baseball player universally called Mo, is treated like a businessman — usually when he is deep in talks to buy ratty apartment buildings and make them habitable again.
Then there are times when he is treated like catnip — usually by women, like the ones who spotted him strolling through the cleaned-up courtyard of one such apartment complex in Brownsville, Brooklyn, called the Plaza, that Mr. Vaughn and his partners bought in 2007.
“How ya doin’ Mo Vaughn,” they crooned in near-unison. “Mo Vaughn? Mo Vaaaauuuuugghnn.”
Mr. Vaughn, 42 — and married with a 5-year-old daughter — cuts an unlikely figure in New York’s real estate world, not just because women are drawn to him, or because he is 6-foot-2 and 280 pounds under his custom-made suit, Donald Pliner loafers and diamond studs. Charismatic and massive, enduringly famous and comfortably rich, he brings a dose of glamour to the decidedly unsexy world of low-income housing.
This is where Mr. Vaughn, a star slugger for the Boston Red Sox who quit baseball in 2003 after a lackluster run with the Mets, decided to build what he called his “afterlife” from the ashes of his baseball career. His six-year-old company, Omni New York LLC, is on its way to becoming a major player in the low-income housing world. It has acquired 4,000 apartments, most of them in New York State’s scrappiest neighborhoods, housing the poorest of tenants (98 percent of them qualify for Section 8 rent subsidies).
In a city obsessed with the gilded cocoons of the rich, the company has forged a reputation for turning around properties once deemed untouchable in the caste system of New York real estate — like the Plaza, where drug dealers once openly sold their own brand of heroin, guarded by pit bulls whose food was laced with gunpowder.
Mr. Vaughn, both teddy-bearish and intimidating, is the leader of an unlikely triumvirate. His Omni partners are a Russian expatriate named Eugene Schneur, 38, his lawyer and friend since baseball days, and Robert Bennett, 46, who has years of experience financing low-income housing. The firm began buying in 2004, focusing on so-called acquisition rehabs — older properties in various stages of decrepitude, often with absentee landlords and teetering finances.
Since then, it has bought and rehabilitated 23 sites in New York, Massachusetts and Wyoming for a total of $503 million. Other deals worth $205 million for 1,000 units, most in the Bronx, are scheduled to close in September.
“Is he a big deal in New York real estate? He’s becoming a big deal,” said Harold Shultz, a senior fellow with the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, a research group.
“It’s unusual to have someone famous; usually this field is small operators,” Mr. Shultz added. “But Mo, he was serious.”
Other professional athletes have become developers in retirement — Tate George, a former guard for the Nets, has spearheaded projects including affordable housing in places like Newark and Bridgeport, N.J. But many more have gravitated toward flashier, more commercial ventures, like movie theaters and restaurants (Magic Johnson); grilling devices (George Foreman); barbeque sauce (William Perry, “the Refrigerator”); and bars or nightclubs (too many players to count).
Mr. Vaughn, who was born in Norwalk, Conn., and now splits his time between a 3,000-square-foot rental at 52nd Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan and a five-bedroom home in Coral Gables, Fla., said he chose this field because it seemed like a way to both do some good and make some money, with minimum risk. And though he spent the high points of his baseball career in Boston and was largely lampooned as an overweight has-been while with the Mets, Mr. Vaughn said he chose to make this city the center of his business interests because he “felt bad how it ended for me in New York.”
“I always had dreams of coming to New York, driving through the boroughs, and knowing people through baseball,” Mr. Vaughn said from his office on the 31st floor of the Dag Hammarskjold building on the East Side. “Now I know people in the boroughs for different reasons. Good reasons.”
Looking out over the United Nations building and the East River below, he added, “I knew the test of a man was what he’s going to do with his afterlife.”
Read the Full Article @ The New York Times
No comments:
Post a Comment