Saving this Brooklyn Park apartment complex was a yearslong ordeal. Now its owner plans to sell.

Shortly after clawing back control from gang elements, the nonprofit owner of a massive Brooklyn Park apartment complex is in the final stages of selling to an out-of-state investment firm, stoking unease among elected officials.

Affordable housing provider Aeon wants to sell its Huntington Place apartment complex to Mas Capital by the end of the year.

The change comes after Aeon spent years stabilizing Huntington Place after drug dealers wreaked havoc on the complex during the pandemic. Spending heavily on security, evictions and critical repairs has allowed Aeon to stabilize the property, but unable to repay its lenders. While the hope is that Mas Capital would continue to rehabilitate the aging complex, elected officials and Brooklyn Park residents are unsure what to expect from the unfamiliar for-profit company.

Monday evening, Aeon CEO Eric Johnson stood before Brooklyn Park City Council members and made an impassioned plea to the city to forgive its $5 million loan to Aeon and transfer Huntington Place's affordable housing covenants to Mas Capital. Aeon, meanwhile, would remain a limited partner for two years post-sale to help spend $10 million in state grants meant to help Huntington.

"This is our last stand. We have no more options after this," said Johnson. "We are out of steam. This debt is due. ... What's behind the curtain if this does not happen, guys ... is unspeakable, and I just don't want to get into that. I'm just going to say it to you this way — it becomes a zombie property because Aeon can no longer invest in it. It becomes a place where all security is basically gone."

Huntington Place, the second largest apartment complex of its kind in Minnesota, was built in 1969 and contains 834 one-bedroom units across six buildings — a formula that is less than ideal for family housing and would not be replicated today. For generations it provided low-barrier housing for people in transition and in need of a fresh start. In 2020, when then-owner Dominium sought to sell Huntington Place, Aeon purchased the property with $76.6 million of investments from the Twin Cities Local Initiatives Support Corporation and National Equity Fund in order to prevent the likely displacement of thousands of people had the property passed to a market-rate developer.

One month later, the pandemic hit. The state instituted an eviction moratorium. Affordable-housing providers everywhere suddenly faced crisis conditions: nonpayment of rent, the heightened acuity of tenants' mental health needs and unprecedented security costs.

'Free-for-all'

The nadir of those problems came out at Huntington Place in 2021 and 2022, when gang members took over the building entrances and parking lot, shooting off guns and extorting residents for money, said Brooklyn Park South Precinct Cmdr. Elliot Faust. The Fire Department wouldn't enter the premises without a police escort because people would jump on the fire trucks, he recalled. Bishop Harding Smith was asked to bring his Minnesota Acts Now violence interrupters in, but their work was short-lived. A July 2022 city memo stated there was "too much animosity toward the group" for them to be effective. Amid a nationwide staffing shortage, Aeon struggled to hire maintenance for Huntington Place, perceived as a particularly difficult place to work.

"People stopped paying rent because they didn't have to, and you couldn't evict them for it, and it's just became a free for all where people didn't respect the place where they were staying or living anymore, and the management couldn't hold people accountable," Faust said.

The turning point came when the city, Aeon and tenant advocacy groups like the Village BP started collaborating in earnest, issuing weekly memos to communicate what actions they were taking to claw back control of Huntington Place. Aeon hired an armed patrol, installed security cameras and erected a fence to restrict movement in and out of its parking lot, spending $1.353 million annually from 2021 to 2024. The police raided the units of drug dealers and Aeon jettisoned them as the moratorium eased. City staff door-knocked floor by floor, issuing repair orders for discharged fire extinguishers that were never replaced, unpatched holes in walls, mold, water damage, mice and roaches. Repairs improved the look and feel of the complex. The addition of sidewalks helped residents walk to the bus stop, and speed bumps broke up the roadway near the front checkpoint area that had been nicknamed the "racetrack."

Crime statistics paint the picture of a massive ship yawing straight. Between 2022 and 2023, there was a 56.6% plunge in violent crime. The trend continues downward.

Longtime resident Ernie Jackson said he and his wife, Kim, used to only leave their apartment to let their dog out because, "You know, who wants to be involved in the chaos and craziness?" But since security was restored, he's spent a significant amount of time this summer soaking up the sun in his lawn chair.

Aeon has informed them that residents need not worry about displacement because affordable housing covenants will follow the property through January 2050. The Jacksons are heartened by that. Still, Kim wonders whether the new owner will maintain the social support services that Aeon worked with city and community partners to offer — the school supply giveaways, the health resource fairs and vaccine outreach, pizza nights with police and teen outings to Dunwoody College.

Not much is known about Mas Capital locally. It doesn't own any other affordable-housing projects in the Twin Cities region, and the firm did not respond to questions from the Star Tribune about its long-term intentions.

Mas Capital Asset Manager Sam Kirzner provided a statement through Aeon: "We are in the process of due diligence and appreciate the supportive nature of the partners involved. We look forward to going through the due-diligence process and answering questions along the way."

'Major success story'

Faust, who called turning the tides at Huntington a "major success story," said he couldn't help but worry about the continuity of those improvements without Aeon in charge.

Tim Gladhill, the city's community development director, said Brooklyn Park's priorities in the sale are twofold: prevent existing residents from losing their housing, and protect the investments the city has already made toward rehabilitating the property. City staff "generally feel comfortable" that those priorities will be met through the sale, Gladhill said, noting that the city still needs to get to know Mas Capital. "We want to spend a little bit more time to make sure that [it] has some longevity to it, that it's not just talking points at time of sale."

On Thursday, Aeon hosted a tenant meeting at Huntington Place about the impending sale. Residents had been given notice by email the night before, but most people out and about weren't aware that the complex was being sold. There were no flyers to spread the word about the meeting.

Uncertain future

The Village BP founder Tekoa Cochran, a former resident who assumed the role of tenant advocate during the pandemic and pushed the city of Brooklyn Park to intervene at Huntington Place, criticized the communication. Walking through the complex Friday afternoon, she told as many people as she ran into about the impending sale, pointing out patched dents in a wall had been left by gunfire and the algae-filled pool that hasn't been functional for years. Cochran believes that this residual evidence of squalor, despite recent improvements that have been made to the property, can make Huntington residents feel less valued.

"We're really lucky to have the community that we have at Brooklyn Park, because when the community heard about what was going on, they stood up for us," she said, crediting police for putting forth the effort to repair their legitimacy with Huntington tenants. "We learned that we needed each other and that the only way any of this is going to work, if we want to improve our lives, improve our conditions, improve our safety, to be taken seriously, we needed everyone on board."

Brooklyn Park City Council members, who also populate the city's Economic Development Authority, were candid with their skepticism on Monday night. Expressing some heartburn at the idea of forgiving $5 million in loans, the commissioners questioned what community amenities the city might be able to get out of its investment, whether Mas Capital could be entrusted to make the more than $200 million in capital improvements that Aeon estimates it would take to bring the complex in line with modern standards, and how their relationship with the Huntington community would change once a for-profit company is running it, vs. a mission-driven nonprofit.

"What's at stake here is people's lives, people's housing stability," said Mayor Hollies Winston, urging the city to help negotiate a solution. "So when we talk about 2,500 people, I wouldn't write off five people, let alone 2,500 people. ... God forbid that stability were to go away, we don't know what that looks like‚ and I don't think your average Brooklyn Park resident is heartless enough to want to even consider that possibility."

The Economic Development Authority is expected to vote at a meeting next month. Details have not yet been finalized.