For the last eight years, North Siders have watched the Maria Regina College deteriorate.
Prominent Syracuse developer Mark Congel bought the Maria Regina campus in 2015. He planned to turn the six-building, 7.5-acre campus into apartments, he said at the time.
But since 2015, the buildings’ windows have been broken, people have broken into them and one building caught fire. Neighbors say Congel has failed to take care of the property. It often has had trash strewn on its overgrown lawn.
Another developer signed a purchase offer for the property nearly two years ago, but that sale has still not yet gone through because the developer hasn’t raised enough capital to finish its proposed project. Congel still owns the property.
That developer, Home Leasing LLC, said construction could still be at least a year away.
Mary Salibrici, who lives less than a mile from the convent, signed a petition to save the property, along with 1,000 other neighbors. She’s complained about the property’s condition to city officials, hoping it will be redeveloped.
“I just hope I live long enough to see it happen, because it’s a beautiful property,” Salibrici said.
Maria Regina’s story reaffirms an age-old tale. It is yet another property that a developer has promised to redevelop but ultimately left to sit. At best, Maria Regina has become blighted and an eyesore. At worst, it’s a piece of Syracuse’s housing puzzle left unused.
While Home Leasing does not yet own the property, its plans for the Maria Regina campus will come before the Syracuse Planning Commission at 6 p.m. on Monday.
Home Leasing has blamed its delay in completing the purchase on a struggle to raise capital for the project. The company said the cost to redevelop the property increased from $78 million in March 2022 to more than $100 million. Home Leasing will not redevelop the property until it receives state financing for the project, which will not happen until December 2024 at the earliest, company officials said.
That means North Side neighbors who have waited eight years for Maria Regina to be restored will likely have to wait at least a year or more for construction to even begin.
“We still have a pretty large gap that we need to find other sources of funding for,” said Jenifer Higgins, a development manager for Home Leasing.
Higgins declined to say how big the gap is but said it’s “sizable.”
“It’s a bit of a moving target,” she said.
‘It never happened and years went by’
The Sisters of Saint Francis sold the six-building, 7.5-acre Maria Regina campus to Congel for $500,000 in July 2015. At the time, Congel told the Syracuse Post-Standard that he planned to develop the convent into 175 apartments.
Mark Congel is the son of the late Robert Congel, whose Pyramid Companies built and owns Destiny USA. Mark Congel bought the Maria Regina campus with The Kimberly at Grant Blvd. LLC, which is registered to Granite Development Company, a development firm at which Mark Congel is a managing partner.
About a year after buying the campus, New York’s Empire State Development awarded $1.1 million to The Kimberly at Grant Blvd. LLC. A description of Congel’s intentions still lives on the state website.
ESD’s description of the project labeled it the “Kimberly Enterprise Center” project. It would have cost $23,216,224 to redevelop two of the six buildings on the Maria Regina campus. One of the convents was set to become a shared office, incubator and commercial space. The other was to be turned into an assisted living residence.
But in 2016, Congel filed the first of three petitions of the city’s assessment of the property. The city valued the property as being worth $4.3 million. He again filed petitions in 2017 and 2018, according to Onondaga County court records. Congel cited the fight over the assessment as a reason for a delay in the property’s development in a 2016 interview with the Post-Standard. The city reduced the assessed value of the property in 2019 to $640,000.
ESD ultimately never disbursed the $1.1 million to Congel, according to state records. The project never happened.
Congel did not reply to multiple attempts to contact him for this story.
“He was publicizing the fact that he was going to turn the property into apartments. People were excited about that, because there’s a lot of people on the North Side getting older, probably figuring they would sell their homes, and then they would move in there,” Salibrici said. “But it never happened and years went by.”
Frustration with Congel started immediately, said Salibrici and fellow North Side neighbor John Robinson. Trash littered Maria Regina’s overgrown lawn, and people broke into the vacant property.
Over the last four years, city officials have cited Congel’s LLC 15 times for its poor care of the Maria Regina property. Eight of the violations — for poor maintenance of the buildings’ walls, roofs and windows and the accumulation of garbage in the buildings — remain unresolved. Congel and the LLC failed to register the property as vacant, according to the city’s open data portal.
Deputy Commissioner of Business Development Eric Ennis said the city has contracted to mow the campus’ lawn and keep the property clean.
The Kimberly at Grant Blvd LLC owes the city and county more than $74,000 in unpaid taxes and cleanup costs from 2022 and 2023, according to county property records and city officials.
‘A very complex property’
In early 2022, North Side residents believed they had stumbled into a godsend. Home Leasing, a Rochester-based developer, signed a purchase agreement for the property.
But the last nearly two years have not gone smoothly. Home Leasing officials previously said construction on the project would begin in 2023. Construction has not yet started.
The development company still does not own the property because the sale is contingent on Home Leasing raising enough capital to develop the buildings on the Maria Regina campus.
A flier handed out by Home Leasing at a community meeting in 2022 projected the redevelopment of Maria Regina to cost $78 million. They now estimate the cost of the project to be over $100 million.
Home Leasing appears prepared to wait even longer to begin construction. The state’s Housing Finance Agency, part of New York State Homes and Community Renewal, put the Maria Regina project in its closing pipeline for the end of 2024 or beginning of 2025, Higgins said. Construction cannot begin before the financing is awarded.
“They are the linchpin for us to get this project completed,” Higgins said. “They are providing access for tax credits and a first mortgage and subsidiary financing, all things which are critical for producing this kind of housing.”
Even then, Home Leasing is still significantly short on capital for the project, they said. They have so far declined to say how big the funding gap is.
“It is a very complex property,” said Home Leasing development manager Adam Driscoll. “It has interesting spaces to it that make it hard to assign a development program to.”
Despite the delays, residents say they so far have found Home Leasing to be more engaged than Congel.
The company held public meetings in the neighborhood to build community support and share their plans for the campus. The first meeting took place in 2022 at the Magnarelli Community Center on Grant Boulevard, and they held another at Destiny Christian Center on Turtle Street in April.
Higgins and Driscoll said the company is “planning to be a long-term member of the community.”
At a recent Syracuse Landmark Preservation Board meeting, Home Leasing’s development coordinator Lindsey Allen said the company plans to use five of the six buildings on the property. Home Leasing plans to sell the chapel on the property to Destiny Christian Center.
“It is going to be very expensive to redevelop to a high standard of energy efficiency, and figuring out the financing has been tricky,” Driscoll said of the project.
Residents wait for the Maria Regina’s redevelopment
Salibrici has struggled to square her memories of the old Maria Regina Campus with what the campus became under Congel’s ownership.
She remembered bringing her granddaughter to the Gingerbread House daycare center in the old convent school. A fire started in the daycare center in 2022.
The property was known for its beautiful stone fence and a prominent well-kept lawn, Salibrici said.
Robinson and Salibrici each helped gather more than 1,000 signatures for a petition to help save the Maria Regina campus. The petition asked for the path to be cleared for Home Leasing to redevelop the property.
Despite Salibrici’s pessimism about how the Maria Regina project has been handled so far, she hopes its future is brighter.
“I think in the end, it’s going to be good,” Salibrici said. “… You know that some of this stuff has to be demolished, but the main buildings are beautiful, and they can be kept and restored. And it will be really nice to see that again.”
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