Rockland May Have Dodged a Bullet with Allure but We are Not Certain that the Braunstein Father and Son Nursing Home Magnates are Any Better.
LostMessiah, April 15, 2016
According to an article in Crains from December 11, 2015, one of the stumbling blocks is h having the property re-zoned. Sounds familiar, like Allure and the Deed Restrictions. Cranes reports:
“The nursing home needs the Red Hook property to be rezoned to proceed with development—a process that has stalled the project for years. Previously, the Bloomberg administration was reluctant to convert areas within an industrial business zone to residential, said Howard Weiss, a land-use attorney with Davidoff Hutcher & Citron who is representing Oxford.
“They looked at Red Hook and they see it’s no longer a manufacturing area—it’s an area that has a mix of uses, including residential uses,” Weiss said of the board’s decision. “In fact, there are some residences right on the Oxford block.”
The approval, by a margin of 29 to 5, came as a bit of a surprise after Community Board 6’s land-use committee had rejected the project last week.”
With Rockland County in the midst of a lawsuit and countersuit with Shalom Braunstein whom, with his father’s stake would have acquired the Summit Park Facility in Rockland County, the similarities between the tactics are hard to ignore. While we will not address it all here and now, we thought we would bring you a piece published by “Clarkstown What They Don’t Want You to know” with a link to the corresponding LOHUD article.
A Jerk Gets Jerked By The County Executive Though This May Not Be The Biggest Breaking Story.
Shalom Braunstein in March sued the county for $5.9 million for his deposit and other damages, claiming the county and its LDC failed to fulfill critical conditions that blocked him from finalizing the purchase of the Summit Park Hospital
The County Executive sued Braunstein in return. “He did not have the money, he did not get the needed licensing, he did not tell us the truth,” County Executive Ed Day said Tuesday. “His actions cost taxpayers millions of dollars and this administration will act aggressively to recover every penny.”
http://www.lohud.com/…/rockland-files-16m-suit-v…/82954472/…
According to Freedom of Information Act requests, the parties that bid on the Summit Park Hospital and Healthcare Facility were:
Allure Group – Allure Healthcare LLC
Summit Acquisition Group/ Summit Park Acquisition Group (Braunstein Entity)
Sympaticare – Sympaticare Healthcare (Braunstein Entity)
Northern Riverview Healthcare/Northern Services Group
Bronx Rehabilitation Care/Center for Care LLC
Focus Investment (Zupnik)
The Allure Group, a cadre of young, seemingly disparate entrepreneurs, has been on a buying spree, snatching up nonprofit nursing homes across the city and turning them into for-profit cash cows.
Its $72 million payday for flipping a nonprofit Lower East Side nursing home to a luxury condo developer — after first getting asleep-at-the-switch bureaucrats to lift a deed restriction that would have prevented the conversion — has ignited a scandal that’s embroiled Mayor de Blasio and prompted two investigations.
City records show Allure owes $5.2 million in back taxes on a Brooklyn nursing home that used to be a nonprofit, and $853,795 on another nursing home in the borough that it bought last year and that is now slated for housing.
The Allure Group, currently the subject of a series of investigations regarding a Rivington Street Nursing Home, was backed out of any interest.
http://nypost.com/…/shady-firm-dupes-city-to-profit-72m-in…/
Summit Acquisition Group/Summit Park Acquisition Group were both Braunstein entities, as was Sympaticare Healthcare.
From what we gather it would seem that Braunstein had two separate bids into the property. Whether or not the interests in each differed is information we do not have at this time but this should become clear in depositions.
Under the current deal as contemplated “The Sympaticare Deal”: Shalom Braunstein was to have 35% and Barry Braunstein (who is currently trying to obtain approvals for a facility in Red Hook, New York) 10% making up 45% of Sympaticare, LLC, d/b/a Summit Park Hospital d/b/a Summit Nursing Care Facility. The remaining interests were spread across other “Sympaticare” entities like Sympaticare New Jersey, LLC and Sympaticare Lakewood, LLC, both of which had overlapping membership stakes.
Approvals of the deal required, amongst other things, that certain parties holding membership interests in the underlying entities invest money or provide affidavits certifying to those investments. Those affidavits appear to have never been supplied. Moreover, there were numerous contingencies that needed to be met by the Sympaticare group in order to receive New York State approvals, most of which from what we understand had not been met, nor would there have been time to meet them given all of the deadlines and the unmet contingencies.
Whether Braunstein wanted to settle on time is only for him to know but it appears he may well have known he could NOT have settled on time and thereby he misled Rockland’s Taxpayers.
These lawsuits could be something Mr. Braunstein may now wish he had never instigated. They may lead to depositions of great interest to the FBI given the mess that Mayor de Blasio of New York has now found himself embroiled in.
LOSTMESSIAH 
We think the investors are the reason he is going after the County. They are probably leaving him with no choice. We don’t think he intended to close. Were he to have been in sync on this deal like others, one of his competitors would have stepped in (Zupnick or Allure). That seems to be the pattern. Something went drastically wrong for him here. We don’t think that they anticipated that the County would play hardball.
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What kind of idiot like Braunstein puts up millions of dollars in deposits without any chance of getting the property? You can imagine a major lawsuit if any of this money came fro investors.
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