BRATTLEBORO-The Brooks House has experienced multiple phases over its more than 150 years, including as a hotel rumored to have hosted Rudyard Kipling, a mixed-use residential and commercial rental property, a fire-ravaged shell, and a successful example of community-led investing.
In December, the iconic downtown building entered a new, albeit quiet, phase: new ownership.
Harry May, LLC, purchased the building from Mesabi, Inc. for $8.5 million on Dec. 30. Tenants and community members can expect the building to operate as it has in recent years.
New owners David and Ting Shlansky, the husband-and-wife team behind Harry May, have asked the current manager, local real estate firm M&S Development, to continue overseeing the 88,000-square-foot building, which features 23 apartments, six retail spaces, and three office spaces.
The Brooks House, built in 1871, went on the market in the spring of 2025 and was listed by V/T Business, a commercial real estate firm in Burlington.
Stevens described David Shlansky as someone who loves Vermont and appreciates historic buildings.
“We were lucky to find somebody with those values,” Stevens said. Craig Miskovich, Mesabi member and attorney with Downs Rachlin Martin (DRM), said selling the Brooks House has felt “remarkably uneventful.”
“I’m still as concerned and hopeful about Brattleboro as I was before the sale,” Miskovich said. “So things are pretty much the same.”
DRM, a current Brooks House tenant, intends to remain in the building.
A love of old buildings and a fan of Brattleboro
Shlansky recalls reading about Mesabi’s role in revitalizing the Brooks House after the 2011 fire. He feels it’s not overdramatic to call the efforts “admirable, maybe heroic.”
After a recent tour of the building, then on the market, his admiration grew.
“A basement tells you a lot about a building,” Shlansky said in a phone interview. “They didn’t spend money for no reason, but they went to town in terms of really, really high quality that’s going to last for centuries.”
Shlansky plans to take a stay-out-of-the-way approach to owning the Brooks House. M&S has cared for the property beautifully, he said; the team knows the local community and the local market, and has built successful relationships with tenants.
“So we’re pretty passive in our approach — not wanting to meddle with something that works really well, at least in my view,” he said.
Purchasing the building was an emotional decision as much as an economic one for Shlansky. Large real estate purchases, such as the Brooks House, yield little financial return in the first five to 10 years, he said. But for Shlansky, the building’s function, architecture, and aesthetics captured his heart.
“It’s a gem, in my view, and it’s got real value to be connected with it,” he said. “If you think about it, what would the town be without this building?”
Former residents of Northampton, Massachusetts, the couple made many happy visits to Brattleboro, where he is now excited to become a part of the fabric of downtown.
The sad reality, he said, is that modern engineers would avoid constructing buildings like the Brooks House or designing downtowns like Brattleboro, which have “a humanity” that grew organically in accordance with residents’ needs, he said.
According to Shlansky, he and Ting have more than 25 years of experience rehabilitating historic buildings. At Harry May, he oversees the construction and design side of projects; Ting manages properties, permitting, and planning. He is also an attorney specializing in civil litigation.
The couple owns several properties in northwestern Vermont, New York State, Massachusetts, and Florida — although most are two to four units, nothing like the Brooks House, he added. They live in Key West, Florida, and have a second home in Vergennes, where they also own Burchfield Management Company.
Now is the right time
The Mesabi team — Stevens, Miskovich, Drew Richards, Peter Richards, and Ben Taggard — along with M&S, has spent 13 years “getting the Brooks House up and running,” said Stevens.
“Now it’s time to pass the torch,” he said, adding that over the past decade, the team has worked hard to make Brooks House into what he called a “simple building” that is structurally sound and well-managed, with loyal commercial and residential tenants.
Mesabi, too, has met the many program requirements and paid off the debt associated with the building’s complex $24 million funding stack, which included federal tax credits, state grants, bank loans, and private investments.
They never intended to own the building forever.
Mesabi purchased the Brooks House after a five-alarm fire in 2011 rendered the building uninhabitable, displacing 60 residents and 10 businesses.
Immediately after the fire, owner Jonathan Chase intended to rehabilitate the 87,000-square-foot building. Stevens’ engineering and architecture firm, Stevens & Associates, worked for six to eight months to stabilize the damaged structure, remove all soft furnishings, and prepare the building for the renovation phase.
Costs, however, outstripped what insurance paid out on the fire, and Chase decided he couldn’t continue with the project.
An understandable decision, Stevens said.
On paper, the Brooks House was a lemon. It would cost $24 million to fully rehabilitate the building and bring it into compliance with modern building codes, he recalled. The building was assessed at $1.349 million, according to public records from the 2013 sale.
However, Stevens said he and his fellow investors believed that unless someone took action, the building would continue to decline until it would inevitably be torn down and turned into a parking lot.
The question for Stevens became, “How do we bring enough other forces together to get it rebuilt and possibly get it back online and contributing to the community?”
Community-led investing
A consortium of investors — Stevens, local attorney Craig Miskovich, Drew Richards, Peter Richards, and Ben Taggard — formed several legal entities, including Mesabi, and purchased the Brooks House for $2.28 million.
Stevens recalled that it took almost three years to secure financing, purchase the building, and fully rehabilitate it.
Tenants moved into the building in 2014.
Following the successful launch of the Brooks House, Miskovich and Stevens founded M&S Development in 2014. The real estate firm specializes in similarly complex redevelopment projects that require a mix of public and private funding.
Stevens sees redevelopment projects like the Brooks House — where the cost to renovate exceeds the building’s value yet fulfills a community need — as a philanthropic endeavor rather than a traditional development designed to yield high profits.
In community-led investing — sometimes called community-enabled investing — investors carry most of the risks and expect to see few returns.
“In other words, they’d do better leaving their money in a retirement account,” Stevens said.
It also means that the project is unlikely to attract wealthy investors from outside the local community. So the people who do invest must have priorities that outweigh the returns on their investments, such as the desire to add housing or improve their community’s economic health.
Obtaining public funding, such as the federal New Markets Tax Credits and federal and state Historic Tax Credits, is also crucial. These can sometimes account for 40% of a project’s budget.
Putting together private-public funding, however, requires effort to secure it. It also requires extensive oversight to ensure compliance with program requirements once the project is complete.
Stevens said that the Brooks House taught him the nuances of the federal tax credit programs and how to work with a community of investors. M&S has taken this knowledge to subsequent projects such as the Putnam Block in Bennington and Brattleboro’s DeWitt Block at 40 Flat St.
Miskovich and Stevens said community investing is becoming harder as the cost to build continues to outstrip the rents tenants can pay. For example, the Benn High Redevelopment — the rehabilitation of the former Bennington High School into approximately 40 housing units and a senior center — is dealing with a risk-to-return ratio of 5:1, said Stevens. He expects the gap to widen.
Built in 1913, the building served as a school until 2004. Construction has started on the project, expected to cost $55 million and be completed later this year.
“The problem is, it’s getting harder to do,” said Miskovich. “The economics are getting worse, not better, and the risk on the developer is going up, and the reward is definitely going down.
“Costs are going up significantly faster than the income of our tenants, both our residential tenants and our commercial or retail tenants,” he continued. “So, yeah, we have a disparity in Vermont where the costs are rising much faster than our ability to pay for them.”
Stevens said multiple efforts are reducing construction costs, but closing the gap between costs and rents will require a significant increase in Vermont’s median family income and workers’ wages.
After more than a decade shepherding the Brooks House, not much has changed for Stevens, especially with M&S continuing to manage the building. He sees a bigger win in how the Shlanskys’ purchase of the Brooks House demonstrates a level of hope in the future of downtown.
“The Brooks House will live long beyond the Mesabi guys,” said Miskovich. “It’ll live long beyond the next owner, and so each owner will continue that legacy of ownership, but the Brooks House will survive.”
Disclosure: Longtime staff reporter and current freelancer Olga Peters previously worked with Stevens & Associates. Stevens and Miskovich were not aware that The Commons had assigned this story after editors learned of the sale through public property records.
This News item by Olga Peters was written for The Commons.