For 123 years, the Sisters of the Congregation of Divine Providence, a small Catholic religious order based in Kentucky, ran The Jeanne d’Arc Residence in Manhattan as a way to give young women who were new to the city an affordable, safe place to live. Members of the order staffed it themselves until 2021, when the pandemic and a shrinking, aging community of sisters finally forced its closure—one of many such convent boardinghouses squeezed out by rising costs and dwindling vocations to religious orders. Just a handful still exist across the city.
Faced with unaffordable repairs that forced them to make a hard decision, the sisters sold the residence in 2024 for $22.5 million to Red Apple Group, led by John Catsimatidis, the billionaire supermarket magnate and former Republican candidate for New York mayor, who plans to redevelop the site into apartments. But there was one catch. Under state law, a charity can’t sell a major asset without approval from the state attorney general or a court, a rule meant to ensure that sale proceeds remain tied to the not-for-profit’s original charitable purpose.
After reviewing the deal, New York attorney general Letitia James approved the sale of Jeanne d’Arc, plus the payment of $2.7 million to the religious order for “carrying costs and expenses” it had covered on Jeanne d’Arc’s behalf and nearly $446,000 for state property taxes and real-estate broker fees and services.
But James refused to release the remaining $19.3 million in sale proceeds—and still hasn’t more than two years later.
Why not?
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