A 37-unit apartment building at 200 Hancock Street that was the subject of tenant protests against unsafe living conditions last summer has been sold to a new owner, the Boston-based real estate firm ARX. Trinity Management, a subsidiary of the Dorchester-rooted Trinity Financial development company, will manage the property.

According to the Suffolk County Registry of Deeds, the building changed hands for $4.8 million, a 23 percent increase over its 2012 sale price to the previous management company, Longwood Residential.

Steve Meacham, organizing coordinator for City Life/Vida Urbana, which helped residents at 200 Hancock organize a tenant association last summer, said he is hopeful that the new owners and managers will work with tenants to deal with problems in the building, something he says the former building managers failed to do.

Meacham said the tenant association plans to send a letter to Trinity Management requesting the same terms they asked of Longwood Residential last summer: a multi-year agreement not to raise rent above 3 percent, and a request not to raise rent for Section 8 tenants above the standards set by the city housing authority.

Meacham said that representatives from Trinity met with residents in December to hear their concerns, but the company has yet to fully respond to their worries about rent increases.

“I think Trinity wants to present themselves as friendly to the tenants,” said Meacham. “They don’t seem to want to get involved in antagonistic relations, but seem like they’re not interested in any guarantees. The tenants want guarantees.”

Anthony Dabney, who lives in the building and who has become the unofficial spokesman of 200 Hancock’s tenant association, said that the new management team has already made a number of improvements to the building, including hiring a cleaning person, installing new carpeting, painting the common areas, and repairing the laundry room. Dabney said Trinity has also made an effort to temper residents’ concerns about eviction and possible rent increases resulting from their planned updates to four to five vacant units in the building.  

“They assured us that things would be different; no one was going to be pressured, no one was going to be displaced,” Dabney said.

But Meacham and others at City Life remain uneasy about the long-term effects of renovations to units in the building, which he said typically go hand-in-hand with rent increases. He said he hopes Trinity’s history of supporting smart residential development in Dorchester and elsewhere across the city will hold true for 200 Hancock.

“They have a record of managing multi-income developments, and that’s how they should see this development. They should preserve a significant portion of this building as long-term affordable,” Meacham said.

For Dabney and his fellow tenants, who say they are hesitant to trust their new management company after the ordeal with Longwood Residential, the situation at 200 Hancock is a “work in progress. So far so good,” he said. “Only time will tell for sure.”