NYC housing rally

February 2, 2010Jon Brooks 1 Comment »

Three years ago, two companies, Tishman Speyer Properties and Black Rock Realty, bought Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan, an iconic post-war housing complex that is home to 25,000 tenants, many of them with rent-controlled apartments. Last month, in what one observer called “the poster child for the entire housing bubble,” the deal blew up when the partnership defaulted on its loans and turned over the property to creditors. From the New York Times:

…the two partners were betting that they could turn a healthy profit over time as they replaced rent-regulated residents with tenants willing to pay higher market-rate rents. But their plan fell apart when they could not convert enough apartments to the higher rents as quickly as they had planned. And in the past two years, average rents in New York have fallen sharply, along with property values.

Now, according to the Times, tenants are “in limbo,” and a rally was held Sunday to keep the housing complex “an affordable oasis,” in the words of the New York Daily News. Below is a video from the rally featuring dozens of long-time residents, found on the blog StuyTown’s Lux Living. “This is my home,” one tenant says, “and it should be treated better than a Monopoly game; we’re talking about people’s lives, not profits.”

For more on Stuyvesant Town, check out The Stuyvesant Town Report.

Posted on February 2, 2010 at 4:55 pm
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