NYC's Stuyvesant Town To Be Sold at Auction

by Lisa Palladino (RSS feed)
Sep 30th 2010 at 5:04AM

NYC's behemoth apartment complex Stuyvesant Town will be sold at auction on October 4. A state appeals court ruled against hedge fund manager William Ackman on September 28, paving the way for bondholders to sell the apartment complexes Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village in a foreclosure auction. About 25,000 people live in the 11,277 apartments, which are on the East Side near the FDR Drive between 14th and 23rd Streets.

The ruling denied a request by a joint venture between Ackman's Pershing Square Capital Management and Winthrop Realty Trust to reverse a lower court ruling that barred them from elbowing past holders of $3 billion in mortgage bonds to take control of the properties.

Tishman Speyer made news when it bought the 56-building complex for $5.4 billion in 2007 and again when it defaulted on its loans. Read about the complex's long history here and about its financial woes here.

Tags: auction, auctions, New York, New York City, NYC, real estate, Stuyvesant Town, Tishman Speyer, William Ackman

Filed under: Auctions, Real Estate Developments

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

ettices Sep 30th 2010 9:22AM

as usuall no info is this fed housing and why is in forclouer not meeting the rent or was rent for tentents not high enoubh to cover cost

tweb142 Sep 30th 2010 12:25PM

To ETTICES: DUUUU use your brain. Look at the area and the housing. 25,000 residents and I bet all are welfare and 99% are probably black. White trash, and hispanics probably make up the rest. If I had enough money to buy the whole complex, fix everything up, and then I would rent out everything for cheap monthly rents, say around $300 per month to help everyone. But I don',t so I can't.

BTDT Sep 30th 2010 12:55PM

At full occupancy it would take at least fifty years to amortise this white elephant.
Good luck at auction.

Michelle Bruner Sep 30th 2010 2:54PM

Stuyvesant Town is part of a program to provide affordable (not free) housing for a wide variety of NY city residents. The residents of Stuyvesant Town are of all ethnic groups and socioeconomic categories. This is not government welfare housing but mostly middle class housing, which is is low supply in New York City where rents for one bedroom apartments start at $1,800 a month or more. The problem occurred when a development group overpaid for the property in the hopes that they could raise the rents for all tenants and then were prevented from doing that by the existing rent laws. Their situation is very similar to banks that purchased mortgages in anticipation of their worth going up. In other word the developer gambled and lost.

Michelle Bruner Sep 30th 2010 2:54PM

Stuyvesant Town is part of a program to provide affordable (not free)
housing for a wide variety of NY city residents. The residents of
Stuyvesant Town are of all ethnic groups and socioeconomic categories.
This is not government welfare housing but mostly middle class
housing, which is is low supply in New York City where rents for one
bedroom apartments start at $1,800 a month or more. The problem
occurred when a development group overpaid for the property in the
hopes that they could raise the rents for all tenants and then were
prevented from doing that by the existing rent laws. Their situation
is very similar to banks that purchased mortgages in anticipation of
their worth going up. In other word the developer gambled and lost

Carol Ziegler Sep 30th 2010 3:14PM

As a New Yorker whose lower middle class family moved to Stuy Town soon after the buildings opened, I think this is a sad but instructive story. These apartments are small, with small ktchens and a limited number of small baths. In the late 1940's when we moved in most of the tenants were families with young kids. Given the post-WWII housing shortage, our little apartment was a piece of heaven for my family-spolied only when my parents learned that it was built with a racially restrictive covenant-meaning whites only. Although we are white and pretty non-political , my parents found that intolerable and we moved in the early 1950's.

Stuy Town remained very much majority white even after the racial policy changed and had no air-conditioning even after most middle class buildings were at least wired for window air-conditioning units. But it was affordable housing for many, many people. Then the housing boom led the purchsers of the complex to try to market the apartments as "luxury" -causing more than chuckle from those of us who lived or had lived there.

I believed at the time of the sale from its original developer (Met Life) that these apartments should be preserved as affordable housing-very much needed in NYC. But what seems to have been a combination of greed and delusions of grandeur led to the re-branding of the apartments as "luxury" and well, you can see how that worked out. Many people who could not afford the steep rent increases were forced to leave and the "luxury' apartments went empty.

I hope that this much needed housing stock can be saved and will be rented (or sold) at affordable proces for the many folks who need them.