Business
& Labor
Stuyvesant Town, Peter Cooper Village Sold in Landmark Deal
(archrecord.construction.com - 10/19/2006)
By Tim
McKeough
Tishman Speyer Properties, which owns
a global collection of prominent buildings including Rockefeller
Center, is adding a staggering 80-acre chunk of Manhattan
to its portfolio. Heralded as the biggest real estate deal
in American history, Tishman Speyer and its partner BlackRock
Realty have agreed to purchase Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant
Town, located on the east side of Manhattan between 14th and
23rd Streets, for $5.4 billion. The site is currently home
to 110 apartment buildings, containing 11,232 individual units.
Metropolitan Life built the two projects
in the late 1940s as affordable housing for returning veterans.
Now, tenants and community leaders are concerned the sale
is a death knell for affordable housing in the borough; to
secure the deal, Tishman Speyer beat out bidders that included
a group formed by current tenants, which hoped to take control
of the property with an offer of $4.5 billion. “The thousands
of tenants in rent-stabilized apartments are completely protected
by the existing system,” Tishman Speyer president Jerry
Speyer said in a statement. “ No one should be concerned
about a sudden or dramatic shift in this neighborhood’s
make-up, character or charm.”
However, it’s the long-term
implications that worry affordable housing advocates most.
“It’s pretty straightforward,” says Brad Lander,
Director of the Pratt Center for Community Development. “It
means the gradual replacement of middle-income housing and
middle-income families in Stuy Town with high-income families.”
Lander adds that the deal is symbolic of broader trends in
Manhattan: “[Current tenants] will leave for a variety
of reasons and their units will be taken to market. Those
individual families may not be harmed, but the city loses
its income diversity and its middle class.”
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