I get the New York Times on line and many times, because I don’t like to spend the morning reading the newspaper at the computer, I just delete it. But a headline caught my eye today – “Huge New York Housing Complex is Returned to Creditors”. I am always interested in the changes New York City undergoes, so I clicked on the story and I learn that 4 years ago a realty group headed by Tishman-Speyer (they control Rockefeller Center and the Chrysler Building) bought the Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village sister complexes for $5.4 billion dollars. Then they set about making improvements and raising rents.

Here are excerpts:

"The surrender of the properties, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, ends a tortured real estate saga that saw the partnership make expensive improvements to the complex and then try to rent the apartments at higher market rates in a real estate boom. But a real estate downturn and the city’s strong rent protections hindered those efforts, leaving the buyers scrambling to make payments on loans due for the properties, which have been a comfortable harbor for the city’s middle class since they opened in the late 1940s. ...

"Metropolitan Life built the complexes for World War II veterans in the 1940s, when the city was in desperate need of new housing. It received tax breaks and other incentives in return for maintaining low rents. The buildings became home for generations of workers searching for an affordable spot in Manhattan. ...

"But with the real estate market soaring in 2005, MetLife decided to sell. Tishman Speyer and BlackRock won an auction the following year.

"This month, the partnership ... defaulted on $3 billion in debt on the properties, and in the last few days secondary lenders have been calling to replace the partnership."
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I can’t be sorry this real estate boondoggle has taken place because there is nothing more heinous to me than that big-money buys middle-class housing and turns it into housing for the wealthy, further decreasing the number of affordable Manhattan rentals.

It is also ironic that Tishman Speyer is suffering the threat of bankruptcy the same as many middle-class home owners who have had to give up their homes, although I am sure they personally are not suffering, merely that their vision of obscene profits has been destroyed.

I have sometimes contemplated what I might do if I lost Ed and have wistfully thought of going back to New York and leaving Florida to the brain dead seniors. But, financially, a decent space there is no longer an option if I don't win the lottery. Anyway, NYC, unless you have loads of money, is only kind to the young. You really can't go home again.

Ed said I’d be financially okay staying in place. Maybe I’ll just move into the library.

xx, Teal