Tenants’ rally tells banks: ‘Hands off our homes!’

Holding signs demanding “Save our homes” and “Stop displacement of working families,” some 700 tenants of New York City’s iconic middle-income housing projects, Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, protested on a cold Sunday morning Jan. 31 to demand their rights following the latest twist in the development’s ownership saga.

After five decades in the hands of its original owner, Met Life, the twin apartment complexes were sold for more than $5 billion in 2006, at the height of the real estate boom. The value of the complexes has now plummeted to less than $2 billion. In December, the owners, Tishman Speyer and Black Rock, failed to make the monthly $16 million payment to their creditors, in effect walking away from a very large underwater mortgage.

The consequence of this disastrous real estate deal could be the eviction of the 11,000 current tenants. Late last year, tenants won a significant legal victory over the landlords by getting 4,000 apartments placed back under rent regulation, after the landlords had managed to remove the apartments by using loopholes in the regulations.

The combative Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village Tenants Association, representing approximately 30,000 tenants, has fought the owners of the complex for years. In the 1960s it fought to integrate the project, which had been built in the late 1940s to attract white returning veterans and their families. In recent years the struggle has turned to preserving “affordable housing” in Manhattan, a borough of New York that is increasingly polarized along economic and class lines.

Rent protections were established in many U.S. cities to prevent price gouging during the housing shortages of World War II. They still exist in New York City, though in a much weakened form with a shortage of decent, affordable housing. In a year and a half, however, these rent protections are up for renewal or termination. Tenant associations are gearing up for what will be a hard-fought struggle to maintain access to affordable housing.