New York City: ‘Hands off our homes’

Hundreds of Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village tenants came to the steps of New York’s City Hall June 13 in the rain to demand “Wall Street predators keep their hands off our homes.” They want ST-PCV preserved as a community, not turned into a commodity.

ST-PCV is a very large apartment complex with over 11,000 apartments on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which Met Life sold for $5.8 billion in 2006. Tishman Speyer Properties, its buyer, wanted to convert most of the rent-stabilized apartments into market-rate ones.

That didn’t happen. Only 5,000 were converted, and three years ago Tishman Speyer faced foreclosure. The demonstration on June 13 marked the end of the foreclosure and the announcement of plans to sell the complex to a new predatory landlord.