From left: Benjamin Jealous, head of the NAACP and 99 Hudson Street

Updated at 2:30 p.m. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has sold three floors of a commercial condominium at 99 Hudson Street for $18.5 million, according to records filed with the city today.

The buyer was a company formed two years ago by a pair of former Tishman Speyer executives, called JMC Holdings, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. JMC founders Matt Cassin and David Taylor plan to gut the space and renovate it, and have tapped CBRE to lease the space, the Journal said. [more]

A New York Supreme Court Justice handed down a decision last night allowing the Department of Education to move forward with the closings and co-locations of 22 failing city schools and 15 public charter schools, the DOE announced.

Justice Paul Feinman denied a request from NAACP and the United Federation of Teachers for a preliminary injunction preventing the closures, saying that there was “no clear and convincing evidence that these low-performing schools could be so easily turned around.”

NAACP and UFT filed the suit in early June, seeking interim and long term relief. — Katherine Clarke… [more]

Black and Latino homeowners have been particularly hard hit by the
foreclosure crisis, according to a New York Times analysis of
foreclosures filed since 2005 and federal mortgage data. Mortgage
defaults occur three times as often in mostly minority areas as in
mostly white ones, and 85 percent of the most affected neighborhoods
have a majority of black and Latino homeowners. The NAACP has filed a
class-action lawsuit against several of the country’s largest banks for
making the subprime loans that made up half the loans given to the New
York City area’s black middle-income borrowers in 2005 and 2006…. [more]