One month later, Stuy Town rents are still market-rate

Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village residents have received their rent bills for December, but last month’s rent deregulation ruling doesn’t seem to have made a difference in their charges. Lawyers for the complex’s tenants demanded Tuesday that rents for the approximately 4,000 illegally deregulated apartments be modified by January and that an escrow account holding the past eight months’ worth of overcharges be turned over. In April, complex owners Tishman Speyer and BlackRock began putting the difference between market-rate rents and regulated rents into the escrow account. By the year’s close, the account will contain $16 million, or roughly $4,000 per apartment, tenant lawyers said. A statement issued from law firms Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz and Bernstein Liebhard said they may take legal action soon if tenants aren’t given control of the account. “If necessary, plaintiffs’ counsel will be making an application to the court asking it to issue an order to set January 2010 rents, and to turn over to plaintiffs’ counsel the escrow account,” the statement said. [Bloomberg] and