Stuy Town tenants seek speedy sale of complex

Tenants of Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village, Manhattan’s largest apartment complex, are asking the bondholders that own the property’s debt to bypass the company working out the loan and seek a speedy sale of the complex, Bloomberg News reported.

Since the 11,000-unit complex went into default in 2010, it has been controlled by CWCapital Asset Management. According to a letter the Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village Tenants Association sent to residents, CWCapital is refusing to entertain offers on the building — offers that could pay off debtholders. 

The Tenants Association has been engaged in talks with Toronto-based Brookfield Asset Management to convert the rental apartments into condominiums, in order to pay bondholders, but CWCapital has been unwilling to consider the idea.

“It has thus far been unwilling to work directly with us and to share the information necessary for us to formalize a bid in advance of opening up the property to a formal sale process,” the association wrote. “CWCapital’s overall response to our attempts to engage it has been to stall and delay.”

In 2006, the 80-acre property, between 14th Street to 23rd Street on Manhattan’s East Side, sold to Tishman Speyer Properties and BlackRock Realty for $5.4 billion — a record at the time. Since the default two years ago, the sale of the buildings has been stalled while CWCapital negotiates a 2007 lawsuit challenging lease rates. [Bloomberg] —Christopher Cameron