Stuyvesant Town Showdown

Jacqueline Duran, 23, left her sixth floor apartment in Stuyvesant Town one recent April afternoon with her recycled bottles in hand. But as she stepped out of the elevator in the lobby of her building, she was greeted by a handwritten note on the glass garbage disposal room door that read: “College students, you’re the reason why we have bugs and rats. Why don’t you go back to your mommies and daddies in the suburbs.”

Residents Angered by CW Capital and Rose Associates Student Leasing Polices

Recent publicity has called to front and center the appalling conditions created in both Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village by Rose Associates’ aggressive marketing plans to fill apartments—reconfigured through the use of newly-constructed “pressurized walls”—with college students. Obviously, neither the Tenants Association nor the community at large has anything against college students nor, for that matter, college dormitories. However, students and dormitories both have an appropriate setting. A residential community is not such a setting.

Our community was conceived, designed and operated for many years by MetLife as a residential community. It eventually became an iconic property within Manhattan, in a bucolic park-like setting. It was overwhelmingly popular, evidenced by many years’ long waiting lists for prospective tenants. Eventually through vacancy decontrol, the waiting lists disappeared, as did MetLife in 2006. What followed was a short, disastrous tenure by Tishman Speyer; its default on the property’s massive debt load; and the temporary stewardship of CW Capital, a “Special Servicer” as the property awaits transfer to a new owner.

Giving Students an Easier Way to Find Roommates

According to Scholarships.com, the average cost for college dorms can range between $7,500 and $9,000 per year.

This gives private colleges and organizations, such as the Educational Housing Services, the license to overcharge students in overhead fees, such as residential assistance.
Kyle Freedman, a Baruch College Corporate Communications major, along with his cross-collegiate staff have a different vision.

A vision where a student is able to find the perfect apartment for a fair price, without the uncertainty of having an unreliable, incompatible roommate.

“MyStudentApartment.com is set to become a full service brokerage matchmaking algorithm platform that helps every student find the perfect apartment with compatible roommates,” said CEO and founder of MyStudentApartment.com, Kyle Freedman.

Uncertain Future For Stuy-Town As NYU Dorm for Adults

The owners of the 110-building housing complex, Tishman Speyer Properties and Black Rock Realty, finally announced on Monday that they will hand the property back to their creditors, after defaulting on a $16.1million loan payment this year. Tishman Speyer, which also controls the Rockefeller Center and the Chrysler Building, bought the complex for $5.4 billion just four years ago in what was the most expensive real estate deal of its kind ever made in the history of the United States. Now, because of the default, investors from the Church of England to the government of Singapore have lost hundreds of millions of dollars.

NYU Not Planning to Buy Student-Occupied Apartments in Stuy Town

Though Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, the 80-acre apartment complex on the East Side, is facing foreclosure, the nearly 150 New York University graduate students who rent apartments there will likely not be affected, and NYU has no plans to purchase the properties, said John Beckman, a university spokesperson. “Currently, everything is status quo ante,” Beckman told NYU News. “Buying the apartments is not currently under consideration.” Winthrop Realty Trust and Pershing Square Capital Management have collaborated to purchase the complex for $45 million, calling for a co-op conversion of the property, which has garnered interest from several developers who want to bid on the project, most recently Gerald Guterman. But NYU students who live there are only minimally affected by the ongoing legal and financial struggles plaguing the complex. “As far as when I was living there, NYU basically told us to disregard all info about the situation,” said Andrew Cardenas, a student. “All our rent was paid directly to NYU and even super-related work requests were always made through NYU, never using the Stuy Town services.”

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Is Stuyvesant Town Really a Glorified NYU Dorm?

“I attend NYU,” writes Henry Melcher in the New York Press this week. “And, as of this summer, I moved into Stuy Town with a roommate only to discover how our neighbors love to hate us.” Melcher’s essay about living in the venerable middle-income housing institution (Say it with us: It. Was. Never. The. Projects.) takes a look at what’s been going on in Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village from the angle of the much-vilified student population. They are, according to local (older) critics, “noisy, binge-drinking, pot-smoking, disrespectful college students — who might even use the stairwells as toilets.” Surely some of them may be such, but many, if not most, are just frugal forward-thinkers creative enough to look outside the NYU dorm box for an interesting new place to live and grow. Also, as Curbed writer Joey Arak points out in this story, many of them are not actually students — but are just pegged as such by grousing older residents because they look under 30.

Welcome To Stuy Town U

TWO GIRLS IN skimpy white bikinis soak their feet in the fountain at the center of the Oval. Nearby, a couple of muscular guys casually flex as they toss a football back and forth for the admiring girls. Another young woman leans back against the fountain’s edge while her small terrier tries to lick her face.

The green lawn is littered with tanning twentysomethings and their picnic blankets, gossip magazines, iPods and BlackBerrys. It could be a sunny photo of a collegiate quad for an admission’s guidebook. But it’s not. We’re looking at the center of Stuyvesant Town’s 61-acre housing complex.

At the edges of the scene are the young parents with blankets and chairs watching their children play tag. And just at the fringes of the Oval’s grassy area—out of easy view of the young interlopers—are the older residents. A few sit on benches, the others in wheelchairs located on a dirt path beside their foreign-born nurses. Here, technology consists of clunky old radios with long antennas. If you listen closely, the hum of classical music or an opera aria fills the air.

Are New Stuy Town Tenants Pooping in Hallway?

A sodden young man in Stuy Town recently took the adage about not shitting where you eat quite literally, and decided to do his business in one of the stairwells. The incident, described vividly by a commenter on StuyTown Lux Living, highlights the roiling tension between longtime rent-stabilized tenants and rowdy arrivistes who’ve moved in since landlord Tishman-Speyer pushed out some of the old-timers and raised rents.

According to the appalled bowel movement witness: “I was walking up the stairs to my third floor apartment and I saw an obviously drunken college kid TAKING A SHIT in the stairwell. I did a double take. The clearly inebriated young man just looked at me and said, ‘Hey when ya gotta go ya gotta go.’ Thanks Tishman-Speyer for bringing such high class tenants into what USED to be a wonderful place to live.”

But NY Mag’s Chris Rovzar, who happens to live in Stuy Town, doesn’t believe the story, and thinks Tishman-Speyer has made the place “nice now. All this nostalgia for when it was a set of glorified geriatric dormitories really strikes me as misplaced.” And besides, now there are “many more attractive bodies sunning in the Oval.” They should just take the elevator on their way down there, though.

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I Really Don’t Think People Defecate in the Hallways of Stuyvesant Town

Intel editor Chris here, dispatching live from my apartment in Stuyvesant Town! (Well, not really. For once I shed my cut-off sweatpants, fed the fish early, and came into the office this morning. But I usually blog from there!) Thought I’d toss in a little first-person blog post to defend my glorious neighborhood after reading a nasty, but admittedly hilarious, post on the blog StuyTown Lux Living. Here’s an excerpt from a comment that appeared on the site last week:

“Stuyvesant Town has sank to a new low. I don’t mind the beer bottles and used condoms in the hallway, hey, it’s New york City, but last night I saw something which shocked even me, a jaded lifetime old New Yorker. I was walking up the stairs to my third floor apartment and I saw an obviously drunken college kid TAKING A SHIT in the stairwell. I did a double take. The clearly inebriated young man just looked at me and said, “Hey when ya gotta go ya gotta go.” Thnaks Tishman-Speyer for bringing such high class tenants into what USED to be a wonderful place to live.”

Stuyvesant Town Tenants Wary of N.Y.U. Influx

Despite swirling rumors fed by the existence of an increasingly youthful tenant population and a soft rental market, New York University has not taken over more apartments in Stuyvesant Town, according to the residential complex’s general manager.

Though unsure of the exact number of students living in apartments made available through an arrangement with the university, Steve Stadmeyer said that he had no plans to change it. “We’re happy with the current situation,” he said. “We have a nice relationship with N.Y.U. They’ve been very cooperative.”

The number of N.Y.U. graduate and professional students in the complex is 288, states the university’s Housing and Residence Life Web site. The site also states that the two-bedroom furnished apartments rent for either $11,550 or $10,250 per academic year, depending on the size of the unit.