The middle-income housing projects Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village sit on an 80-acre patch of Lower Manhattan. In 2006, they came to epitomize the lunatic excess of the housing boom when their 11,232 apartments sold for $5.4 billion. They were bought at a competitive auction by Tishman Speyer Properties and BlackRock Realty.
Charles Bagli covered the purchase for The New York Times. In his new book, Other People's Money, he tells the story of how the biggest ever real estate deal came together and then spectacularly came apart. Standing in the park at the center of Stuyvesant Town, Bagli tells NPR's Robert Siegel that these housing projects provided a place where people of moderate means could set down roots.
"There's first-, second- and third-generation families living here," he says, "and it was sort of a quiet oasis and, most importantly, an affordable oasis in an increasingly expensive Manhattan."
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