110-Building Site in N.Y. Sold to Speyer for $5.4 Billion

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/17/nyregion/18stuycnd.html?ei=5065&en=191ed9bdf9f7ccbb&ex=1161748800&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print

Jerry Speyer, a real estate investor who controls some of the city’s most prominent icons, like Rockefeller Center and the Chrysler Building, signed a deal to buy 110 apartment buildings along the East River in Manhattan for $5.4 billion, MetLife announced today.

Mr. Speyer, the chairman of Tishman Speyer Properties, is buying a trophy of a different kind in Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, two adjoining complexes on First Avenue between 14th and 23rd Streets. Built by Metropolitan Life in 1947 for returning veterans, Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village have served as an affordable redoubt for generations of police officers, teachers, nurses and the like. The unremarkable brick buildings are set among trees and fountains on 80 acres of some of the most valuable land in the country.

Mr. Speyer and his partner, BlackRock Realty, outmaneuvered nearly a dozen other bidders, including a group aligned with the tenants at the complexes who hoped to preserve them as relatively affordable middle-class housing, a rapidly disappearing commodity in Manhattan. As housing costs have skyrocketed in the city in recent years, the pending sale of the complexes and the larger issue of affordable housing became a cause célèbre among New York politicians and tenant activists.

But Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg stayed on the sidelines, and MetLife was intent on selling for the highest possible price. The tenant group’s offer of $4.5 billion lagged behind bids from some of the biggest names in real estate, including Apollo Real Estate Advisors with the Dermot Company, Related Companies with Lehman Brothers, the Millstein brothers, and Vornado Realty Trust.