Tenants Celebrate As Over 11,000 Apartment Units Will Remain Rent Stabilized in Stuy Town

Approximately 11,200 apartment units in Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village Complex in Manhattan will remain permanently rent-stabilized after the property owner Blackstone Group on Feb. 24 decided not to appeal a landmark court ruling it had earlier lost to the tenants associaton. Blackstone, the private equity firm and one of the largest real estate owners in the city, had bought the property in 2015 for $5.4 billion.

At the time, the plan was to push most of the apartments in the complex, that was originally built as middle class housing for returning GIs after World War II, into the market rate category.

“We were simply preserving our options in the event future Court decisions were made that would impact this case,” a Blackstone spokesperson, Jillian Kary, said in response to why the landlord withdrew the appeal. “However, we did not ever have plans to change how we treat rent stabilized apartments at StuyTown.”

Blackstone says they have stayed committed to the StuyTown community. “In 2015, we voluntarily preserved 5,000 units as affordable housing, and since then have invested more than $375 million into the property and materially improved resident satisfaction,” a Blackstone spokesperson said.

”Very big news for Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village,” said city council member Keith Powers on X, formerly Twitter when news broke on Feb. 24. “This means every apartment is now permanently stabilized.”

In 2020, tenants sued Blackstone to stabilize their apartments, under newly enacted state laws that provide further tenant protection. A judge sided with tenants association last year. A one point, the number of stabilized apartments in the complex appeared to be shrinking until the 2020 ruling put them all back under rent stabilization regulations.

“I’m thrilled,” Susan Steinberg, President of Stuyvesant Town Peter Cooper Village Tenants Association told Straus News. “This was something very dear to the heart of the tenant association to try to protect the thousands of units that were potentially going to be subject to expiration of the tax abatement on June 30, 2020.

“If not for the lawsuit, it would have been deregulated and those apartments would have made their way to market rate,” she said. “Once an apartment is deregulated, it is subject to whatever the market will bear.”

Landlords, however, are not pleased with the 2020 court ruling or that that Blackstone had abandoned the appeal. “One problem with the Housing Stability and Protections Act (HSTPA) is that it provides protection to higher income tenants who do not need it,” Sherwin Belkin, a lawyer representing landlords across NYC, said in a statement. “In doing so, it discourages investment in much needed housing supply, undermining the purpose of the law. My firm intends to continue to challenge this statutory regime in other cases not involving StuyTown working their way through the courts.”

Steinberg says “All units are considered rent regulated, which means that they are subject to the increases that are promulgated by the NYC Rent Guidelines Board. That means they’re not the kinds of increases that market would call for,” Steinberg said. “The last increase we had was 2.5 percent on a one-year lease and 3 percent on a two-year lease, which is a lot better than all of a sudden finding that your rent is $500 or a thousand dollars more a month.”

The wider implications beyond Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village Town is about whether rent stabilization has a good impact beyond the community, according to Steinberg.

“There are many apartments that have J-51 tax abatements, and I am sure that owners would probably be looking forward to increasing the rents to market rate once those tax abatements expire,” Steinberg said. “If those units were rent regulated as of June 14, 2019, which was the date of the HSTPA, then they are stabilized going forward unless there is a serious change in the NY state legislature.”