Abstract
Located in the heart of Manhattan, one of the most expensive housing markets in the world, Stuyvesant Town was for many decades a haven of affordable housing. In 2006, the complex was sold by the original developer, insurance giant MetLife, to a new investor group led by the real estate company Tishman Speyer. That group would default on loans within 4 years and turn the property over to new owners; both Tishman and these new owners, CWCapital, undertook large-scale efforts to deregulate affordable units to generate more revenue to justify the massive US$5.4 billion sale price. The details of these events (and countless legal battles) are well documented in New York Times reporter Charles Bagli’s (2013) book, Other People’s Money: Inside the Housing Crisis and the Demise of the Greatest Real Estate Deal Ever Made. A newer book, Priced Out: Stuyvesant Town and the Loss of Middle-Class Neighborhoods, focuses instead on the residents affected by these events through a series of interviews that depict how the dismantling of affordable rent regulations has led to a divided community in which tenants resent and distrust both their landlords and their neighbors.
Priced Out is well-researched and well-organized, with a statement of purpose laid out in the introduction: ‘We assert that New York’s global investment networks and urban development patterns are fueled by a neoliberal economic paradigm that values housing solely as an investment, rather than as a building block for neighborhoods, sense of community, and sustainable, vibrant urban life’ (p. 12). The opening chapter provides a history of Stuyvesant Town, a community of 110 buildings, totaling more than 11,000 apartment units, housing nearly 25,000 residents. Built in the 1940s to provide affordable rental housing to returning veterans and their families, Stuyvesant Town was originally an explicitly Whites-only community. While the authors of Priced Out acknowledge this fact, they are more focused on a new wave of conflicts and discrimination born out of the property’s recent sale and the ongoing deregulation efforts of the current owners.
The second and third chapters present interviews with the long-tenured residents, mostly elderly, who benefit from rent regulation that places limits on annual rent increases and guarantees the offer of renewal leases. While many older residents reflect on the community they helped build, they also discuss their current circumstances of ‘aging in place’ with little support and general indifference, if not outright hostility, from landlords and neighbors alike. Landlords target improvements that can be marketed to the new, market-rate tenants and often force unwanted renovations on the elderly residents to then raise their rents, ignoring simpler improvements that would truly help them. Young neighbors resent the rent protections in place, mistakenly believing that market-rate rents support the continued existence of the affordable units.
The center of the book, chapters 4 and 5, provides a brief history of New York City housing laws, policies and regulations, helping contextualize the pivot from the older tenants in rent-regulated units discussed in earlier chapters to younger, more affluent ones in deregulated units covered in the subsequent chapters. This section of the book helps explain many of the misconceptions concerning rent regulation and documents the various, increasingly neoliberal plans put in place that allow landlords to more easily profit from ownership of apartment properties. These chapters are good starting points, and researchers interested in more detailed analyses of rent regulation and broader housing policies can look to the many publications cited in Priced Out.
The sixth and seventh chapters focus on the more recent additions to the community: young professionals, new families, and college students, who pay three or four times the monthly rent than those in rent-stabilized units do. These apartments were removed from the rent stabilization system through renovation or through churn. Owners raise rents after renovations, passing on improvement costs to tenants; they also raise rents when units become vacant, targeting college students unlikely to remain for more than a year or two. These new tenants are under no obligations to preserve the sense of community that so many elderly residents speak of as the unique characteristic of Stuyvesant Town, but the difference between these two groups’ attitudes and expectations for their community are rather stark, and the animosity between the groups is real. A splintering of tenant groups only benefits the landlords, who face no concerted opposition to their efforts to increase property value through raising rents and cutting expenses.
The building owners’ lack of consideration and concern for elderly residents is mirrored in the ageist and classist attitudes of new tenant groups. This echoes the fact that MetLife, the original owners, maintained discriminatory racial policies, and the community remained majority-White for decades, even after many legal battles, in large part because most residents favored the community as it was designed. Two moments in Priced Out highlight the cloud of discrimination shifting, though not entirely, from racist to ageist and classist. In an interview with ‘Charlie Price’ (the book uses pseudonyms), the 27-year-old single attorney paying market rate rent lashes out at the corporate owners who would be charging even more than he pays now if the courts did not intervene; he then states his contempt for the rent stabilized neighbors asking for people to join a rally to protect the rights of low-income residents. Earlier in the book, an elderly resident discusses her anger at having to drag her laundry cart down to find the machines all occupied by a woman working for one of the new, well-off families in market-rate units, who has the audacity to be watching Spanish-language television, ‘which the tenant thought was unfair, since she believed tenants, rather than housekeepers, should be allowed to choose what to watch while doing laundry’ (p. 85). The authors point out, ‘When Stuyvesant Town was built, there were five central laundry facilities with attendants who did the wash. Today, each building has its own unattended laundry room’. It would be interesting to know the race and ethnicity of those former laundry attendants. Despite acknowledging his too-high rent, ‘Charlie’ wants no part of helping neighbors to defend their rent protections; likewise, the elderly tenant targets a minority housekeeper for disdain, rather than bemoaning the larger shift in economic realities that make the laundry-room scenario possible.
In addition to Bagli’s Other People’s Money, another book can be read alongside Priced Out to paint a more complete picture of this community. Published in 1970, Arthur Simon’s Stuyvesant Town, U.S.A.: Pattern for Two Americas details the decades-long racism and discrimination that began as official policy and, despite many lawsuits and a vocal minority of Stuy Town residents advocating for desegregation, lived on in the general attitudes of the majority of residents. Simon’s book includes a quote from Frederick Ecker, president of MetLife at the time of Stuy Town’s development: ‘Negroes and whites don’t mix. Perhaps they will in a hundred years, but not now. If we brought them into this development, it would be to the detriment of the city, too, because it would depress all the surrounding property’ (Simon 1970, 7). This emphasis on property values before human rights lives on with new owners in a different economic reality, and the hostility of residents towards owners and each other persists. New hostilities have supplanted, though not removed entirely, the racial hostilities of old.
Although the book might have been enhanced by more photographs, maps, floor plans or graphics, along with additional statistics (change in residents’ occupations over time, for instance), Priced Out succeeds in presenting compelling ethnographic research of a community that is representative of a larger fight over affordability and the right to the city. This book is a welcome addition to critical research on the continued efforts to deregulate or circumvent rent rules and maximize profits by a growing class of savvy, motivated corporate actors.