In a victory for tenants, rent stabilization appears to be here to stay at Manhattan’s largest apartment complex.
More than 11,000 apartment units at the Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village complex will remain rent stabilized now that its landlord dropped a legal challenge to overturn a court ruling over the weekend.
City Councilman Keith Powers, a Democrat who represents Manhattan’s east side where the apartment complex is located, announced the news on social media.
Private equity firm Blackstone bought the residential development in 2015 for $5.4 billion, and planned to lift more than half the apartments out of rent stabilization in a deal made with the city.
Tenants sued the firm in 2020, and a judge sided with them, prompting Blackstone to appeal the decision, but the firm dropped the appeal on Saturday.
In a statement provided to NY1, a Blackstone spokesperson said the firm "has consistently displayed an unwavering commitment 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," the spokesperson said. "We were simply preserving our options in the event future Court decisions were made that would impact this case; however, we did not ever have plans to change how we treat rent stabilized apartments at StuyTown.”
That decision to drop the appeal came less than a week after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a pair of challenges to New York’s rent-stabilization laws.
New York City landlords who filed the petitions had asked the justices to overturn the laws, which cap rent hikes and make it harder to evict tenants.
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to correctly identify Councilman Keith Powers.