De Blasio Overstated Housing Preserved In Stuy Town Sale: Report

STUY TOWN, NY — Mayor Bill de Blasio overstated the amount of affordable housing preserved by the 2015 sale of the Stuy Town housing complex, according to a new repot from a city watchdog agency.

In 2015, de Blasio announced that Manhattan's largest housing complex, Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village, would be sold to the Wall Street investment firm Blackstone and the public pension fund Ivanhoé Cambridge for $5.3 billion. The complex was previously owned by CW Capital.

The city would provide Blackstone and Ivanhoé Cambridge with $220 million in subsidies in exchange for a guarantee that 5,000 of the housing complex's 11,000 units would stay affordable for the next 20 years as part of the deal.

The city's Independent Budget Office said in a new report on Friday that de Blasio's 5,000-unit promise overstated the amount of housing preserved by the deal his administration helped to negotiate.

According to the IBO's analysis, de Blasio's guarantee of 5,000 affordable apartments for the next 20 years translates to 100,000 apartment years of affordability. The IBO takes issue with the de Blasio administration's claims, and says that more than half of the apartments would have remained affordable by law even without the city's pricey intervention.

"According to the de Blasio Administration, absent the agreement, virtually all of the units in the complex would have eventually converted to market rate status," according to the report. Instead, the IBO says, "the deal can be credited with 36,000 apartment-years of additional affordability—not 100,000."

In October 2015, when the deal was announced, the de Blasio administration touted the plan as one that would help preserve the complex's historic working- and middle-class character.

"We’re saving taxpayers a lot of money," Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen said at the time.

The IBO report questions whether the city money that was invested reaped the rewards that the de Blasio administration had promised.

"As the Mayor continues to push for the preservation of affordable housing, the subsidies tied to these preservation efforts must be weighed against a realistic estimate of what would happen to the housing in the absence of the city’s intervention," the IBO report concluded. "Such a comparison then informs what the public truly gains in exchange for the financing and tax benefits the city provides in enacting the preservation agreements."

The de Blasio administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Patch, but Housing Commissioner Maria Torres-Springer defended the deal in a statement to Politico.

"Our intervention offers far greater protections to the tenants in those units and guarantees that those units will remain affordable and serve low- and middle-income residents upon turnover," she said.

Image credit: AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, file. Image caption: The Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village apartment complex in New York in 2006.