Who could have Thunk It?

When the genius Real Estate Investors decided to buy many largely successful housing developments at the top of the RE market with overvalued leveraged loans by promising to bring all those dastardly rent-stabilized apartments up to market rents you had to know it was a truly stupid and flawed business model.

These might seem like the worst of times for large-scale housing complexes like Riverton Houses, Stuyvesant Town and Savoy Park. Their owners, all of whom bought the buildings at the top of the market, are in rough shape, stumbling under the weight of oversize debts and teetering at the edge of foreclosure.

But in the midst of an unforgiving market in which rents are falling and lenders are showing no mercy, real estate executives and even some housing advocates say that the tenants at these large complexes may come out of this dire situation in good shape.

Well reality does often does have an upside, we can only hope. As they say “Reality does have a Liberal Bias.”

UPDATE:

Tenants at Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, the sprawling middle-class apartment complexes on the East Side of Manhattan, won a major victory over their landlord on Thursday when an appeals court ruled that the company had wrongfully raised rents and deregulated thousands of apartments after receiving special tax breaks.

The, decision issued by the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, could ultimately cost the landlord, Tishman Speyer Properties, $200 million if it is required to repay residents of more than 3,000 apartments for improper rent increases over the past four years, said a lawyer for the tenants.