Subsidized Apartments on the Auction Block

The nation’s largest federally subsidized housing complex, Brooklyn’s Starrett City (aka Spring Creek Towers), is for sale, its owners announced yesterday. The 140-acre complex was built three decades ago as an enclave for blue-collar New Yorkers and now has about 14,000 residents living in its 46 towers. Coming just weeks after the $5.4 billion sale of two similar Manhattan complexes—Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town—the announcement by owners Starrett City Associates has affordable-housing advocates worried that rents will climb post-sale, squeezing out longtime residents.

Some housing experts argue there is little incentive for a new owner to drop out of subsidized housing programs, since that would mean giving up tax breaks. And rents at Starrett City (which, incidentally, you may remember as the location of the “baby alligator” sighting the other day) are reportedly closer to market levels than they are in Stuvesant Town. But as Jonathan Rosen, a spokesman for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, told the Daily News, “over time, any logical purchaser is going to have every rational incentive to squeeze more money out of this.”

46-Tower Brooklyn Apartment Complex to Be Sold [NY Times]
Starrett City owners eye Stuy-high offers [NY Daily News]

Photo by Chang W. Lee for The New York Times