Stuy-Town Goes Belly Up

It’s not just the little guys who can’t pay their mortgages: The U.S.'s most expensive piece of residential property has been given back to creditors after the New York apartment complex's owners defaulted on their $4.4 billion mortgage. In 2006, a group led by Tishman Speyer Properties bought the sprawling Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town apartment complex in Manhattan, a 56-building, 11,000-unit property, for $5.4 billion, the largest price on record for a single U.S. residential property. Driven by a weak New York City economy that wrecked rents and demand for apartments, the group defaulted on its mortgage in January, and is handing the property over to creditors in order to avoid foreclosure proceedings. Some estimates set the current value of Stuyvesant Town at a mere $1.8 billion, less than half its purchase price.