Court Gives Stuy-Town Settlement Final Okay

NEW YORK CITY-A New York State court has granted final approval of the class action suit brought by a group of tenants at Peter Cooper Village/Stuyvesant Town, court documents show. Justice Richard B. Lowe III, chief justice of the New York Appellate Term, First Department, had given the settlement preliminary approval this past November; Wednesday's court action effectively ends the Roberts vs. Tishman Speyer litigation that reached the state's highest court in 2009.

Approximately 27,500 tenants will receive settlement checks rangigng from $150 to more than $100,000, according to law firms Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz LLP and Bernstein Liebhard LLP, co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs. The settlement is intended to compensate them for rent overcharges between Jan. 22, 2003 and Dec. 31, 2011, respectively the start and end of the class period, according to court documents.

Additionally, the 4,311 apartments at the massive Stuy-Town complex—actually, two adjacent apartment complexes totaling more than 11,000 units in Midtown South—that were decontrolled during the class period will remain rent-stabilized through June 2020, when the complexes' J-51 tax benefits expire. The New York Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, ruled in October '09 that the apartments had been removed improperly from rent stabilization while the complexes continued to receive those tax benefits.

MetLife, which had developed Stuy-Town in the 1940s, sold it to a group led by Tishman Speyer Properties and BlackRock Realty for $5.4 billion in November 2006. In early 2010, Stuy-Town's owners handed the keys over lenders, represented by CWCapital.