THE insignificant smudge on the elevator wall inside the cookie-cutter brick apartment building at 3 Peter Cooper Road in the Peter Cooper Village housing complex has caught the eagle eye of Councilman Daniel R. Garodnick: He surreptitiously flexes a forefinger and, with a brief application of spit and polish, the smudge is no more.
Candy wrappers in the hallway outside his one-bedroom apartment get similar treatment. He spirits them away to the trash, and not because he’s an obsessive-compulsive neatnik. No, his behavioral complex is more complicated than that: There’s marketable Manhattan real estate on the line here, and pride of ownership, though premature, in his newfound solicitude toward Peter Cooper’s every facade.
Doesn’t everybody want to be his own landlord? Doesn’t everybody maintain an umbilical connection to neighborhoods that provided a stress-free childhood? Mr. Garodnick, the son of a financial adviser and a retired schoolteacher, can see the apartment building where his parents have lived for nearly 40 years right from his own living room window. Comforting.
Mr. Garodnick, 34, single, and an avowed front-liner in the generation-in-a-hurry-to-make-its-mark, must be forgiven for behaving as if he owns a piece of this place (and for hoping there is no conflict of interest, City Council-wisely, in his trying to).
In his best-laid plans, he will retain a stake in it — he and some 25,000 other occupants, many of them long-term renters, like his parents, of the 11,200 apartments in Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town, adjacent residential behemoths owned for 60 years by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.
This summer, MetLife put the entire community on the block, with a suggested selling price of $5 billion, a sum that presumably presages a conversion to luxury co-ops or condos — which means that over time, the middle class will be priced out and a unique neighborhood designed for and amenable to working families will cease to be.
Mr. Garodnick says he would find that appalling even if he were not a lifelong Stuyvesant/Peter Cooper resident (except for college and a short rental nearby at 21st and Third, he has never lived anyplace else) and a proponent of moderate-priced housing. Too bad MetLife seems to disagree with him.
“Well, $5 billion, that’s their price, and it seems like an astronomical price to me,” says Mr. Garodnick, positioning himself in a colonial-reproduction wing chair stenciled with gold stars. “Gold-plated luxury condos and working-class people don’t mix.”
Mr. Garodnick, an only child who lived in Stuyvesant Town until he was 4, and then in Peter Cooper (his parents moved in pursuit of air-conditioning), is indignant.
“I did not expect one-fifth of my Council district to go up for sale,” he says. “In a beautiful world, MetLife would recognize that not only do they have an opportunity to make a profit here, but they have an opportunity to do right by the city by dealing directly and fairly with the people who live here. But how much affordability do you get out of $5 billion? Not much.” His math puts it at $450,000 per unit; perhaps not too steep for young professionals like him, who pay market-rate rents of about $2, 700 to $3,200, for one-bedroom apartments, but too much for many of his neighbors.
Stuyvesant and Peter Cooper are a cradle-to-grave neighborhood with residents in baby carriages and wheelchairs, not a hip, hot area: “Nobody ever accused me of being cool,” says Mr. Garodnick, a graduate of Trinity, Dartmouth College, and the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a law degree.
His interest in working for the civil rights division of the Justice Department fizzled when John Ashcroft took over — “I was not convinced of his commitment to civil rights” — so he took a job as a litigator at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, a Manhattan firm, before running for the Council on a reform/constituent services agenda.
His antidote to MetLife? Organize the tenants — with the help of investors who are likely to include the New York City Central Labor Council and with political clout supplied by a Who’s Who of elected officials that includes Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles E. Schumer — to bid on the properties and “take control of their housing destiny.”
Not a simple task, particularly with a seemingly hostile landlord: Mr. Garodnick’s request on Sept. 1 to review the bidding requirements was rebuffed in a hurry.
He is not their favorite tenant, particularly not after he led a tenant insurrection against the switch from traditional locks on the lobby doors to electronic keycards bearing the users’ photographs (MetLife won that one, citing enhanced tenant safety; Mr. Garodnick says it’s not the keycards he dislikes but the surveillance information they provide to landlords).
LAST week, MetLife, courting offers from several of the city’s most powerful developers (Mr. Garodnick was told that of the city’s major real estate players, only Donald Trump has declared the site beneath his radar) refused to accept a bid from the tenant association It deemed the tenants group an unqualified bidder. Two days later, after being pressured by elected officials, MetLife reversed itself. Mr. Garodnick’s consortium received the bid books early this week; bids are due on Oct. 5.
“MetLife has stacked the deck against us, first by stalling for 18 days, and now giving us an Oct. 5 deadline for first bids that really puts us in a squeeze,” he says. “I was initially skeptical about our ability to be competitive: how on earth does anybody put together $5 billion? But we intend to make a credible bid and we will.”
Worst case? Well, he won’t hold his breath on lease-renewal day.
