Bloomberg's Rich Friends, and His Silence on Affordable Housing @12:01 PM
As you might expect, today's big story on Mike Bloomberg's financial tentacles and the city, from the Voice's Wayne Barrett, is long and winding, and not nearly as exciting as one brave bird's suicide attack on the mayor's plane. Much of it is innuendo and unanswered questions. (That's sort of fine and right, though: it's important, with such a mayor as ours, that you acknowledge that there's lots we cannot find out!) But there are a couple of things that, if you can parse them, you might want to give some attention. READ MORE 7
The Market Crash Blowback Lag: Even Tishman Speyer Has Problems @9:30 AM
Not you too, Tishman Speyer! The WSJ says that the fabled and relatively squeaky-clean family real estate empire (Rockefeller Center! Chrysler building!) Tishman Speyer has defaulted on loans for a massive Washington real estate investment. (We already knew that their enormous purchase of Stuy Town was pretty much a debacle, of course—and which will become a full-on disaster next year when the fund paying the differential between its debt and its income runs out.) Here's what I don't quite get. If Speyer unloaded $12 billion in property at the top of the market, and also has $2 billion essentially in cash, why then is refinancing a $2.8 billion investment a problem? Are they just defaulting to default? Sure there's a lack of rental income on all properties— but it's not like they own Jared Kushner's troubled 666 Fifth Avenue or anything, which is becoming more and more vacant, with bigger and bigger ads put up by brokers on its empty ground floor retail. 3
