Bad Day at BlackRock

After last week, there's not a whole helluva lot to cheer about but reading stories like this cheer me up a little. It's nice to know it's not just little people like us made to bite a stick and grab their ankles:

NEW YORK (AP) -- The financially troubled owners of two massive apartment complexes that sold for a record $5.4 billion a few years ago said Monday they're turning them over to their creditors.

The joint venture ownership team led by Tishman Speyer Properties and BlackRock Realty, hurt by the real estate market collapse, couldn't make a multimillion-dollar loan payment earlier this month for the Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village apartments in Manhattan.

Over the last few days it became clear the only viable alternative to bankruptcy would be to transfer to lenders control and operation of the 110 buildings and 11,000 apartments overlooking the East River, partnership spokesman Bud Perrone said.

"We make this decision as we feel a battle over the property or a contested bankruptcy proceeding is not in the long-term interest of the property, its residents, our partnership or the city," Perrone said in an e-mailed statement.

The group bought the complexes, which have about 25,000 tenants, in 2006 at the height of the real estate bubble in the nation's largest residential real estate deal.

The record purchase price seemed outrageous to many real estate analysts, but the partnership believed it had a winning strategy: It would aggressively convert thousands of rent-regulated apartments occupied by middle-class families into luxury units that would fetch top dollar.

It went on to say that these scumbags at BlackRock Realty and Tishman Speyer Properties tried to squeeze out these middle class working class people by jacking up their rent to the tune of $200,000,000, which a state court ruled was too excessive.

The 11,000+ units were built by MetLife for returning veterans from the second World War and 75% of them were rent-controlled.

It's nice to see a bunch of greedy scumbags get their just desserts once in a while.