Saving Stuyvesant Town by Daniel R. Garodnick

Author:Daniel R. Garodnick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2020-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

9

FINDING A PARTNER

Balancing himself carefully as he climbed up on top of the reception desk of the management office at 317 Avenue C in Stuy Town, Adam Rose looked down at a handful of colleagues gathered at his feet and smiled mischievously. In his hands, he held a crowbar, and his gaze was fixed on the Tishman Speyer logo in front of him. With the crowbar, he tugged at the sign until it came crashing down to the ground. After being summarily dismissed by Tishman Speyer in 2007, Rose had now officially returned at the request of CWCapital’s Chuck Spetka. He laughed as he looked at the Tishman Speyer logo on the ground. “Rose is back!” he announced to the assembled crowd. “There’s a new sheriff in town.”1

Rose was eager to find ways to make his mark on the quality of life in the community—and to show how he could do a better job than the hated Tishman Speyer, who many tenants felt had allowed maintenance to deteriorate. Andrew MacArthur was the boss, but since he came without the institutional memory for the property and without the full team that Rose brought to the table, he gave Rose significant discretion over property management in those early days. Rose got right to work. In his first three months, he increased the public safety force by 12 percent and promised to grow the number of employees who answered calls from residents by 30 percent to reduce on-hold times for maintenance requests.2

Together, Rose and MacArthur also brought in a man named Jim Yasser as the property’s managing director. The Tenants Association looked forward to having a new point person, someone who could politely and seriously engage with tenant concerns. During much of MetLife’s tenure, the property manager had been Bill Potter, who not only lived in the community but had a reputation for helping tenants in difficult personal situations, like a divorce, or a parent who died. Mr. Potter, as he was known, was spoken of adoringly by residents because he cared about their well-being and acted on it. Meredith Kane knew Yasser and told me that he was more of a “deal guy” and expressed some surprise that he had been tapped to handle tenant complaints. Nevertheless, Doyle and the tenant leaders were happy to give anyone a chance to make things right in Stuy Town.

CWCapital invited me and the TA board to meet Yasser on November 16, 2010, in a conference room in the management office at 317 Avenue C. Doyle, Steinberg, Sheehy, Fink, and I showed up with a handful of other board members, as well as Samuel Ditter from Moelis. Ehrlich and Anne Greenberg participated by phone. With Ackman and Ashner out of the way, we were happy to have a chance to engage with CWCapital and wanted to use this meeting to reiterate our position that we wanted MacArthur to link arms with us. By the fall of 2010, the only potential bidder publicly clamoring for attention in

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