Multiply that story by 10,000 - in the same paper today ....

Buyers of Huge Manhattan Complex Face Default Risk

Three years ago, the sale of the 110 red brick apartment buildings at Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan amounted to the biggest American real estate deal of all time.

Now the buyers are running out of time and money. Jerry and Rob Speyer and their partner, BlackRock Realty, who together paid $5.4 billion for the quiet middle-class redoubt near the East River, have nearly exhausted an additional $890 million set aside for apartment renovations, landscaping and interest payments. Rents are down 25 percent from their peak.

Real estate analysts say that the partnership’s money will run out as soon as December and that the owners are at “high risk” of default on $4.4 billion in loans. Two real estate executives who have been briefed on the finances insist that the owners can hold out, but only until February.

On Thursday, the partnership will go before the Court of Appeals in Albany to try to overturn a lower court decision that could force them to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in rent rebates to thousands of tenants.

Regardless of the outcome at the Court of Appeals, Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village are in trouble. City officials have been monitoring the looming crisis, worried that the financial problems could eventually lead to default, deferred maintenance and disinvestment at a complex that has served as an oasis of affordability in Manhattan for middle-class New Yorkers. Some 6,875 of the 11,227 apartments at the two adjoining complexes are rent regulated.

Rest here...http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/nyregion/10stuy.html?hp

Didn't anyone have any brains????????