“Other People’s Money: Inside the Housing Crisis and the Demise of the Greatest Real Estate Deal Ever Made” with Charles Bagli of the The New York Times

In just over three years, real estate giant Tishman Speyer and its partner, BlackRock, lost billions of investors’ dollars on a single deal. The New York Times reporter who first broke the story of the sale of Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village takes readers inside the most spectacular failure in real estate history, using this single deal as a lens to see how and why the real estate crisis happened.

How did the smartest people in real estate lose billions in one single deal? How did the Church of England, the California public employees’ pension fund, and the government of Singapore lose a combined one billion dollars of that investment? How did MetLife make three billion dollars on the deal, without any repercussions from a historically racist policy of housing segregation? And how did eight middle-class residents of a sleepy enclave in New York City win the most unlikely lawsuit in the history of real estate law?

Questions? E-mail Eric Wakin.

 

All events are free and open to the public but require registration at cul-events@columbia.edu

Location: Columbia University, Butler Library, Room 523 from 6:30 – 8:00 PM.

Co-Sponsors: Rare Book & Manuscript Library; Herbert H. Lehman Center for American History; Center for Sustainable Urban Development, The Earth Institute;  Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate, Columbia Business School; Urban Planning Program, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation