Non-Fiction
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| Saving Stuyvesant Town: How One Community Defeated the Worst Real Estate Deal in History | 2021 | Buy |
Daniel R. Garodnick grew up in Stuyvesant Town, the large middle-class housing complex on Manhattan’s East Side built by MetLife for World War II veterans. When MetLife announced in the mid-2000s that it would sell the complex to the highest bidder, Garodnick — by then a City Council Member — found himself at the centre of the fight to protect his neighbours’ homes.
The sale went through in 2006 for a record $5.5 billion, with buyers Tishman Speyer and BlackRock heavily leveraging the purchase. When the deal collapsed, Garodnick worked with the Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village Tenants Association through a five-year legal and political battle that ended in a sale preserving rent stabilisation and affordable housing for thousands of residents.
Saving Stuyvesant Town, published by Cornell University Press in 2021, is both a firsthand account of that fight and a broader look at how ordinary citizens can push back against large-scale real estate interests in American cities. It reads as a practical case study in tenant organisation as much as a personal story.