Other People’s Money: Inside the Housing Crisis and the Demise of the Greatest Real Estate Deal Ever M ade

Description

Review

“The read­er inter­est­ed in New York real estate his­to­ry, its mon­eyed elites, or even the self-con­tra­dic­to­ry aspects of social invest­ment should find ample mate­r­i­al for reflec­tion and enjoy­ment in Bagli’s account.”
— Pub­lish­ers Week­ly

“Bagli’s sourc­ing is impres­sive, and read­ers will wel­come his abil­i­ty to make arcane invest­ment deal­ings com­pre­hen­si­ble.” —Kirkus

“Oth­er People’s Mon­ey deliv­ers one of the great untold sto­ries of the finan­cial crisis—how greed, arro­gance, and the dis­tort­ed incen­tives of the com­mer­cial real estate mar­ket helped dri­ve our nation’s econ­o­my off a cliff. Told through metic­u­lous report­ing of what was arguably the worst real estate deal of all time, in this vital­ly impor­tant book Bagli demon­strates how the well-heeled and well-con­nect­ed walked away rel­a­tive­ly unscathed from the wreck­age that they cre­at­ed, leav­ing a dev­as­tat­ed mid­dle class hold­ing the bag yet again.”
—Neil Barof­sky, New York Times best­selling author of Bailout: How Wash­ing­ton Aban­doned Main Street While Res­cu­ing Wall Street

“Charles Bagli does for the pol­i­tics and eco­nom­ics of urban real estate finance what Jane Jacobs did for urban street life. Bagli’s new book, Oth­er People’s Mon­ey, uses the sale of a major hous­ing com­plex on Manhattan’s Low­er East Side, Stuyvesant Town-Peter Coop­er Vil­lage, to demon­strate how con­tem­po­rary real estate spec­u­la­tors deploy inter­na­tion­al finance and local pol­i­tics to change the hous­ing options of more ordi­nary city dwellers. Bagli, a tal­ent­ed jour­nal­ist, makes the street-lev­el impacts of abstract glob­al finance eas­i­ly under­stood.”
—Elliott Sclar, pro­fes­sor of urban plan­ning, Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty

 “Oth­er People’s Mon­ey is a ter­rif­ic book. With remark­able tex­tu­al clar­i­ty and a fine-tuned dra­mat­ic sen­si­bil­i­ty, Charles Bagli has recre­at­ed the extra­or­di­nar­i­ly high stakes pok­er game that was the largest real estate deal in U.S. his­to­ry. His char­ac­ters include the biggest real estate play­ers on the plan­et as well as mid­dle-class res­i­dents des­per­ate­ly hold­ing on by their fin­ger­tips to the only hous­ing they can afford. A tru­ly epic tale, one that sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly demon­strates the log­ic (and illog­ic) of the real estate bub­ble that set the stage for world­wide reces­sion and that reveals the wild, unfor­giv­ing nature of twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry cap­i­tal­ism. It’s a pow­er­ful sto­ry and a great read.”
—Rick Fan­ta­sia, coau­thor of Hard Work: Remak­ing the Amer­i­can Labor Move­ment and pro­fes­sor of soci­ol­o­gy at Smith Col­lege

About the Author

Charles V. Bagli is a New York Times reporter who cov­ers the inter­sec­tion of pol­i­tics and real estate. He has writ­ten about the sale of high-pro­file build­ings, polit­i­cal con­tri­bu­tions of the real estate indus­try, the bat­tle to build a two-bil­lion-dol­lar sta­di­um for the Jets, bid rig­ging in the con­struc­tion indus­try, pay­offs at the tax asses­sor’s office, and a Sut­ton Place co-op that turned pub­lic land into a pri­vate park. He has worked for the New York Observ­er, the Dai­ly Record of Mor­ris­town, New Jer­sey, the Tam­pa Tri­bune and the Brook­lyn Phoenix. He lives with his wife in New Jer­sey. They have two daugh­ters.

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A vet­er­an New York Times reporter dis­sects the most spec­tac­u­lar fail­ure in real estate his­to­ry Real estate giant Tish­man Spey­er and its part­ner, Black­Rock, lost bil­lions of dol­lars when their much-vaunt­ed pur­chase of Stuyvesant Town–Peter Coop­er Vil­lage in New York City failed to deliv­er the expect­ed prof­its. But how did Tish­man Spey­er walk away from the deal unscathed, while oth­ers took the finan­cial hit—and MetLife scored a $3 bil­lion prof­it?   Illu­mi­nat­ing the world of big real estate the way Too Big to Fail did for banks, Oth­er People’s Mon­ey is a riv­et­ing account of pol­i­tics, high finance, and the hubris that ulti­mate­ly led to the nation­wide real estate melt­down.