On Wednesday morning, a small crowd of New York City co-op owners rallied outside the ultra-luxury Midtown building where tech billionaire Michael Dell owns a $100 million penthouse.
But it wasn’t at all for computer issues. The 25-or-so attendees held up signs and chanted, “Save our homes!”
Just down the block sits Carnegie House. It’s the longtime home of many rally attendees — and one of Dell’s recent real estate investments. Residents of the co-op, known as the only remaining affordable building on Billionaires’ Row, are facing the looming threat of displacement from a 450% rent hike.
The issue is the co-op’s ground lease. Though residents own their apartments inside, they don’t own the land the building stands on — the ground lease owners do.
While residents who bought into the co-op expected a future rent hike, many say they never expected the radical transformation of their street and its property values. Susan Dell, a Carnegie House resident of 27 years, said she fears being priced out of the city altogether.
“Everywhere you have politicians talking about the necessity of creating fair and affordable housing,” she said at the rally. “Here we have affordable housing, and just want to keep it.”
The current landowner of the Carnegie Hall lease, an entity tied to real estate investors Rubin Schron and David Werner, purchased the ground lease in 2014 for $261 million. They received a $100 million in financing from Michael Dell’s MSD Partners in 2023, the Real Deal reported.
After recent negotiations between the co-op and the landowners failed, an independent arbitration panel ruled in July that the owners could hike the…