The owners of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, the sprawling sister complexes overlooking the East River in Manhattan, will miss a $16 million loan payment on Friday, which would put them in technical default on their mortgages, and the 20,000 residents in limbo.

The $5.4 billion purchase of the complexes’ 110 buildings and 11,227 apartments by Tishman Speyer Properties and BlackRock Realty in 2006 made headlines. But the denouement at Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper has cast a pall over what had been a comfortable harbor for the city’s middle class since the complexes opened in the late 1940s.

“It worries me,” said Anne Granberry, a nurse who moved into Stuyvesant Town in June. “They haven’t told us anything.”

Tishman Speyer declined to comment, although executives who had been briefed on the matter said the partners could not pay the entire amount due.

City Councilman Daniel R. Garodnick, who lives in Peter Cooper Village, said Tishman Speyer notified him on Thursday afternoon that it would not make its mortgage payment on Friday.

Tishman Speyer and its partner have been negotiating since November to restructure $3 billion worth of debt and to hold on to the properties, which cover 80 acres east of First Avenue, from 14th Street to 23rd Street. But their reserves, once stuffed with $890 million for capital improvements, interest payments and renovations, are now virtually depleted.

Banking and real estate executives say that untangling the financial structure and either foreclosing or devising a new deal will take months. Aside from the $3 billion in mortgages, there is another $1.4 billion in secondary, or mezzanine, loans and almost $1 billion in equity invested by the partners, a Florida pension fund, the Church of England and others. Read More