When Tishman Speyer Properties walks away from 11,232 Manhattan apartments because it can’t pay its mortgage, that’s good business.

But if Rick Gilson, a college custodial supervisor in South Dakota, walks away from the mortgage on his mobile home, he’ll be a deadbeat.

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Those two borrowers face the same financial dilemma: Their mortgages far exceed the values of their properties. Yet one gets to walk away without guilt, while the other can’t.

Gilson is too scared to dump the mortgage on his mobile home. He owes $31,973, but the home is only worth about $14,000.

“I have 12 years of money put into this property that I will never get out,” said the 50-year-old Gilson, from Rapid City, S.D. “But I am still paying because this is what I have been told to do. That’s what I think is right.”

Until now, the focus of the real-estate crisis has been on individuals. One-fourth of U.S. homeowners, or nearly 11 million Americans with mortgages, are “underwater” on their home loans. In some parts of the country — Florida, Nevada, Michigan, California and Arizona — the share tops 40%. Some experts say it makes sense for some people to walk away if they’re deeply underwater, even if doing so could wreck their credit scores for seven years. It may not be worth it to keep paying a mortgage when they can find comparable rental housing for considerably less money.

The argument against walkaways is that they will wreak economic havoc if a lot of people do it. Banks will have more bad loans on their books. They’ll make fewer loans. Home prices will plunge more.

The rules are different, though, for the walkaway of all walkaways.

That title is reserved for what happened to one of New York’s trophy properties, the 56-building Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village complex. Spanning 80 acres on Manhattan’s east side, it’s the largest single-owned residential area in the city. Its red brick buildings, built by Metropolitan Life in the 1940s for World War II veterans, are still a haven for the city’s middle class.

Commercial-real-estate firm Tishman and its partner, investment firm BlackRock, paid $5.4 billion to buy the property from MetLife in late 2006–right at the market’s peak. They hoped to make money by converting rent-regulated apartments into luxury condos and raising rents.

Then the housing crash hit. The value now: $1.8 billion.

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“They made assumptions that things would grow to the moon, and things certainly did not,” said Len Blum, a managing partner at investment bank Westwood Capital.

Tishman said last week that it was turning the property back over to creditors to avoid filing for bankruptcy protection. In recent weeks, Tishman failed to restructure $4.4 billion in debt and couldn’t find another buyer, according to a statement from the company.

Tishman exits the deal with a ding to its reputation, but it will be fine. It still has Rockefeller Center and the Chrysler Center in New York, and dozens of properties in cities worldwide. The company has about $33 billion in assets.

Residential homeowners wouldn’t get off so easy.

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