Mayor Zohran Mamdani made a day one pledge to tenants in a Brooklyn apartment building to help them and stop their landlord from selling off the bankrupt property to another real estate firm.

What You Need To Know

Pinnacle Group sold rent-regulated properties in a bankruptcy auction that Mayor Zohran Mamdani tried to stop


Pinnacle’s tenants have long complained of shoddy conditions and unanswered calls for repairs 


The buyer, Summit Properties, paid $451 million for roughly 5,200 units

Tenants have long complained of shoddy conditions and unanswered calls for repairs.

“If your landlord does not responsibly steward your home, [the] city government will step in,” he told them inside the building lobby.

That effort so far has failed. The city failed to get a bankruptcy judge to delay the fire sale auction that took place on Thursday.

The auction of properties owned by Pinnacle Group and its chief, Joel Wiener, covered a total of 93 buildings, roughly 5,200 apartments. The winning bid from Summit Properties was $451 million — or $86,000 per unit.

In the Mamdani administration’s attempt to stop the auction, lawyers for the city doubted “the properties can support proposed sale price and maintenance needs and costs given the regulated rents” and that it won’t be a “supportable business” because the current rents are “very low-averaging.”

“It’s quite a contradiction to me,” said Kenny Burgos, CEO of the New York Apartment Association, a lobbying group for rent-regulated building owners.

The auction may portend bigger problems for affordable housing.

“So if the city is classifying these properties as very low averaging and unable to sustain themselves, then by definition, over 300,000 other rent-stabilized apartments would be [in] even worse conditions than the Pinnacle portfolio right now,” Burgos told NY1.

Summit Properties Chairman Zohan Levy said in a statement: “We have reached out to the City and look forward to talking with the new administration and residents about our plans to invest in the portfolio and help make New York affordable for everyone.”

City officials are assessing options. 

“We will continue to fight to ensure any owner of this portfolio makes necessary repairs to bring the buildings up to code and respects the rent stabilization regulations,” Leila Bozorg, Mamdani’s deputy mayor for housing and planning, said in a statement.

Zara Cadoux, a tenant organizer who lives in a roughly $1,600 a month two-bedroom in a Pinnacle building, had wanted the city to get creative. She’s on a rent strike.

“Work with preservation partners, work with community land trusts, potentially create a new form of city ownership,” Cadoux said. “The city has a lot of different tools at its disposal.”

A hearing for the bankruptcy judge to approve the auction will be held on Thursday.