Heat and electricity turned off for days, elderly and disabled residents stranded as elevators break down, intimidation by management, ceilings caving in, rampant roach and mice infestations — all this and more is what living in a Pinnacle Group building is like, tenants say. 

Pinnacle is a real-estate behemoth headed by Joel Weiner that owns 146 residential buildings in New York City, 93 of which are being auctioned off. They contain 5,000 rent-stabilized apartments. And as of November 21, those 5,000 rent-stabilized units are slated to be auctioned off as a part of a bankruptcy agreement Pinnacle has with its lender, Flagstar Bank. 

Left behind in these proceedings are the tenants, many of whom say they are tired of the conditions they have been living in, and feel alienated from the process that will decide who receives ownership of their homes. In the face of such stakes, tenant organizing within Pinnacle buildings has taken off. About 50 tenant associations in multiple boroughs have come together to form Union of Pinnacle Tenants, the city’s first cross-borough tenants union. 

One of its first actions was a rally outside Brooklyn’s federal courthouse on Nov. 20, the night before the auction began. Tenants stood outside, chanting, waving signs, and testifying about what they had gone through in their buildings, urging Judge Davis S. Jones, who is presiding over the bankruptcy auction, to slow down the process, and for the city to protect the tenants. 

Vivian, a tenant leader, was one of the 50 or so tenants and supporters at the rally. She has lived in a Pinnacle-owned building in Harlem for five years. 

“93 buildings, owned by Pinnacle, all rent-stabilized are being auctioned off, and the bidding starts tomorrow. We’re here to give the message to the judge tonight, as well as other powers in government, that we deserve to have a say in what happens to our homes,” she told The Indypendent. 

Vivian said she has heard from neighbors who had lived there for decades that her building used to be “a really nice place to live” before Pinnacle took over. It wasn’t when she moved in.

“Since the beginning, there were problems,” Vivian says. “The first year I was there, the elevator was constantly out. It didn’t affect me much, because I live on a low floor, but I know that there were elderly in my building and they were having trouble. So I would email management, no response, no response. Then I started having problems in my own apartment: heat not turning on, pests, the stove, oven, and door not working, leaks, things like that.” 

Sometimes these issues were addressed, she added, but often they weren’t. 

A Flatbush tenant, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from Pinnacle, told the Indypendent that there had been a sewage backup in the laundry room; the front door was left unlocked for months, leading to people entering and then sleeping in the building; and there were exposed wires that appeared “cut” on upstairs floors. 

“It was systematically neglected,” the tenant said. 

Afua McKinney, who has lived in a Pinnacle building in Flatbush for 22 years, also said that the building had been well-kept for 10-15 years, but in the last five years, neglect has greatly increased. She described a hole in the roof, mouse and cockroach infestations, no hot water, the front door being broken, and collapsing ceilings. 

“Being a longtime tenant, I’ve gotten used to [these conditions],” McKinney said. The Union of Pinnacle Tenants, she said, has “re-energized and reignited us to address these longstanding issues.”

Vivian said the elevator being out for eight months is what motivated her and her neighbors to action, specifically citing the death of one of her neighbors during that time.

“I know one tenant whose wife was infirmed, and she couldn’t make it up and down the stairs,” she said. “And while the elevator was out, she passed away. Was it because of the elevator only? No, she was sick already, but the elevator being out did not help in the last months of her life. It’s not right. It’s just not right”

Vivian also mentioned their super being unreachable for a month, and the building’s front door being broken. Pinnacle directs tenants to its call center as a hotline for repairs and service requests. McKinney described it as just “not getting you answers.” 

“There are huge problems the landlord systematically chooses not to address,” said Vivian . “The systematic neglect is really an act of theft. In my mind, there was a contractual agreement that if we pay rent, the landlord will provide us certain services to provide stable housing, safe, habitable homes, and it’s barely that.

“But we have to pay rent. The minute we don’t pay rent, we get evicted. So why? Why? Why does Pinnacle get a way out of this? They get to keep our money. They get to pay their investors. Get out of the loan that they are in debt for. It seems a little rigged and unfair,” she said.

In September, Bloomberg reported that “immediately hazardous” housing-code violations in Pinnacle-owned buildings increased fourfold from 2019 to 2024. The outlet noted this is twice the rate of similar rent-stabilized buildings. In McKinney’s building, there have been 591 HPD Complaints issued since 2012. There are currently 255 open violations, including 90 class c violations, which HPD describes as “immediately hazardous” violations,” such as lack of heat in winter months, mold, or lead paint. 

Pinnacle’s Failed Business Model

Pinnacle owes more than $564 million on the buildings. The bank initiated foreclosure proceedings earlier this year. In May, Weiner filed for bankruptcy for many of the shell companies that are the buildings’ technical owners, a practice common in real estate to insulate the actual owners. Pinnacle blames the bankruptcy on inflation, high operating costs, and the landmark 2019 state law that restricts rent increases, particularly those for renovations and on vacant apartments. Weiner and his family also own more than $200 million in bonds in the Israeli market, which as of May had recently fallen to 87% of their face value.

That 2019 law, the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, struck at the heart of Pinnacle’s business model, which was based on buying up rent-stabilized apartment buildings, forcing out long-term tenants through systematic neglect, harassment, and intimidation, and renovating their apartments to rent out at market rate. 

That model emerged after the state weakened its rent-stabilization laws in 1997, City Councilmember Harvey Epstein (D-Manhattan), then a tenant representative on the city Rent Guidelines Board, told the Village Voice in 2017. It proliferated during the housing bubble of 2003–08, and was dubbed “predatory equity” because private-equity backed firms like Pinnacle, Vantage Properties, and Dawney Day bought up hundreds of buildings. Pinnacle purchased buildings containing 20,000 apartments, many in Harlem and Woodside; within two years, the company had filed eviction cases against 5,000 of those tenants. 

“Both Pinnacle and the bank Flagstar are complicit because they thought it would be easy to destabilize rent-stabilized apartments and kick people out. It has not been that easy. So they just have left the buildings to go into disrepair,” Vivian said. 

Pinnacle tenants have been organizing for at least two decades. In 2006, Harlem residents whose building had been purchased by Pinnacle formed Buyers and Renters United to Save Harlem, after residents were harassed and sent eviction notices. Pinnacle settled with those residents in 2011, paying $2.5 million to legal and tenant-rights groups to help current and former tenants make legal claims for damages. 

In 2002, when Pinnacle purchased former Mitchell-Lama buildings in the Bronx, it fired much of the staff within days. A class-action suit filed in 2005 charged that it had fired more than 200 superintendents in buildings it had purchased.

“A business model that is based on destabilizing rent stabilized apartments should not be allowed to exist,” says Pinnacle Tenants Union organizer Tracy Rosenthal. “A landlord whose business model is based on trapping tenants in uninhabitable conditions and destabilizing apartments should be put out of business. And that has been true for decades.”

There’s an element of racial injustice too. Vivian estimates that “broad strokes, 50% of the portfolio being auctioned is in Brooklyn, then Manhattan, and then Queens, and finally in the Bronx, predominantly in Black and Brown neighborhoods.” 

“A lot of my neighbors are Black, Creole — It’s Little Caribbean,” said Ellie, a graphic designer who has lived in a Pinnacle building in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens for three years. “They are facing more discrimination from the super and the landlord. They were intentionally repairing the white tenants’ apartments before the Black tenants. It’s kind of like, ‘Oh, if we appeal to these white people in the building, then maybe the issues will start going away.’”

Many of the tenants affected “are elderly and have mobility issues,” she added.

Rosenthal says the auction might prove detrimental to tenants, because “it’s sending them back to the private market to be preyed on by slumlord development companies.” 

Put Tenants in Control

Tenants and their advocates say there is a better way for these buildings to exist, one that would give tenants, rather than their landlords, agency over their homes. Union of Pinnacle Tenants is asking for the auction to be slowed down or paused, so an option for city intervention could be considered. 

There is a model for tenants to take control their building: the city’s 7A program, in which privately owned buildings that are being neglected by their owners to the point of hazardous conditions can be taken over by court-appointed administrators. But the city rarely uses that program today. As of January 2025, only 26 buildings, with a total of 204 units, were in the program, according to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. That was down from more than 300 buildings in 1981 and 123 in 2003. 

Rosenthal points out that the city used this kind of model during the collapse of Signature Bank in 2023. “The city developed a strategy of temporarily transferring the buildings to its land bank,  Neighborhood Restore, and then gave the buildings more time to pursue alternative ownership pathways and regulatory agreements,” they said.

The auction of Signature Bank’s rental units was even larger than Flagstar’s holdings: as The City reported, it took the Santander Bank, and a partnership led by the Community Preservation Corporation,  to “manage loans covering more than 2,000 apartment buildings and 70,000 rent-controlled or rent-stabilized units in every borough but Staten Island.”

The Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, which is currently in a state Senate committee, is another example of how tenants could take control of their buildings, though neither option is viable for Pinnacle tenants due to bankruptcy proceedings.

The Union of Pinnacle Tenants’ emergence comes at a time when radical tenant organizing has grown in New York City and across the United States. Here in New York, the Crown Heights Tenant Union (CHTU), formed in 2013, can count helping launch one of the largest rent strikes in city history in 2020 during the pandemic and organizing about 60-70 tenant associations into its larger membership among its victories. The membership and organizers in CHTU greatly overlaps with UPT: it’s fair to say the first paved the way for the latter. 

Not to mention the incoming mayoral administration is one that is friendly to the plight of tenants, and eager to ease the housing burden. But although Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani ran on a tenant-centered platform, with a rent freeze for rent-stabilized apartments one of the central promises of his campaign, he did not sign onto a letter asking the bankruptcy judge, Flagstar, and Pinnacle, to postpone the auction. Still, one of CHTU’s founders, Cea Weaver, was recently placed on his transition team, and it’s hard to imagine a municipal administration that would be more sympathetic or aligned with the values of Pinnacle Tenants United.

Assemblymember Phara Souffrant Forrest, who did sign the letter, grew up in a Pinnacle Group building. “When I was young, taking a bath in brown water was normal,” she told the Nov. 20 tenant rally. “It’s not shameful to call out the disgusting places where we’ve had to live in, while Pinnacle made billions of dollars. We’re going to stand together and end it now.” 

At the rally, which was also attended by City Councilmember Chi Osse (D-Brooklyn) and Assemblymember Marcela Mitaynes (D-Brooklyn), tenants spoke of squalid conditions: pest infestations, ceilings that caved in, unlocked entryways, leaks, and sometimes no heat and electricity. In November, Con Edison suspended electricity services to two of Pinnacle’s Crown Heights buildings, saying the company owed $10,350 in unpaid bills. Souffrant Forrest had to personally call to get the electricity back on in one of the buildings, reports Hell Gate. 

The combination of staunch organizing efforts and subsequent support from elected officials coalescing around them, the work of Pinnacle Tenant’s organizing appears to be paying off. On December 11, an attorney for the city and for the Department of Housing Preservation & Development sent a rare letter to bankruptcy court, encouraging a delay in the proceedings. 

Many tenants say they would welcome the chance to experience a different kind of housing, but mostly, they just want living conditions that afford them dignity. 

As McKinney said, “My priority is to fix these issues, but if we could take ownership of these buildings, that would be great as well.”

Vivian agrees. “I want Pinnacle not to be our landlord anymore. I want to have the time to decide, as a building, if we can do better ourselves,” she said. “But mostly I want a fair landlord, someone who’s not going to gouge us for our rent and [instead will] do good with our money.”

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