Within hours of taking office, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that New York City would intervene in the bankruptcy proceedings of Pinnacle Group, a property manager with a portfolio of mostly rent-stabilized units. According to the mayor’s office, the city would “take action to seek immediate relief and improve living conditions for Pinnacle Group tenants, an unprecedented step on behalf of renters living in some of the city’s most neglected buildings.” The mayor’s action was “in the best interests of the tenants and the city,” said the city’s chief lawyer, Steve Banks, standing alongside Gotham’s new tenant advocate Cea Weaver.
An old class-action suit, outstanding violations, and ties to Israeli capital all make Pinnacle an obvious target for the Mamdani administration’s war on landlords. But the attack on Pinnacle and other landlords pushed by Mamdani and allies—that New York City apartments are expensive and degraded because of “slumlords”—is misleading.
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Rather, it was the city and state’s past barrages against landlords—including one orchestrated by Weaver—that felled the property company. The story of Mamdani’s attempted intervention reveals his administration’s ignorance of the problems facing New York’s housing market, and how tenants suffer as a result.
Pinnacle Group began snapping up properties in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as the city became increasingly safe and desirable. The company’s holdings exploded from 267 apartments in 1997 to 21,642 in 2006, according to a New York Times profile from that year. Most of these properties were rent-stabilized. A decade later, in 2017, Bloomberg reported that Pinnacle’s success had catapulted its CEO and founder, Joel Weiner, to billionaire status.
Billions made off of rent-stabilized housing also made Pinnacle a prime target for anti-landlord activists, who argued that its greed was behind rising rents. Tenants and advocates accused Pinnacle of gentrification, claiming its goal was “to push out long-term residents, use renovations and suspicious accounting to raise rents beyond stabilization limits, and then turn them into condos.” One advocate quoted in a 2006 Indypendent article called Pinnacle “a monster.” That year, Congressman Charles Rangel deemed Pinnacle’s business part of a “broader conspiracy to take our community away from us.”
But what activists saw as malicious gentrification was really a response to New York City’s conscious policy goals. In 1993, aiming to encourage investment in the housing market, the city council enacted a $2,000-per-month vacancy decontrol threshold. If a vacated unit’s rent eclipsed that mark—usually, because the owner made repairs and improvements—it would no longer be subject to rent-stabilization. This benefited Pinnacle, since its portfolio consisted mostly of rent-regulated buildings. But the company’s investments furthered the council’s goal of ensuring units remained habitable.
Critics also understated how bad many rent-stabilized apartments had become by the mid-1990s. Entire blocks were riddled with drug addicts, as one Bronx property manager vividly recalled of the era. Evictions could and often did mean dislodging dysfunctional or delinquent tenants—part of the reason why eviction protections increase rents, as landlords must compensate for the expected risk. What activists demonized was often integral to New York’s revival.
Pinnacle Group rode through the 2010s on a wave of rising demand for city housing, which pushed more properties above the decontrol threshold. Cheaper capital—obtained through bond issuances on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange—further catalyzed its growth.
This growth kept Pinnacle in activists’ sights. In 2007, the firm was embroiled in a federal lawsuit brought by the advocacy group Buyers and Renters United to Save Harlem. The group alleged that Pinnacle had harassed, overcharged, and illegally evicted tenants. The case ended in a settlement, without an admission of wrongdoing.
The litigation also unearthed some inconvenient facts for those calling Pinnacle a “slumlord.” An amicus brief filed by the Rent Stabilization Association of New York noted that Pinnacle’s properties had fewer violations than the citywide average; that none of its buildings came close to meeting the city’s threshold for “unsatisfactory” housing (three or more violations per unit); and that, had one tenant not vandalized an elevator and barred Pinnacle from entering her apartment to make repairs, the number of violations would have been even lower.
The plaintiffs alleged that Pinnacle had sued “as many as one quarter [of] . . . tenants since acquiring their ownership interests,” implying routine and unmerited hostility on the part of the landlord. But as the amicus brief from November 2007 reported, only 0.82 percent of Pinnacle’s units at the time were subject to nonpayment proceedings in any given month. That figure is nearly nine times lower than the New York City Housing Authority’s monthly rate (7.8 percent) during that period.
The attacks on Pinnacle—that it was a greedy gentrifier trying to push out disproportionately nonwhite tenants—are typical of anti-landlord activists. Such types tend to regard capitalism itself, with its “unfair” distribution of property, as the source of high rents and failing apartments.
A paradigmatic example of such an activist is Celia “Cea” Weaver, co-founder of the Crown Heights Tenants Union and now Mamdani’s tenant advocate. Weaver has long taken a view hostile to private ownership of housing. In her own words, she first became interested in socialism “because of experiencing the housing crisis and the ways in which U.S. capitalism has created a housing and property market that never is really going to serve low-income people or people of color.”
This view has informed her activist work. For example, as New York’s rent-stabilization laws were set to expire in 2019, Weaver led tenant-activist group Upstate/Downstate Housing Alliance’s campaign to replace them with a platform of strengthened rent controls, measures giving nonprofits “first right to purchase,” and prohibitions on eviction without “good cause.” The stated objective is a future where “speculative” housing investment is replaced by a model of “social housing.”
Her greatest success came in helping to pass the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA), a major rent-control law that integrated many of her proposed reforms, in 2019. Weaver’s backroom dealings helped socialists score a major legislative victory and catapulted her to the position of influence she now holds.
HSTPA has been the most harmful piece of legislation for New York’s housing stock since its passage. By eliminating the “vacancy reset”—which allowed landlords to hike a stabilized unit’s rent by 20 percent after a vacancy—the state has pushed 50,000 units off the market in cases where operating expenses or necessary repairs exceed legal rents.
The passage of HSTPA also coincided with the Pinnacle Group’s decline. Just months after its passage, the Wall Street Journal reported that traders had begun betting against Pinnacle’s bonds.
Thanks to the elimination of the vacancy reset and decontrol thresholds, property owners—and tenants—lost equity. In some cases, including parts of Pinnacle’s portfolio, landlords’ debts exceeded the value of their assets. It’s no surprise, under these conditions, that maintenance was affected: Pinnacle’s obligations to lenders persisted, and it did not have the funds for repairs. In late 2025, Bloomberg reported that Pinnacle Group had fallen into bankruptcy. Its advisors reportedly cited “interest rates, inflation-driven increases in operating expenses and lower rent collections,” and the HSTPA.
As part of an agreement with its lender, Flagstar Bank, Pinnacle put buildings containing over 5,100 units up for sale. Several weeks later, Summit Properties USA offered to acquire the buildings. All it needed was a federal bankruptcy judge’s sign-off.
But when January 1came and Cea Weaver went from activist to mayoral appointee, Pinnacle Group became the first target in city hall’s war on landlords. When journalist Errol Louis gave Weaver the chance to respond to the perception that the city would always take tenants’ side, Weaver simply asserted that housing had to provide a “safe, and affordable, and stable place to live.” She didn’t mention whether the profit motive, which encourages supply and upkeep, would be left intact.
The Union of Pinnacle Tenants—an offshoot of the Crown Heights Tenant Union—certainly seemed to hope not. When asked by City Journal for its position on the city’s intervention, the group responded, “We look forward to partnering with the city to hold landlords accountable to its habitability code and to pursue models of ownership that put tenants’ stability and dignity first, not debt service for a billionaire’s speculation.”
Federal bankruptcy judge David Jones does not seem to have agreed. He denied the administration’s requested intervention and recently approved the sale of Pinnacle’s portfolio. City hall did not respond to a request for comment.
Nonetheless, the case revealed several interesting points. As Rob Johnson of the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm, told me, “The thing that’s most notable is the city’s admission that it’s regulating apartments to the point where they’re no longer able to make a profit.”
Johnson said the city’s admission strengthened an impending legal challenge the Institute for Justice is bringing against New York State’s rent-stabilization regime. “It’s a stunning expropriation of private property. The first step of seizure is to make these buildings unprofitable,” which the state has done through rent-stabilization. “Then they’ll step in and say the city will buy it.”
Court filings also revealed that Pinnacle is not quite the “slumlord” that some tenants and politicians allege. Summit’s filing, submitted under penalty of perjury, noted that only 420 of Pinnacle’s 5,151 marketed units (8 percent) have violations—lower than the 12 percent citywide average for serious violations.
In many senses, Pinnacle’s bankruptcy is the product of “pro-tenant” policies pushed by Weaver and others. New York State rendered Pinnacle unable to keep its apartment stock habitable; then New York City sought to punish it for that outcome.
“The Pinnacle Bankruptcy represents a growing problem facing a larger and larger share of the rent-regulated housing stock in the city,” Jim Whelan, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, said. “The city even admitted that in their filing, arguing that current rent roles won’t match the operational costs.” Those responsible—and with the power to fix it—serve in Albany.
If Mamdani truly cares about tenants, he should recognize the role that landlords play in delivering and maintaining the city’s housing stock. But if he cares more about his ideological commitments than the city’s well-being, then New Yorkers can expect the mayor to continue staging toothless fights against property owners.
Photo by Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images