For months, tenants in dozens of rent-stabilized buildings owned by Pinnacle Group tried to do something New York housing law almost never permits: stop their landlord from selling their homes to another speculative owner.
They organized across buildings, formed what became a tenants’ union across Pinnacle’s real estate portfolio, staged protests, and went to court. As one tenant put it during the town hall, the organizing began because “nothing else was working”: complaints went unanswered and conditions worsened. Eventually, they won the backing of city hall under Mayor Zohran Mamdani. They still lost in court.
Last month, a federal bankruptcy judge rejected the city’s request to delay the sale of roughly 5,100 rent-stabilized apartments across more than ninety buildings, clearing the way for the portfolio to be transferred from Pinnacle Group to Summit Properties USA. The case grew out of years of neglect. Under Pinnacle’s ownership, the properties fell into severe disrepair and accumulated thousands of housing code violations, before the company declared bankruptcy last year after defaulting on more than $560 million in loans.
Tenants described years of neglect, including buildings left without power after the landlord failed to pay Con Edison bills. One resident described living with heat outages and broken elevators while management remained unresponsive, saying conditions had become “unlivable.”
The bankruptcy triggered a citywide wave of tenant organizing, as Pinnacle residents formed the Union of Pinnacle Tenants (UPT) and tried to slow the sale and push for what they considered to be a more responsible buyer who would address their concerns with disrepair. That effort ultimately failed. Summit Properties USA lined up a $451 million bid for the portfolio, positioning itself to take control of the buildings despite tenant opposition.
On Sunday afternoon, roughly three hundred tenants logged onto a virtual town hall organized and facilitated by members of the UPT. Tenant organizers walked participants through the ruling, explained what it did and did not change, and devoted most of the meeting to strategy: how to enforce the commitments extracted from the buyer, how to continue organizing buildings, and how to push beyond one-off concessions toward something more durable.
Mayor Mamdani and Cea Weaver, a longtime tenant organizer who is now director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, attended, but neither ran the meeting. Mamdani framed the administration’s role as contingent on tenant pressure rather than a substitute for it.
“I want to be very clear that this work has only just begun,” Mamdani told tenants. “It is also work that would have never even been able to be started, were it not for all that you had already done prior to this moment.”
The focus now is on what tenants are trying to build beyond the courtroom.