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Rent-stabilized tenants at the historic Riverside Houses in Brooklyn Heights say years of neglect by their landlord, Pinnacle Group, has led to crumbling ceilings, brown water, and repeated pest infestations.
Rent-stabilized tenants at the historic Riverside Houses in Brooklyn Heights protested last week against their landlord, the Pinnacle Group, decrying years of neglect they say has led to crumbling ceilings, brown water, and repeated pest infestations.
Jean Campbell moved to Riverside over 50 years ago. At the rally, outside the development at Joralemon Street and Columbia Place, said she’s had to place tarps and buckets throughout her ground-floor apartment to catch runoff water and falling pieces of the ceiling. The exterior brickwork also deteriorated, she said, and rain would enter through the front window of her ground-floor apartment.
“One storm was so bad I stayed awake watching movies all night so that I could empty the bucket when it filled up,” said Campbell.
Tenants also testified about an ongoing infestation of rodent mites, tiny parasites that enter households by way of rats and mice. Hew Evans said that they incurred over $1,000 in costs associated with the mites since late April, and they showed rally attendees a series of bites along their forearm for which they had to receive medical treatment.
“It’s an affront to human dignity,” said Evans.
Tenants were joined by officials who condemned the decision of the New York State Department of Housing and Community Renewal in April to destabilize the rent for several residents, leading Pinnacle Group to demand rent arrears, despite neglecting to make necessary repairs for decades.
Speakers asserted that the persistently poor living conditions amount to harassment, pointing to Pinnacle Group’s attempts over the years to destabilize the complex as a pattern of behavior.
Their push comes in the wake of the Mamdani administration’s stated goal of going after chronically negligent landlords, as outlined in its “Rental Ripoff” report published Thursday.
Through Mamdani’s planned Fix the City initiative, the city has pledged to take legal action against landlords who make it a business model to ignore repairs and housing code violations, with the ultimate goal of shepherding extremely distressed properties to new ownership.
Mamdani attempted something similar for another batch of Pinnacle Group’s buildings earlier this year, after the developer was obligated to sell approximately two thirds of its rent-stabilized portfolio in a bankruptcy proceeding.
The administration sought to interfere—albeit unsuccessfully—in the sale to Summit Properties, questioning the buyer’s commitment to preserving the more than 5,000 units, which had about 6,500 housing code violations across them at the time.
“We’ve seen from the Mamdani administration a more concerted effort to actually try to address conditions and hold bad landlords accountable,” said City Councilman Lincoln Restler, who represents Brooklyn Heights and grew up a few blocks from the Riverside buildings. “This is a perfect example where we’re expecting them to step up in a real way and help fight with us to deliver better conditions.”
The Riverside apartments were designed in the late 19th century by Alfred Tredway White, a pioneering architect of social housing whose work was praised by Jacob Riis, the author of “How the Other Half Lives.” Over a century later, the red-brick complex is one of the last remaining bastions of affordable housing in tree-lined Brooklyn Heights.
The five-building complex featured one of the large courtyards for which White was known until a previous owner* paved over it in the early 1990s, an action that it—and later, Pinnacle Group—was ordered to reverse but, according to court records, did not perform for 30 years. When the landlord finally did restore the courtyard in 2022, HCR permitted it to raise rents for the tenants against whom Pinnacle Group is now demanding rent backpay, which the Riverside tenants are challenging in court.
City Limits was unable to reach the Pinnacle Group for comment. A lawyer from Horing Welikson Rosen & Digrugilliers, P.C., who is representing Pinnacle Group in the case filed by the Riverside tenants, declined to provide additional comment beyond what is found in court dockets.
In the affidavit filed on June 30, the lawyer wrote that tenants “seek to relitigate issues already decided by both the Rent Administrator and the DHCR Commissioner,” and that they do not legally justify that the rent increases constitute “irreparable harm” to the tenants who are on the hook for thousands of dollars in rent backpay.
Last year, Pinnacle Group, led by billionaire real estate mogul Joel Wiener, filed a preliminary plan to convert the buildings to condominiums, which tenants and lawmakers call a “red herring” that signals the landlord’s intent to turn the 157 rent-stabilized units into market-rate apartments.
“Such conversions are commonly used to pressure long-term rent-stabilized tenants out of their homes through refusal of renewals, buyout campaigns, and prolonged neglect,” Restler’s office said in a press statement about the move.
For decades, local elected officials say, Wiener and Pinnacle Group have pursued similar changes that might allow for rent destabilization at the Riverside buildings, like in 2017, when they attempted to build a parking garage under the building, which experts warned would destabilize the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The landlord had attempted a similar endeavor about a decade prior, which was thwarted after the Landmarks Preservation Commission objected (the LPC later approved a revised proposal for the garage, a Pinnacle spokesperson says, though management ultimately dropped the plans).
“This is somebody who’s trying to get out of rent stabilization by harassing people,” said State Assemblymember Jo Anne Simon. “We’re not going to let [Wiener] get away with illegal action and harass people out of their homes so that he can make a buck.”
Policymakers say that this history is evidence of Wiener’s unfitness to steward homes like the Riverside apartments.
Wiener manages the Riverside apartments through the corporate entity Joralemon Realty NY LLC. City Limits’ analysis of real estate records identified through the Who Owns What tool, which tracks landlord portfolios, revealed at least 40 additional LLCs through which Pinnacle Group owns and operates buildings, mostly rent-stabilized, with thousands of open housing code violations among them, according to records from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
To Riverside tenants, the fight is simply about securing safe and sustainable living conditions.
“We just want to get through the day, like everybody else,” said Farhia Hagi, who has lived at Riverside with her daughter for the last five years. “We are not asking for anything luxurious, but to have a home that’s adequate to be able to sleep, eat, bathe, and to not worry about mice getting into our food.”
*This story was updated after publication to include additional information provided by a Pinnacle Group spokesperson, and to correct who paved over the buildings’ courtyard in the 1990s. It was a previous owner, not the Pinnacle Group.
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