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Landlord targeted by Mamdani agrees to forgive back rent in 5,100 apartments
By
David Brand
Published Jun 9, 2026
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Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office
By
David Brand
Published Jun 9, 2026
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The new owner of more than 5,000 mostly rent-stabilized apartments says it has agreed to waive millions of dollars in unpaid rent that tenants owed in the years before a high-profile bankruptcy sale targeted by Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
The company Summit Properties purchased the 93-building portfolio in March after its previous owner Pinnacle Group went bankrupt in a transaction that drew intervention from Mamdani and top city officials. Summit agreed to forgive tenants’ back rent during a recent meeting with leaders from the Union of Pinnacle Tenants, which represents residents across four boroughs where Summit bought Pinnacle buildings.
Many tenants began withholding rent because they had been dealing for years with unsafe conditions, while others fell behind because they could not afford their monthly payments, according to the tenant union. They may now get a blank slate.
“If residents stay current on their rent, we won’t pursue arrears,” Summit spokesperson Jordan Barowitz told Gothamist. He added that Summit was still determining how many tenants owed back rent, but that the total was in the millions of dollars.
A Gothamist review of court records shows at least 84 separate limited liability companies linked to Pinnacle filed at least 2,569 nonpayment eviction lawsuits in the five years between April 2021 and April of this year, when Summit took control.
The Union of Pinnacle Tenants celebrated the concession from the new landlord, and credited the group's continued advocacy.
“It is a big victory,” said Vivian Kuo, a tenant union representative who lives in a Summit building in the Hamilton Heights section of Harlem. “This is real direct monetary redress of people’s issues.”
Kuo said tenants dealt with a range of problems in their buildings including caved-in ceilings, heat outages and, at times, darkened hallways after Con Edison cut the common area electricity due to the landlord’s unpaid bills.
“Your home should be safe and there are certain basic standards — heat, hot water, ceilings and walls that don't have massive holes, doors that lock, a fire escape you can actually escape from,” Kuo said. “These are things that we should have.”
The buildings were at the heart of one of Mamdani’s first official acts as mayor, when he directed city lawyers to intervene in the pending bankruptcy sale citing the city’s role as a creditor. Pinnacle owed the city nearly $13 million in back taxes and fines, attorneys said at the time.
The move was an early indication of how Mamdani might try to fulfill his campaign pledge to steer building sales to owners that city officials and tenant groups deem more responsible.
But Summit had already lined up its bid for the portfolio before Mamdani took office.
The company stated in court that the purchase was financially feasible because lenders agreed to shave $275 million off the buildings’ loans, allowing Summit to spend less money on debt repayment and more on building operations.
Many other owners of rent-stabilized housing across New York City are stuck with onerous debt after they took out hefty loans to purchase buildings, lift apartments out of the rent-stabilization system and raise rents. New tenant protections laws made many of those tactics illegal in 2019, upending their business model.
A federal judge rejected the city’s attempt to slow the sale after a marathon court hearing in January, paving the way for Summit to finalize the $451 million purchase two months later.
Nevertheless, city officials and tenants in the buildings framed the outcome as a success because, they said, their efforts resulted in several commitments from Summit’s CEO Zohar Levy.
Levy agreed in a January court declaration to spend $30 million on renovations over the next five years and to resolve half of the roughly 6,500 housing code violations in the portfolio within two months of purchase — a deadline that arrived on June 1. The majority of the violations were located in Brooklyn buildings.
Summit and the two property managers it hired to run the buildings did fix roughly 3,500 violations in that timeframe, but the total number of violations ballooned in April to over 12,500 after a city housing inspection blitz across 22 buildings.
Barowitz, the Summit spokesperson, said the company “fixed hundreds of apartments, cured thousands of violations and exceeded our commitment.”
But Union of Pinnacle Tenants organizer Jesse Ryan said they still expect Summit to quickly fix the new violations as well.
“They’re not new issues, they’re newly recorded,” Ryan said. “We believe those new numbers aren’t a reflection of new issues, but rather the record-keeping catching up to reflect the picture of how many issues there are in these buildings.”
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Zohran Mamdani
housing
new york city
David Brand
David is a reporter covering housing for Gothamist and WNYC. Got a tip? Email [email protected] or Signal 908-310-3960.
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