This story was co-published in collaboration with Shelterforce, the only independent, non-academic publication covering the worlds of affordable housing, community development and housing justice.

Jon Deliz has exhausted his personal days waiting for repair men who never showed up.

The 45-year-old middle school teacher says he’s been dealing with decrepit conditions for years at his studio apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. This includes leaks that cascade into other tenants’ apartments, mold, rats, and boiler failures that lead to a lack of heat in the winter.

Last year, he began organizing with his building’s tenants union — and concluded it did not make sense to continue paying rent.

“I realized that paying rent to this landlord is like rewarding neglect,” Deliz said at a rally last month in front of his home at 1296 Pacific St., a six-floor, 76-unit apartment building of mostly rent-stabilized units.

Tenants at Deliz’s building have been on rent strike for 14 months, meaning they’re withholding all of their rent until their conditions are met. Those demands include addressing long-delayed building maintenance issues like broken elevators, mold, and pest problems. While tenants, including Deliz, have been hit with eviction notices for non-payment of rent, they intend to make their case in court that their landlord is not keeping the building habitable as required by law.

The building is tied to the Pinnacle Group, a major real estate company in New York. Earlier this year, the Pinnacle Group’s CEO, Joel Weiner, put dozens of property holding companies into bankruptcy after the properties they own and manage — including 1296 Pacific St. — were set to be foreclosed.

Those properties, which house more than 5,000 rent-stabilized tenants, will be put up for auction next year. Striking residents hope to send a signal to potential bidders that the buildings are in poor condition.

“We want to interrupt and intervene in the foreclosure process such that tenants can make a decision about what’s the best next step,” says tenant organizer Tracy Rosenthal, who handles communications for the Crown Heights Tenants Union. Rosenthal says that since the new tenant union was still forming, tenants haven’t decided on a course of action that would give them agency over the sale process.

“There’s many different strategies to have a say in what happens to your buildings. Some of them involve owning them yourselves. Some of them involve harnessing financing so that the city or a nonprofit can own it,” Rosenthal says.

Deliz says he’s willing to consider pushing for a tenant-led purchase of his building, but that he is more focused on the immediate crisis.

“I can’t even look that far ahead,” Deliz says. “Let’s make sure, is everybody in this building safe?”

While it’s unlikely that tenants would be able to assemble the required capital to buy buildings in the portfolio by January, the sale does give them leverage to publicly shame Pinnacle into funding repairs.

“It wasn’t until I went on rent strike that suddenly calls are getting returned and repairs started getting done,” Deliz tells Next City/Shelterforce.

Next City/Shelterforce reached out to Pinnacle for comment, but a spokesperson, who responded via email, stated, “Because of the current bankruptcy proceedings, the company does not have anything to add to what is stated in the filed court papers.”

Mushrooms growing out of the walls

Tenants at the September rally spoke about cockroach infestations, mushrooms blooming from ceiling corners, and broken stoves and windows.

Valerie Phillips says she’s lived in a Pinnacle apartment for over 30 years, on Bedford and Carroll. She’s lived there since her children were young; she now has a 3-month-old granddaughter. Phillips says that while she was traveling, the superintendent of her building shut off the gas and electricity to save money but failed to turn it back on when she returned.

As a result, she recently wasn’t able to warm up her granddaughter’s baby formula and had to go across the street to warm it. Phillips says she’s resorted to paying for repairs on the unit out of pocket and then deducting the amount from her rent check.

“I don’t know what else we have to do. I’ve complained. I called the cops. I called them to do the repairs, many of which I’ve done on my own, with my own money,” Phillips said at the rally.

Assemblymember Phara Souffrant Forrest — who represents Fort Greene, Clinton Hill and parts of Crown Heights — spoke about her family’s own experience with Pinnacle. Forrest grew up in a rent-stabilized apartment that was purchased by Pinnacle in the late ’90s, where her parents still live. Her father recently sent her a picture of mushrooms growing on the ceiling of his apartment.

She provided a photo to Next City/Shelterforce showing two translucent stems growing from the ceiling corner and fruiting in different directions, with soggy black caps. Above one mushroom are what appear to be two splotches of mold.

At 1296 Pacific St., tenants were worried that seniors living on the sixth floor would be trapped without a working elevator. Deliz, who lives at this building, said the elevator had been broken for three months earlier this year and that he personally had to transport some elderly residents up and down the stairs on his back, something other seniors speaking to Next City/Shelterforce say they witnessed.

Pinnacle’s history of problems

The holding companies that control Pinnacle’s New York buildings filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May, after owing Flagstar Bank over $564 million in debt payments. The properties also have more than $500 million in debt tied to Israeli-issued bonds, which means the buildings’ debt is close to $1 billion, according to Bloomberg. Flagstar Bank told Bloomberg that Pinnacle ceased mortgage payments in January.

According to the Bloomberg report, Pinnacle Group has blamed the delinquencies on rising interest rates, inflation, and 2019 laws that made it more difficult for them to deregulate rent-stabilized units and hike rents, eliminating loopholes that had led to widespread tenant harassment.

Corporate owners of rent-stabilized housing stock apply for mortgages with an explicit plan to deregulate units in order to repay those loans. Converting rent-regulated units into condos is a longtime strategy of Pinnacle and its CEO, Joel Weiner; according to a 2019 Commercial Observer article, Pinnacle was only able to break even by deregulating its rent-stabilized apartments and selling them as condos.

In September, Bloomberg broke the news that the company would be auctioning most of its portfolio of multifamily buildings in New York City. Bidders will have to submit interest by Nov. 21 and the auction will take place on Jan. 8, 2026, if there is more than one qualified bidder, according to the bankruptcy filing.

Pinnacle and Weiner have a long history of infractions with the company’s rent-stabilized housing stock. Weiner, a third-generation real estate mogul, began buying up properties in low-income neighborhoods in 2002, according to the Norwood News. In 2007, tenants in Harlem and the Bronx filed a class action lawsuit against Pinnacle, alleging illegal evictions and rent overcharges, that ended with the company paying $2.5 million to nonprofits. A separate lawsuit in 2008 from the state attorney general’s office required Pinnacle to refund rent overcharges and to keep rent rolls up-to-date.

In 2022, The City reported that Attorney General Tish James reached a settlement with Weiner after he acknowledged that the company had failed to disclose needed repairs to gas piping prior to selling units to condo owners.

Tenants have also criticized Pinnacle’s long history of selling bonds on the Israeli stock exchange. According to a report in The Real Deal, the Pinnacle Group does business in Israel as The Zarasai Group and has raised hundreds of millions of dollars through bond sales there since 2012, using its New York-based properties as collateral.

Tenants expressed anger that their rent money was potentially going to pay back debt on those bonds, mostly owned by Israeli companies, as calls for boycotts of Israeli companies have increased over the course of what human rights experts, genocide scholars, and the United Nations agree is a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

“To think that any of our rent money is going to fund genocide in Israel, in Gaza right now is a damn shame,” Forrest says.

“It’s f—king disgusting that this money is being sent to fund the genocide, especially because it affects my family really deeply,” says Yasmin Almokhamad, another Pinnacle tenant, during September’s rally. Almokhamad, who has lived in her two-bedroom apartment at 1296 Pacific St. for two years, says that when she wakes up in the middle of the night, her baby’s bottle has roaches crawling all over it. Her rent is $2,400 a month.

Lights off

The September rally came as tenants in 10 different Pinnacle buildings received notices of imminent electricity shut-offs from utility company ConEd, which services Pinnacle’s buildings in the city. A few weeks later, on Oct. 14, ConEd turned power off in the common area of two buildings, 1048 and 1042 Union St.

A spokesperson for ConEd told Next City/Shelterforce, “Con Edison works to help customers with financial challenges manage their energy bills. Terminating a customer’s service is a tool of last resort. It is used when a customer has repeatedly failed to pay their energy bills over a prolonged period and has not enrolled in a flexible payment plan to meet their obligation.”

Tenant groups at both buildings — the Union of Pinnacle Tenants and the Crown Heights Tenant Union — organized an emergency rally the following day and issued a call on social media asking followers to call the city’s Department of Housing Preservation & Development and ConEd to demand the power get turned back on.

By the time of the Oct. 15 rally, ConEd had turned the power back on in both buildings following calls from local elected officials. According to Forrest, ConEd said Pinnacle owed it more than $10,000 across all its buildings. (A bankruptcy filing shows that Pinnacle’s various holding companies in the city owe ConEd more than $79,000. Neither Pinnacle nor ConEd returned a request for clarification.)

The company reportedly told Forrest that it shut off electricity while waiting for Pinnacle to send over bankruptcy paperwork, including a plan for repayment, and that the company had been slow in sending that paperwork over.

While the company turned the lights back on at 1048 and 1042 Union St. before the Oct. 15 rally, two other Pinnacle-owned buildings on the same street have notices from ConEd of imminent shut offs.

While the power shut-offs in building common rooms do not interfere with apartment devices like fridges and microwaves, tenants say it would impact heating systems, which are gas-powered but electronically operated. There was also concern that seniors would not be able to leave apartments in the evenings if they had trouble seeing.

Mildred Ross, 72, has lived at 1048 Union St. — one of the two buildings that briefly had its power shut off — for 47 years. She tells Next City/Shelterforce that she’s used to fighting Pinnacle; she was one of the tenants organizing against rent overcharges that sued the company in 2007. (She says she did not personally receive any money from the settlement.)

“We have seniors here that’s over 90 years old that couldn’t get in and out of the building. Mail wasn’t running because nobody’s coming into a dark building,” Ross said at the Oct. 15 rally. She said most of the tenants in the four Pinnacle-owned buildings on Union Street have lived there for over 25 years.

One tenant at the rally who spoke to Next City/Shelterforce was 84-year-old Virginia Cheese, who said that she had been living in the same unit since 1964, decades before Pinnacle purchased the building. Her granddaughter now lives in another Pinnacle-owned building on Union Street with Cheese’s great-grandchildren.

Although ConEd turned the power back on, Ross said the heat was still not working in her building because of a sewage backup in the boiler room.

She exhorted a crowd of other Pinnacle tenants at four buildings on Union Street to repeatedly call 311 if they still didn’t have heat the next day. Temperatures dipped to 48 degrees on the night of Oct. 15. Speaking into a megaphone, she also brought up the prospect of tenant control of their buildings, which drew some cheers from the crowd.

Asked how it felt to be fighting the same company for so long, Ross took a breath and said, “It is really tiring.”

This post was originally published on Next City.