"On his first day as mayor, Zohran Mamdani spent the afternoon at 85 Clarkson Avenue, a run-down rent-stabilized building in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens. He was there to announce a trio of executive orders, including one to revive the Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants, and the venue was a targeted choice: 85 Clarkson is owned by billionaire Joel Wiener, a fairly notorious landlord whose real-estate firm Pinnacle Group filed for bankruptcy last year"
"Joel Wiener comes from a real-estate family and was a relatively small-scale landlord through the '90s, with a business model Bloomberg described as "buying rent-regulated, run-down properties that house many tenants behind on their rent." (The occasion for the Bloomberg piece was Wiener's ascendance, in 2017, to billionaire status.) All of that accelerated in the early 2000s, as Pinnacle's portfolio grew thanks to investment from a firm called Praedium Group."
Zohran Mamdani used a visit to 85 Clarkson Avenue to announce executive orders including revival of the Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants. The building is owned by billionaire Joel Wiener, whose Pinnacle Group filed for bankruptcy and has 93 buildings slated for a foreclosure auction. The planned sale of more than 5,000 mostly rent-stabilized apartments is an early test of city tenant-protection and landlord-accountability measures. The mayor attempted but failed to halt the sale; Summit Properties USA won the auction on January 9. The attorney general sought to block the sale and a judge will rule on the challenge.
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