#tenant-advocacy

#tenant-advocacy

A troubled portfolio of over 5,000 rent stabilized apartments will be sold to a new private landlord, a bankruptcy court judge ruled Friday afternoon after lawyers for the Mamdani administration, the New York Attorney General, and organized tenants had intervened to try and stop it. Residents of the 90-plus building portfolio owned by Pinnacle Group had been pushing a judge to delay Pinnacle's bankruptcy sale and give the city a chance to vet the buyer and put together a competing offer.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday defended his pick to lead the city's revitalized Office to Protect Tenants after past social media posts resurfaced in which the appointee criticized homeownership and called for reducing white middle-class wealth. It comes after another of Mamdani's appointees, Catherine Almonte Da Costa, resigned after old social media posts surfaced that contained antisemitic statements and criticism of the NYPD.

Where I live in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, we saw this cycle where landlords and bankers and policymakers had driven up the value of real estate using speculative financial capital, the housing market crashed, and then the solution to that was just a different private equity firm coming in and owning the buildings," Weaver, 37, said in a Dissent magazine interview published last winter. "This cycle fueled waves of gentrification in Crown Heights.

Parcel taxes are a type of property taxes, but they're legal under Prop. 13. In essence, the city imposes a tax not on the value of a piece of property but on its size: larger lots pay higher taxes than smaller ones, but within each category the tax is flat. A $2 million 2,000-square-foot house on a standard 25-by-100 foot lot pays the same as a similar house assessed at $400,000.

Dan McLean got an eviction notice at his apartment last week, instructing him to be out in less than five days. But McLean, who lives at a property owned by Home Forward-and is severely visually impaired-didn't know he'd been served previous eviction papers or that he was behind on rent. He says the housing voucher he receives wasn't covering his full rent, but no one at The Yards at Union Station apartments bothered to tell him, and he started racking up back rent and fees. To make things worse, court summons were being sent to a mailbox he didn't have access to.

"It's not just about how much our members make. It's not just about their caseloads. It's about justice for all New Yorkers who deserve high quality representation." - Brandon Mancilla.

The NYC Rent Guidelines Board approved increases of 3-percent for one-year leases and 4.5-percent for two-year leases, affecting over one million apartments starting Oct. 1.