A major settlement between rent-regulated tenants and a large New York City landlord may be at risk after some of the tenants complained that they were not eligible for millions of dollars in compensation.
Oops. The major landlord is the Pinnacle Group and the lawsuit was “originally brought over allegations of illegal rents and harassment.”
It’s one of those intriguing stories because you can’t really be sure what happened. Except, of course, that the Pinnacle Group was accused of behaving badly and given that they had a large number of elderly, rent-regulated tenants, you can pretty well figure that they did behave badly. If tenants’ advocacy groups were against Pinnacle, I know what side I’m going to be on.
Although the reasons why the carefully negotiated settlement is in danger of collapse does have complexity, the Times’ Mireya Navarro tells it in a straight-forward easy to understand way.
The tenants’ original lawyer is Richard Levy. The rebel tenants have just hired a new attorney.