Eight tenants at Shepherd Glenmore, a supportive and affordable housing complex in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn, are facing eviction lawsuits for non-payment of rent — filed by the very developer Mayor Zohran Mamdani has held up as a model for how New York City should treat renters. Court records show Spatial Equity, the firm behind the $61 million complex, is pursuing the non-payment cases even as the mayor champions the company as a so-called high road landlord.
According to the New York Post, which first reported the eviction filings, Shepherd Glenmore opened in July 2025 with 123 affordable housing units, including 74 supportive units for formerly homeless residents and 48 deeply affordable apartments, according to the Supportive Housing Network of New York. The project, co-developed with HousingPlus, was financed through state housing bonds, Low-Income Housing Tax Credits and city Department of Housing Preservation and Development subsidies. Shepherd Glenmore is Spatial Equity's only property with actual tenants living in it, per the Post's reporting.
A Mayor's Model Landlord Faces Its Own Eviction Cases
Spatial Equity is headed by Teghvir Sethi, who describes his firm as a minority-owned affordable housing developer and has publicly criticized landlords who displace tenants, the Post reports. Sethi received a master's in real estate from NYU in 2017 and has described himself as a do-gooder who did not want to participate in the market-rate world, according to the same outlet. Neither City Hall nor Sethi responded to the Post's requests for comment on the eviction filings.
Mamdani has pledged repeatedly to keep tenants in their homes and has framed his housing strategy around steering foreclosed and distressed properties toward community land trusts and nonprofits rather than private speculators. He has publicly labeled his favored developers, including Spatial Equity, as high road landlords. Just this summer, per the Post, Sethi told the outlet that most of the distressed portfolios the city is targeting were typically highly leveraged and focused on displacing tenants when speculative landlords took them over — a framing that stands in tension with the non-payment suits now unfolding at his own complex.
City Hall's East Harlem Play With Spatial Equity
The eviction filings surface as Mamdani is actively backing Spatial Equity's bid to take over the Emerald Portfolio, a collection of 38 distressed buildings and 887 units in East Harlem, according to The Real Deal. Courts handed down judgments of foreclosure against Isaac Kassirer's Emerald Equities for the portfolio in July 2026, after the buildings had racked up 2,342 outstanding housing code violations as of that April, the outlet reports. Tenants in five of the East Harlem buildings had previously staged a rent strike before securing $500,000 in rent credits and repair promises.
Spatial Equity's bid is structured to transfer six of those East Harlem buildings directly to the El Barrio Community Land Trust, where a tenant board would take over governance, according to City Limits. Tenants on East 103rd Street had already formed a union to lobby for community land trust ownership of the buildings, the outlet notes. Hoodline previously reported on the mayor's initial East Harlem push to steer the foreclosure sale into nonprofit hands.
The city's East Harlem strategy is not without precedent — or failure. In January 2026, the Mamdani administration attempted a similar auction intervention to direct Pinnacle Group's 5,000-unit rent-stabilized portfolio to non-profit stewards, but private firm Summit Properties USA ultimately bought the portfolio out of bankruptcy for $451 million, per City Limits. Flagstar Bank had held more than $564 million in debt against that distressed Pinnacle portfolio across four boroughs. A 13-minute taxpayer-funded video the mayor produced supporting the Union of Pinnacle Tenants, narrated by Morgan Spector, chronicled that earlier fight.
Emerald's Troubled Record and a Prior Enforcement Action
Emerald Equities was already under state scrutiny before the foreclosure. In February 2025, the New York State Attorney General's Office ordered the company to restore 21 illegally deregulated apartments to rent-stabilized status and pay $54,800 in tenant restitution after widespread compliance failures, Hoodline previously reported in its coverage of the Emerald-linked Bronx properties. State regulators also flagged mishandled tenant security deposits across Emerald's distressed buildings.
Spatial Equity is not new to large-scale affordable housing partnerships with the city. In August 2024, the firm and nonprofit partner Community Access purchased the former St. Emeric church campus in the East Village from the Archdiocese of New York to build a 570-unit, fully affordable complex, with 60% of units set aside for formerly homeless residents, according to 6sqft. The city's Department of Housing Preservation also tapped Spatial Equity to co-develop the Aurea, a 131-unit affordable complex on the Lower East Side set to occupy space formerly used as an NYPD parking lot. Spatial Equity currently plans to expand its portfolio through those two additional affordable housing projects.
Critics Question a Double Standard
Sethi has appeared alongside Cea Weaver, director of the New York City Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants, at a Federal Reserve Bank panel in June, part of the administration's broader effort to align its housing allies publicly. Weaver has called for the abolition of all evictions. Deyanira Del Río, who served on Mamdani's transition team and previously headed the New Economy Project, spearheaded the NYC Community Land Trust Learning Exchange, in which Sethi also participated.
Not everyone is convinced the arrangement squares with the mayor's rhetoric. Phil Wong criticized Mamdani for what he called hypocrisy over his landlord and tenant policies, arguing that one set of rules cannot apply to favored landlords and another to everyone else. Mamdani has said his approach is meant to hold both goals together: “We can keep people in their homes, and we can build the homes that they need to live in,” he has said.
The Broader Eviction Landscape
The Shepherd Glenmore filings land against a citywide backdrop of eviction pressure. New York City marshals executed more than 8,000 court-ordered evictions across the five boroughs in the first six months of 2026, according to the Citizens' Committee for Children of New York, even as the citywide residential rental vacancy rate hovered near a record low of 1.4%. New York State has expanded legal representation in housing court under Right to Counsel programs in an effort to curb marshal evictions.
Mamdani unveiled his Block by Block housing plan in July, a policy framework allowing the city to seize chronically neglected residential buildings and reallocate them to land trusts, nonprofits or tenant cooperatives, according to the NYC Mayor's Office. That plan includes a $5 million loan fund meant to help small landlords cover rental arrears and prevent eviction filings in the first place. Separately, Mamdani and the City Council agreed in July to expand the city's housing voucher program to low-income tenants facing eviction in rent-stabilized units, projecting coverage for roughly 5,600 households, per Spectrum News NY1. The mayor also dropped a previous administration lawsuit that had limited CityFHEPS vouchers strictly to shelter occupants.
Property owner associations, meanwhile, have pushed back hard on Mamdani's proposed rent freeze and property takeover policies. Real estate industry analysts reported that owners argue escalating water, sewer and insurance expenses — not landlord neglect — are driving building distress, according to The Real Deal. NYC water and sewer rates rose 6% this July, adding further operating pressure on rent-stabilized buildings citywide. Whether the non-payment evictions at Shepherd Glenmore stem from voucher delays or uncollected arrears remains an open question, one that will likely shadow the administration's housing agenda as it moves to finalize the Emerald Portfolio deal.
