Wherever in New York City you live, I bet you can picture an apartment building that fits one of these two descriptions: a multi-family rental property that has passed from absentee landlord to absentee landlord, falling deeper into disrepair as its tenants suffer through cold winters, broken elevators, and leaky roofs; or, a once-affordable development where the subsidies expired and the building was sold to a new landlord as market-rate rentals, only for a great many long-term tenants to be displaced.
For decades, New York City has allowed these twin problems of distressed property flipping and expiring affordability to fester. It is time for New York City’s elected leaders to stand up and proclaim: enough!
On Sept. 9, the City Council will hold a hearing on a bill that would address these twin problems and give reputable operators a chance to intervene.
The Community Opportunity to Purchase Act, or COPA, is sponsored by Brooklyn Councilmember Sandy Nurse, a well-known champion for tenants and Community Land Trusts. Modelled on similar bills in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., New York City’s COPA would give a list of government-vetted qualified entities the first chance to buy troubled properties when they come up for sale.
Once the new owners purchase a building through COPA, they would be eligible for grants, low-interest loans, and technical assistance from the city to bring the buildings up to code and preserve them as affordable rentals or limited-equity cooperatives. This law could help pave the pathway to social housing in New York, turning perennially troubled rentals into safe, affordable homes for long-term New Yorkers and new immigrants alike.
Contrary to some critics’ allegations, COPA would not affect small homeowners or parents passing properties on to their children. The bill explicitly excludes owner-occupied buildings with less than six apartments, like the one my parents owned and I grew up in, and it does not cover transfers between family members, as when a parent passes a property on to their child. It also includes a carve out for sales that need to happen quickly in order for owners to avoid financial hardship.
COPA puts a circuit breaker into a real estate system which has long enabled crumbling buildings to change hands behind anonymous limited liability corporations (LLCs) and has allowed once-affordable buildings to surge to sky-high market rates.
If the Council passes COPA and the mayor signs it into law, the effects could be transformative for New York.
If you have lived in your neighborhood for some years, you can readily envision the impact a bill like COPA could have made if it were in place years ago. Take a moment to imagine all the buildings in your neighborhood that have fallen into disrepair and been subject to frequent flipping, and the buildings where affordability protections were allowed to lapse. Remember all the people who used to live there but were since displaced by either formal evictions, informal harassment, or the endless grind of substandard conditions.
Now picture a world where we passed legislation like COPA many years back. How many of those buildings would now be thriving and affordable? How many of those long-lost neighbors might still be vibrant parts of your community?
It may be too late to bring them all back home, but this year the Council has a chance to make sure this story does not keep repeating into the future. Instead of allowing buildings to flip or rents to surge, New York can preserve affordability and promote community ownership. Our communities cannot afford to let this opportunity slip away again.
Jones is president and CEO of the Community Service Society of New York.