COPA’s return is imminent — and this time it is sure to pass.
The Community Opportunity to Purchase Act would pause sales on thousands of apartment buildings to give nonprofits handpicked by the mayor a better chance to buy them.
“We are in the process of finalizing the language,” said bill sponsor Council member Sandy Nurse at an affordable housing forum Wednesday. “We’re hoping to have something introduced very quickly, within the next 30 days.”
The real estate industry strongly opposed a version of COPA passed by the Council last year, saying it would compromise owners’ ability to sell buildings. Owners got a reprieve when Mayor Eric Adams vetoed it in the final days of his tenure.
The city’s Law Department raised concerns “at the 11th hour” about the bill’s chances of surviving a legal challenge, Nurse said, neglecting to mention that she could not round up 34 votes to override the veto.
But Adams’ successor, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, has long supported the bill, so it was just a matter of how and when Nurse would revise it. Nurse and another COPA backer gave some answers to those questions at the panel discussion, hosted by the New York City Bar Association in Midtown.
“Essentially what COPA does is create a very short, exclusive pre-listing with prequalified purchasers who have experience buying and refurbishing affordable housing,” Nurse said.
Nurse said she solicited feedback from the real estate industry as well as from supporters of the bill. But tenant advocates are actually helping to write the bill, as one panelist at Wednesday’s event made clear.
Arielle Hirsch, director of policy at the nonprofit Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, said COPA is a policy priority for UHAB, and outlined some of the parameters of the pending bill.
Only buildings with some indicators of physical or financial distress, such as those in the city’s Alternative Enforcement Program or on the Certificate of No Harassment list, or those about to lose a subsidy such as 421a or Low Income Housing Tax Credits, would be subject to the bill, Hersh said.
Nurse later confirmed those details. The Council member estimated that fewer than 500 sales a year would be affected by the law.
The bill targets “owners who may not have been the most responsible,” she said, adding, “They’re not the worst of the worst.” (For those, the city has another program called Third Party Transfer.)
It is clear, though, that many thousands of buildings would be subject to COPA.
Virtually all mixed-income rental properties constructed in the past 50 years were built with an expiring tax abatement, such as 421a. The Mamdani administration in February added 250 buildings to the Alternative Enforcement Program. And LIHTC is ubiquitous among affordable housing developments.
It is unclear if rental buildings that age out of the state’s Mitchell-Lama program will also fall under COPA, but they fit the description given by Nurse and Hersh.
Several other city and state programs, such as J-51, feature affordability requirements that expire when their subsidies do.
COPA aims to steer buildings to buyers who will preserve affordability and away from those that will make them market-rate, or fail to repair and run them well.
To safeguard the law from constitutionality challenges, it will only delay sales, not force them, unlike Local Law 79, a heavy-handed version that passed two decades ago and was ruled unconstitutional by the courts.
Owners would have to inform the city of their intent to put a COPA-covered building on the market. The city, in turn, would notify a “very small group of prequalified buyers” — organizations selected by the city through a request for proposals process.
Those potential buyers would have an opportunity to do their due diligence before a public listing. “Not so much time as to delay the market,” said Hersh, but enough for potential buyers to understand the building’s situation and figure out the underwriting.
If no one expresses interest, the window would close and the owner would be free to pursue a sale as usual. But if a prequalified buyer raises its hand, it would have 175 days to make a deal, Nurse said.
Erica Buckley, a partner at Nixon Peabody who represents sellers of multifamily buildings, expressed doubts that COPA would work as planned. As much as she likes the concept, she said on the panel, actual building sales to tenant-aligned buyers do not fit into the bill’s parameters.
“Everything takes too long,” said Buckley. “It’s just the reality.”
Read more
The Daily Dirt: Tenant “Obstruction” to Purchase Act
COPA panic: Brokers, owners sound alarm on City Council bill
If COPA is so great, why stop there?
