NYC to force landlords to offer buildings for sale to non-profits first

The New York City Council has passed a bill that will force some property owners to give nonprofits first dibs on buying their distressed properties if the bill becomes law. The bill has headed to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's desk for his signature.

The "Community Opportunity for Purchase Act," or COPA, will force some landlords to offer up their properties to "community land trusts" and nonprofits for 90 days so that they can have first dibs on the properties. Although a similar proposal has been floated before that would have applied to a much larger number of properties, this one is not as extreme. The original COPA bill was vetoed by former Mayor Eric Adams right before he stepped out of office.

The bill will impact 2,100 NYC buildings that are mostly managed by the Housing Preservation Department in the Big Apple. The previous bill would have covered around 10,000 buildings in the city. The bill was brought by Brooklyn lawmaker Sandy Nurse, who claimed that the bill last year was "legally sound" but that changes were made for government agencies.

“It was more that there was a number of different points that could be sued over, so it wasn’t that there was anything unconstitutional; it was just that they wanted an opportunity to re-strengthen now that they’ve had a third review of it,” she said.

Ann Korchak, the board president of the Small Property Owners of New York, slammed the bill. “COPA, in any form, is a destructive housing policy for renters, owners, and affordable housing. COPA will devalue buildings, forcing small, often immigrant and multigenerational, owners to sell their buildings for pennies on the dollar,” she said.

“Giving the right-of-first-refusal to nonprofits shuts out conventional buyers who have the financial wherewithal to immediately improve and rehabilitate a failing building," she added, per the New York Post.

If the measure goes into effect, it will slow down property deals for those buildings that are impacted by it. The previous version of the bill was lauded by socialist New York City Mayor Zorhan Mamdani, who said in a policy proposal that NYC should "pass COPA to give CLTs [Community land trusts] and non-profits the right of first refusal when landlords sell."