The Community Opportunity to Purchase Act of 2025 was passed quickly and easily, according to its sponsor, Council member Sandy Nurse.
“It has a huge level of support in the Council,” she said Wednesday. “I think everybody recognized COPA will be an effective intervention to create affordable housing, to protect the affordable housing that we have.”
She added, “It was easy to get it over the finish line.”
Maybe too easy, it turned out: Mayor Eric Adams vetoed it on his way out the door, after Council member Darlene Mealy rounded up enough votes to prevent her colleagues from overriding a veto.
Given the lesson learned by the City Council in 2006, Nurse should have known better. That year Local Law 79 was passed, placing what proved to be an unconstitutional requirement on building owners who failed to renew federal affordability subsidies.
In Nurse’s defense, she was 22 at the time and wouldn’t move to New York City until three years later after living in Panama, Cuba, South Korea and Japan. (Her parents were in the Navy.)
And she didn’t inherit COPA from a departing colleague until September, when the Council was deciding which of about 100 bills it would try to pass before members’ terms expired at year-end.
But any bill interfering with the right to sell private property is going to be vetoed if the mayor is a capitalist (e.g., Mike Bloomberg in 2006 and Eric Adams in 2025) and challenged in court.
It’s possible that COPA would have survived a lawsuit had Adams’ veto been overridden. Local Law 79 of 2006 was far more severe.
It granted tenant associations a right of first option to buy covered buildings, even if owners had no ability to renew expiring subsidies. The law let tenants pay the appraised value, rather than the market price. “It was a forced sale,” recalls Erica Buckley, a lawyer who works on building sales.
The new COPA doesn’t force owners to sell, but it does make them wait, which carries its own risks.
“If a nonprofit came to me with a package with a big ribbon on it, I have to think [my clients] would take it,” said Buckley. “The problem is, getting there is so hard.”
She is working on a deal like the ones COPA encourages, but after two years, it has not closed, “and it’s not going to,” Buckley said. “And it’s not because the owner doesn’t want to. It’s because there’s no money.”
Thomas Silverstein, a supporter of Washington, D.C.’s version of COPA, said its effectiveness “has waxed and waned” — deals close when there’s financial backing from the city, and not when there isn’t.
“It’s vitally important that there be financial resources,” said Silverstein, president and executive director of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council.
Other cities with versions of COPA have found the same thing. New York’s bill doesn’t come with funding, although Mamdani could find money for it at some point.
“I want more than anything to see tenants become owners,” said Buckley, who previously worked in the state attorney general’s office and in the nonprofit sector. “My concern [with COPA] is how these deals work in reality.”
A thing we’ve learned: Buckley, a partner at Nixon Peabody, warned that the pending Community Opportunity to Purchase Act would not address the common occurrence of tenants’ approaching the owner of their building and saying, “We want to buy, can you convert it into a co-op?”
“You cannot have those conversations,” she tells owners, “because you would be violating the Martin Act.”
Said Buckley, “I actually have that conversation on a monthly basis.”
Elsewhere…
This satellite photo from Google Maps shows plenty of asphalt and dirt flanking the walk from Rashid Walker’s Hempstead development site to the village’s LIRR station. It’s enough to make an urban planner cringe — and a housing developer drool:
But when I called the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to see if it plans to repurpose some of those underused parcels for apartments, I was surprised to hear that the MTA doesn’t own any of them.
“Talk to the Village,” the agency told me.
Closing time
Residential: The most expensive residential sale recorded Thursday was $10 million for a 3,727-square-foot, sponsor-sale condominium unit at 16 Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village. Tara King-Brown and Ryan Kaplan representing Corcoran Sunshine had the listing.
Commercial: The most expensive commercial transaction was $9.9 million for a 20,726-square-foot industrial property at 72-02 51st Avenue in Woodside.
New to the Market: The highest price for a residential property hitting the market was $25 million for unit 8 at 778 Park Avenue in Lenox Hill. Alexa Lambert and Leonard Steinberg with Compass have the listing.
Breaking Ground: The largest new building permit filed was for a proposed 44,475-square-foot, 60-unit project at 111 Grove Street in Bushwick. Diego Aguilera Architects P.C. filed the permit on behalf of Jerome Zwick.
— Matthew Elo