The Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) has been lauded by housing advocates as a solution to maintaining affordable housing stock amid a housing crisis throughout the state. The act gives tenants the chance to make an offer on a building before a landlord sells to an outside party.
Gary Simon, 61, is organizing tenants in Flatbush, Brooklyn, to purchase his rent-stabilized building at East 19th and Beverly Road. Simon works as a groundskeeper for a private tennis center and makes about $60,000 annually. He first moved to the building with his mother when he was 16, moved out when he got married at 25, and moved back some years later to a different apartment in the same building. He’s lived there ever since.
“The squeaky wheel gets the oil,” said Simon. “I believe in that. You have to be very squeaky around here.”
He’s been fighting for better housing conditions for decades, asking for repairs and that more attention be paid to the rat population and trash problem. He feels the main problem is that there’s a high turnover of property management companies, as well as the building owner, real estate mogul Margaret Streicker. Streicker’s company, Newcastle Realty Services LLC, has been hit with multiple lawsuits alleging illegal tactics to deregulate rent-stabilized buildings. “The service has always been horrible,” said Simon. “There’s been a steady decline, like a plummet in the quality of service provided here. And it seems like [it’s] everytime there’s a management change.”
The TOPA bill was introduced in 2021 by Assemblymember Marcela Mitaynes (A3353) and Senator Zellnor Myrie (S221) as a method of preserving affordable housing.
“I had my own housing insecurity, like many New Yorkers,” said Mitaynes. “In 2006, we got a new owner of the 35-unit rent-stabilized building where I lived. Within six months, they were able to displace half of the families that lived there. That was really an introduction to housing and my rights as a tenant.”
Mitaynes now focuses on equity housing organizing and tenants’ rights legislation. She said that landlords continue to “over-leverage” their buildings during a sale to make more money. These “bad actors” tend to punish current tenants by making living conditions uncomfortable, such as cutting back on maintenance and sanitation, or not making repairs. “What that means is they’re trying to get people [who] pay a low amount of rent out so that they can bring in people [who] can pay more rent,” said Mitaynes.
Elise Goldin, Community Land Trust (CLT) campaign organizer for New Economy Project, is also looking to get a $250 million acquisition fund from the state to make it easier for tenants to buy buildings.
There is some precedent for a group of tenants buying their building from their landlord to convert into cooperative housing, most recently the residents at a 21-unit building on E. 134th St in Port Morris in the South Bronx.
Those tenants began organizing against rising rents and eventually formed a tenant association. They reached out to housing advocate groups like TakeRoot Justice and the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB), a nonprofit focused on maintaining resident-controlled housing, for help in 2018. UHAB bought the building temporarily and it was then converted into a Housing Development Fund Corporation (HDFC) for the tenants in 2022.
Samuel Stein, a senior policy analyst at the Community Service Society (CSS), said the co-op in Port Morris is similar to “tenant takeovers” in the 1980s. Back then, landlords would routinely go into tax foreclosure and the city would sell a building to the tenants for a cheap price under the condition that it stay affordable. “There’s a history of this happening. We just don’t have the opportunity for it anymore because landlords, if they’re going out of business, are being foreclosed by the bank, not the city,” said Stein.
The trend of landlords raising rents and flipping properties, engendering a massive wave of gentrification, extended from the 1990s into the 2010s, said Stein. This happened in places where Black and brown people historically owned single-family homes, like Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn and Jamaica in Queens, but also in larger rent-stabilized housing throughout the city.
The current housing market, he said, is far too reliant on liens and bank seizures rather than being characterized by landlord abandonment. There are also housing programs, like 421-A and Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH), that have helped keep some affordable housing stock still around—but they’ve been problematic at best.
TOPA would provide tenants with an important intervention point when their building is up for sale, said Stein. Under the bill, a building for sale would be appraised for “fair market value” and the tenants would have the right of “first refusal.” Tenants could then buy their building if they have the funds, pick a buyer they want to be their landlord, or pass on buying altogether. Stein considers the bill a racial justice initiative and a tool to fight gentrification because of its potential impact for Black and brown tenants.
Mitaynes said this would be vital “for someone who got evicted from a home that they shared with their family for over 30 years, [to actually have] the right to take over the apartment and pass it down to my daughter as well,” said Mitaynes. “I’ve seen the way our communities are being gentrified and I’ve seen the lack of action from government. This feels like a really important opportunity we can give folks.”
In terms of opposition, Mitaynes has not found a lot of pushback from the real estate industry or building owners just yet. She’s hopeful the act will pass in Albany this year. Stein added that there probably are plenty of small homeowners of color who would love to sell to their tenants if the tenants could afford to buy their properties. Real estate developers, on the other hand, wouldn’t profit greatly from the implementation of TOPA.
Mitaynes also advocated for the Good Cause Eviction bill, which protects tenants from being evicted without a reason, and the Housing Access Voucher Program bill, which is a state rent subsidy program.
Ariama C. Long is a Report for America corps member who writes about politics for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.