Council Passes COPA, Giving Nonprofits First Shot at Buildings

On Thursday, the New York City Council approved a bill that would let nonprofit housing groups get ahead of for-profit developers when certain distressed apartment buildings come up for sale. The Community Opportunity to Purchase Act, known as COPA, passed six years after its original version was first introduced, and it marks the second time in under a year that lawmakers have sent it to City Hall.

Under the legislation, qualified nonprofits, including community land trusts, would have 20 days to submit a statement of interest when a covered building goes up for sale. They would then have another 70 days to put in an offer before the property reaches the open market. If an owner later receives an offer from a buyer outside that group of qualified entities, the nonprofits would hold a right of first refusal.

The path here has been long. The first version of the bill was introduced in 2020, aimed at preserving existing affordable buildings that were being bought by private equity firms and then converted to market-rate housing or resold. In December 2025, the Council passed a similar version, but then-Mayor Eric Adams vetoed it, along with 18 other bills, on his last day in office.

Council Member Sandy Nurse, who sponsored the latest version, said she had to “really start over again” and make several changes to make the bill workable. The most significant was narrowing the pool of eligible properties. The “targeted universe” shrank from 10,000 buildings to between 2,000 and 3,400, with the revised bill applying only to buildings that meet a higher threshold of housing code violations. That change helped win the backing of Council Speaker Julie Menin and others.

At a press conference ahead of the vote, Nurse made the case for the approach. “Buying and preserving some of the housing we already have is the most immediate way to stop displacement. That’s what COPA does,” she said. She described a model in which trusted housing providers buy certain buildings, work with tenants, renovate the units, and return those tenants to the same apartments at permanently affordable rents, while also offering eligible landlords a pool of community-oriented buyers and bringing those buildings under a form of public oversight.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he intends to sign the bill. In a statement to The Real Deal, he said, “COPA puts the power in the hands of tenants and community organizations, and we’re building on that power with a historic investment in affordable housing preservation. I look forward to signing this bill into law and continuing the fight to make New York a city for the many, not the few.”

Small property owners are not on board. Ann Korchak, board president of Small Property Owners of New York, said in a statement that COPA will devalue buildings and “illegally take private property.” She argued that giving nonprofits the right of first refusal “shuts out conventional buyers who have the financial wherewithal to immediately improve and rehabilitate a failing building,” and said government policies such as rent freezes set small owners up for failure before COPA arrived as a remedy for problems the city helped create.

With the mayor’s signature expected, the measure would move from a six-year legislative fight to implementation, where the details of how nonprofits, owners and the city handle a sale will be tested building by building.