COPA Heads to City Council Committee Vote

COPA is once again heading to a committee vote, then a full City Council vote next week after lead sponsor Council member Sandy Nurse revised the bill to narrow its scope.

The Community Opportunity to Purchase Act, which received enough votes to pass last year but ultimately fell to a veto by ex-Mayor Eric Adams, would give nonprofits or joint ventures designated by the city the first chance to purchase multifamily buildings, namely those with certain affordability restrictions or physical and financial distress.

“Over the last year, I’ve worked alongside NYCCLI, my colleagues, the administration, and the private sector to negotiate a bill that meets the moment,” Council member Nurse said in a statement. “I’m proud to finally bring it to a vote next Thursday.”

The bill will head to a long-awaited set of votes with the revisions, which shrink the universe of eligible buildings compared to past versions that had raised objections from industry groups.

“REBNY appreciates the constructive engagement and thoughtful leadership of Speaker Menin and Council Member Nurse, which has resulted in a more targeted and practical bill,” REBNY President Jim Whelan said in a statement. “We value their commitment to refining the proposal and look forward to continuing to work with the Council to preserve affordable housing, protect tenants and support the creation of more homes for New Yorkers.”

Under the updated bill text, buildings subject to COPA for their affordability restrictions will be limited to those with 100 or fewer units that have regulatory agreements managed by HPD, exempting large mixed-income and affordable multifamily buildings that have as-of-right tax abatements such as 485x and 421a or new city zoning enhancements. Prior iterations of the bill had the potential to capture a broader swath of affordable buildings, not just those with HPD regulatory agreements, and included language that those agreements needed to expire within a two-year window.

For distressed buildings, the bill now requires a higher number of violations, rising to three Class B or C violations per unit or participation in certain programs in order to qualify for COPA. The 2025 version of the bill didn’t include the specific threshold for violations.

Nurse also opted to truncate COPA’s transaction window from 160 days to 145 days, in an attempt to responds to pushback against the bill around potential uncertainty and delays in the sale process. Last year’s version of the bill also would have empowered HPD to add buildings not covered by COPA into the program and extend certain deadlines, powers that the final text now curtails.

“After months of work from the prime sponsor and our legislative staff to address various concerns with the prior version of COPA, the new bill has now been aged in order to be considered for a vote next week,” Council spokesperson Rendy Desamours said in a statement. “The new bill reflects stakeholder feedback with a more targeted approach to the most affected buildings.”

Industry voices have succeeded in whittling away at bills they saw as threatening their business models in the past, influencing the final, watered-down version of good cause eviction that passed at the state level in 2024.

This latest version of COPA also emerges significantly diluted from when it was first proposed in the City Council six years ago, but with more of a chance of winning buy-in from lawmakers likely including Menin, who had allowed the Adams veto of Nurse’s earlier bill to stand in one of her early moves as speaker. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been a vocal supporter of COPA, so much so that it comprises a pillar of his administration’s Block by Block housing plan.