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The revised Community Opportunity to Purchase Act, which now has a majority of sponsors in the City Council, aims to strengthen community land trusts and create more opportunities to place land under community control.
The Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA) has risen from the ashes, and aims to give a boost to nonprofit organizations that promote community ownership—including community land trusts, which allow land to be directly owned by members.
Last year, former Mayor Eric Adams vetoed COPA, a bill that would give preference to preservation specialist organizations upon the sale of certain distressed multifamily buildings. Adams stated at the time that it would create significant challenges for city agencies; real estate industry groups also furiously opposed it, saying it would unfairly disrupt the market.
But proponents of COPA believe that prioritizing community-based organizations in certain residential sales could preserve deeply affordable housing in areas under threat of gentrification.
A revised version of the bill proposed in May now has a majority of sponsors in the City Council, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani has indicated his support. It includes changes that explicitly define community land trusts and empower them to join ventures with other preservation-focused buyers to steward land in a community.
“The immediate impact that we’ll see with COPA will be community land trusts will be able to access more acquisition opportunities and grow their footprint in their neighborhood, which will be a great outcome,” said Will Spisak, senior policy strategist at the New Economy Project, an advocacy group that has spearheaded the advancement of COPA.
So what are community land trusts exactly, and how would they work with COPA should the bill pass this session? City Limits spoke to the bill’s supporters to learn more.
What are community land trusts?
Community land trusts, or CLTs, are nonprofit organizations that steward land to preserve affordable housing or provide other community benefits.
They often operate by holding long-term ground leases, creating a split-deed structure in which the CLT is responsible for improvements to the land, while different community-based organizations (such as housing cooperatives) rent the buildings. The ground lease also stipulates resale conditions that aim to balance homeowners’ interests with preserving long-term affordability.
In this way, CLTs “take land off the speculative market and hold it in perpetuity for the benefit of the community,” said Spisak.
Community land trusts are not a new concept, but New York has been relatively low on the uptake compared to other cities. The oldest CLT in the city is Cooper Square in the Lower East Side, which has been active for decades and has preserved over 300 units of deeply affordable housing in an area that has changed dramatically over the years.
Boris Santos knows this kind of change very well. He’s the president of the East New York CLT, but he was born and raised in Williamsburg and was among those Hispanic New Yorkers who were displaced following a city-led rezoning there in 2005, which gave way to a boom of glossy high-rises along the neighborhood’s waterfront.
He joined the steering committee for a community land trust in East New York, where he now lives, in 2016, and the land trust was formally registered in 2020.
“I want to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself as much as it has in the last decade or so,” said Santos.
The East New York CLT made its first purchase of a multifamily building at 248 Arlington Ave. in 2024, following months of tenant organizing against poor living conditions and neglect from their landlord, and funded primarily through fundraising and loans. According to Spisak, this was the first private-market acquisition of a residential property by a community land trust in New York.
Now, the East New York CLT is closing on an industrial building at 161 Jamaica Ave. that it plans to use as a community center, Santos said.
Many community land trusts exclusively focus on land stewardship and affordable housing development. According to Santos, community organizing and campaigning have been part of the East New York CLT’s DNA since its inception, further connecting residents with where, how, and with whom they live.
“If we do the community organizing work, it’s easier for us to preserve, galvanize, and strengthen and forge ties in the community,” said Santos.
How has COPA evolved over the years?
If passed, COPA would authorize the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) to grant certain qualified entities the right of first offer to purchase certain distressed properties that come up for sale, as well as the right of first refusal to match any subsequent, better offer from a different private buyer.
To break down each of these terms:
- HPD already maintains a list of “preservation buyers”—organizations that have been vetted for their ability to rehabilitate distressed affordable housing units. HPD would similarly certify nonprofit organizations, including CLTs, as qualified entities under COPA.
- Qualified entities would have the right of first offer, meaning that when a property that falls under COPA goes for sale, they have 20 days to put in a statement of their intent to purchase it.
- Following this 20-day period, if a qualified entity made such a statement, it then has 70 days to put together a formal offer, during which time the owner cannot sell the property to any other buyers that are not qualified entities. If they’re unable to reach an agreement with the seller, the property goes to market.
- Then, if the seller fields an offer from a private buyer, qualified entities that made an initial offer have 15 days to match that private offer exactly.
COPA only applies to a narrow subset of buildings with at least four apartments that are either significantly distressed or at risk of exiting an affordability program, which would make them more susceptible to the speculative market, according to Councilmember Sandy Nurse, the bill’s primary sponsor. Her office estimates that only 0.6 percent of last year’s building sales in the city would have fallen under COPA’s scope.
“When poorly run and distressed buildings are put up for sale, new owners do not mean better living conditions in these buildings, but often initiate tactics to kick tenants out,” said Nurse in an emailed statement. “COPA provides a mechanism to save a subset of at-risk buildings and stop this cycle of speculation and neglect.”
Spisak also noted that the above timelines were cut—from 25 to 20 days and 80 to 70 days, respectively—between this year’s bill and its predecessor, following dialogue with members of the real estate industry who worried the rules would drag out sales.
In addition, buildings must meet a higher threshold for distress than in previous versions of the bill, which now applies to properties with daily averages of three or more “hazardous” and “immediately hazardous” violations.
How could COPA strengthen community land trusts?
Real estate experts at the law firm Cole Schotz told City Limits that “statutory delays combined with restrictions on marketing during the COPA period” could impact the values of properties falling under the bill’s scope.
But Rebecca Marx, a research associate at the Urban Institute, argues that additional time for community-based organizations like CLTs to aggregate funds and solicit feedback from residents is worth countering profit-maximizing developments that could price people out.
Under the limited-equity cooperative model often used in residential properties affiliated with a CLT, residents purchase shares in a development rather than individual units. In this way, people are often both literally and figuratively more invested in where they live.
“When they do have an ownership share, and they do have decision-making power,” said Marx, “they definitely get social and community returns, and just feel more responsible for the property.”
In this way, the bill’s proponents say, COPA can play a part in combating the affordable housing crisis by allowing more opportunities for CLTs and other preservation-oriented organizations.
“In New York City, we have tons of neighborhoods that have been shaped by redlining and by discriminatory policy from the federal, state, and city level that have concentrated poverty,” said Spisak. “By doing this work, communities all around the city are sticking their flag in the ground and saying, we’re not going to move.”
Mayor Mamdani has indicated his support for COPA. His Block by Block housing plan states that the bill would provide an “extra layer of protection for tenants” living in distressed properties, and also pledges to support CLTs, outside of COPA, to identify public land that could be suited for one- to four-family homeownership opportunities.
A spokesperson for City Council Speaker Julie Menin, who decides which bills come up for a vote in the Council, told City Limits that she “looks forward to reviewing the bill as it moves through the legislative process.”
Speaker Menin plans on holding a public hearing on the bill, date to be determined.
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