Stable Homes and Resident Empowerment

Implementing Effective Tenant and Community Opportunity to Purchase Programs

Executive Summary

Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) and Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA) laws and policies are being proposed around the country, with potentially substantial impacts on housing affordability, community stability and power, and tenant quality of life. These policies give tenants or qualified nonprofit housing organizations the first chance to buy multifamily rental buildings when the owner decides to sell, and the opportunity to match a third-party offer. While many Opportunity to Purchase bills have been proposed recently or are the subject of local study, TOPA has a 40-year history of being implemented in Washington, DC, in ways that have contributed to affordability and community stability in one of the fastest-gentrifying cities in the country. Eight other jurisdictions in the United States have similar right-of-first-offer and -refusal policies in place for unsubsidized multifamily properties or manufactured homes, including San Francisco, which unanimously passed COPA in 2019.

Based on a review of existing research and interviews with nonprofit housing organizations, advocates, local government program staff, lenders, and technical assistance providers involved in COPA and TOPA implementation, and building on an earlier LISC Community Research and Impact brief,¹ this report 1) describes how these policies work and their outcomes in DC and San Francisco, as well as some shared opportunities and challenges, 2) offers implementation lessons about organizing, technical assistance, and financing needs; and 3) provides evidence about the impact of C/TOPA-like policies, based on preliminary LISC analyses of housing market dynamics in New York City.

Key Findings

• TOPA and COPA are workable and impactful policies that can be implemented even in hot-market locations to strengthen housing preservation programs. In DC, since 2006, TOPA and funding for tenant organizing has enabled the formation of at least 425 tenant associations that registered for TOPA rights. Tenant associations successfully negotiated a rental or ownership outcome in 19,170 units during that period, and overwhelmingly prioritized affordability and building improvements in their negotiations, with roughly 85% of units preserved as affordable and 80% of units receiving repairs or renovations.² DC’s TOPA, combined with preservation funding, has developed or preserved 16,224 units of affordable housing since 2006.³ 2,100 of these units were preserved with financing from DC’s Affordable Housing Preservation Fund, launched in 2018.⁴ In addition to affordable rental homes, TOPA has helped create most of the District’s nearly 4,400 limited-equity cooperative units since 1980,⁵ including 771 cooperative apartments since 2006.⁶ In San Francisco, where local preservation financing focuses on small buildings most at risk of displacement and rent deregulation, COPA and its accompanying partial transfer-tax exemption have preserved 230 units since 2019, out of over 1,000 units preserved citywide since 2013.⁷
• To realize impact, TOPA and COPA policies must have workable timeframes for tenant or community acquisition, paired with resources for tenant organizing and legal assistance; grants and affordable financing to acquire and rehabilitate properties in ways that ensure their affordability and good maintenance; and long-term support for building management and sustainability.
• Successful TOPA and COPA implementation can help strengthen the local housing ecosystem, connecting government, community development financial institutions (CDFIs), and other mission-driven lenders, tenants, and community groups. While critical for effective implementation, such collaborations and systems can be strengthened independently of C/TOPA legislation and help facilitate their passage: in the case of San Francisco’s COPA, the Small Sites acquisition-rehabilitation program helped pave the way for the later adoption of the policy.
• Preliminary research by LISC modeling the effect of fast and flexible affordable housing preservation subsidies suggests the potential benefits of COPA and TOPA on tenant quality of life. In New York, maintenance violations appear to decrease threefold in properties after being sold and then supported by affordable subsidy, compared to similar properties that were merely sold to another owner.

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