For years, residents of 700 E. 134th St., a 21-unit building in the South Bronx, fought their landlord’s efforts to illegally drive them out of their homes. After a prolonged lawsuit, the tenants’ association is celebrating buying the building, which they will turn into a limited-equity cooperative with the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board.
With our Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA), we hope to help facilitate many similar celebrations for tenants across New York State. TOPA would give tenants the right of first refusal when their building goes up for sale, with a time allotment for organizing and securing funding, before the building can be sold on the open market.
TOPA laws work on two fronts. When paired with acquisition funding from the government, they help tenants permanently convert their buildings into social housing. Washington D.C.’s TOPA law, enacted in 1980, has facilitated conversion of 4,400 rental units into limited-equity cooperatives, stabilizing buildings primarily occupied by low-income tenants of color. Further, TOPA bolsters tenants when ownership changes make them most vulnerable. When they can intervene in the building sale, tenants gain power to negotiate for better conditions, reasonable rents or even to bring in a responsible landlord.
TOPA’s protections cannot come too soon. A report by the Community Service Society found that more than one in four low-income tenants in New York City owe back rent, with Black and Hispanic tenants at greatest risk for long-term housing instability. Landlords have sued almost 228,000 households for eviction across the state. As tenants’ rental arrears — currently more than $2 billion — grow, multifamily buildings will experience growing financial distress. This creates an opening for speculative real estate investors to scoop them up, withdraw services, drive up rents and evict long-term tenants.
If this bill becomes law, it can help interrupt this predatory cycle of disinvestment and gentrification. For example, tenants at 1616 President St., a 24-unit building in Crown Heights, have endured years of atrocious building conditions at the hands of Jason Korn, crowned by the public advocate’s office the city’s worst landlord for two of the last three years. Today, the building has 229 open violations with the city’s housing department. Vincia Barber, a tenant leader in the building, has lived with constant mold, pests and garbage piling up outside her window.
Last summer, it seemed that Korn was finally going to address some long-deferred repairs after the tenants’ association engaged city agencies, elected officials, and community groups and went on rent strike. In the middle of negotiations, Korn sold the building to another landlord, Gilman Management, and walked away with a profit.
The sale surprised the tenants, and according to the tenants’ association, Gilman has refused even to meet to discuss the repair plans it had negotiated with Korn. Barber laments that the tenants have to begin negotiations from scratch, even as conditions in the building continue to decline. She thinks TOPA’s requirement that landlords notify tenants of their intent to sell would have positioned tenants better to hold Korn accountable. Further, if allowed to follow the example of 700 E. 134th St., they would run the building more responsibly.
Similarly, in Rochester, tenants in buildings owned by a notorious slumlord have lived with 350 code violations and without a Certificate of Occupancy for years. As in the Crown Heights and South Bronx buildings, tenants organized to address immediate issues in their building, but eventually turned to social housing as a model for long-term stability. After a lot of public pressure — and looming receivership — the landlord sold the building, and seven others, to the City Roots Community Land Trust.
Even amid this success, Lisle Coleman, a member of the City-Wide Tenant Union of Rochester, thinks that with TOPA, tenants would have had more negotiating power in the transaction, and fewer worries that the property would be sold suddenly to another slumlord. TOPA would give the tenants the right to an opportunity to control their homes.
With hundreds of thousands facing possible eviction and housing prices rising, a wave of real-estate speculation looms. As representatives of our communities, we cannot leave tenants exposed as the COVID crisis winds down. Recently, private equity firms bragged about keeping billions of dollars of “dry powder” in anticipation of the speculative opportunities COVID created. TOPA can help keep these vultures at bay and empower tenants against the landlords and investors driving worsening conditions by leveling the playing field. We must act fast.
Myrie represents Crown Heights and Brownsville, Brooklyn in the state Senate. Mitaynes represents Sunset Park and Red Hook in the state Assembly.
