BY COLE SINANIAN  | cole@queensledger.com

CITY HALL — Sandy Nurse has done this before. 

Speaking before her colleagues on the City Council’s Committee on Housing and Buildings on Wednesday, September 9, the Bushwick councilmember once again delivered the opening testimony for the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA) — her landmark bill that would empower trusted nonprofits to acquire distressed apartment buildings before corporate real estate can, all in the name of preserving the New York City’s rapidly diminishing affordable housing stock. 

Nurse has touted the bill as an important step towards halting gentrification in the city’s most vulnerable neighborhoods. She’s cited her own district as an example, where real estate speculators engage in deceptive tactics to acquire homes, make cheap renovations, then resell to high-earning outsiders at huge profit margins in a practice known as “house flipping.” In her testimony Wednesday, she pointed to buildings like 331 E 14th in Manhattan and  2076 Creston Avenue in the Bronx, where squalid, unlivable conditions persist across ownership changes, forcing tenants out in desperation and allowing landlords to flip rent-regulated units to market-rate. 

“The fact is, the private market cannot create enough affordable housing to solve this crisis, especially if we’re losing the affordable housing stock we do have faster than we can build,” Nurse said at the hearing. “This bill is about interrupting a cycle of despair and neglect by design. Because many landlords across this city use deterioration as a strategy to get their tenants out.”

COPA, first passed the Council in December 2025 but  vetoed by outgoing Mayor Eric Adams on his last day in office, reentered the legislative pipeline in May, and takes aim at the sorts of real estate transactions that result in rent hikes and the conversion of low-income apartments to luxury housing. It would help qualified community partners — organizations like land trusts and community development corporations seeking to preserve affordability and the well-being of the neighborhood rather than turn a profit  — purchase buildings with four or more units that are deemed “high-risk,” with either hazardous conditions or imminently expiring affordability restrictions. At the hearing, Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) Commissioner Dina Levy estimated that currently about 2,100 buildings citywide would qualify for COPA. 

Under COPA, an HPD-approved list of nonprofit entities would have 20 days to signal interest in purchasing qualifying buildings before they hit the open market, after which interested nonprofits would get another 70 days to make an offer at the seller’s asking price. The law would only apply to buildings with four or more apartments that have an annual daily average of three or more class B or C HPD violations.

It was one of several housing-related bills discussed at Wednesday’s hearing, which saw legislators question Levy, as well as Department of Buildings (DOB) Commissioner Ahmed Tigani and Director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants Cea Weaver about Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s ambitious “Block by Block” housing plan, which aims to build 200,000 affordable homes and preserve 200,000 more over the next 10 years. 

COPA is a key feature of Mamdani’s plan, which characterizes the bill as crucial to preserving the city’s existing affordable housing. 

“It’s a really strong preservation tool,” said Will Spisak, a policy strategist with the New Economy  Project, a nonprofit that campaigned for COPA’s passage. “And it was one of only two pieces of legislation that are actually named in the housing plan, so I think that speaks volumes to the significance of this bill, in terms of building the kind of affordable city that he ran on and that we’ve been fighting for.” 

With support from the Mayor, the bill will almost certainly be signed into law if it passes the Council. 

“We support this legislation, and believe it is aligned with our larger housing preservation goal,” Levy said Wednesday. 

Some landlord-adjacent groups, however, have criticized the legislation as government overreach. Others have criticized it for being overly ambitious, and wondered whether housing nonprofits are financially capable of acquiring large buildings without City assistance. 

”COPA remains a significant intervention into private property transactions and additional revisions are needed to provide certainty for owners, lenders, and affordable housing investors,” said Zachary Steinberg, Executive Vice President of External Relations & Advocacy at the Real Estate Board of New York — an owners advocacy group — at Wednesday’s hearing. 

In his veto letter last December, Adams worried that the bill’s complexity would “present significant  operational and administrative challenges” for the City agencies tasked with administering it. HPD would be tasked with maintaining and regularly evaluating a list of qualified nonprofits— organizations that the agency would ensure are both financially and organizationally capable of managing large residential buildings. 

“We are going to need to set out some rulemaking if COPA does pass,” Levy said, explaining that the agency will likely base its list of qualified nonprofits on its existing preservation buyers list. As far as funding, while Levy acknowledged that HPD cannot finance every COPA deal, tools like Article 11 of the State’s Private Housing Finance Law — which provides tax exemptions for affordable housing development — could help nonprofits acquire buildings. She added that the agency has also floated working with Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) and other lenders to help finance COPA transactions. 

But for many New Yorkers whose homes and neighborhoods have been threatened by creeping real estate speculation, the bureaucracy is a necessary compromise to prevent further displacement. 

To East New York resident Angus Fischer, the legislation represents an opportunity for racialized communities facing pressure from real estate speculators to take control of their communities before private capital pushes them out. In East New York, recent rezonings have brought speculation and fears of gentrification among the neighborhood’s majority Black and Latino population. COPA would give these communities the power to take control before that happens, Fischer said. 

Fischer explained how he spent much of his life in and out of the shelter system, a pattern that began in his childhood, when his family was abruptly evicted from his Brownsville apartment. 

“Currently in our communities, when you look at the ownership of the properties, it’s corporations,” he told the Queens Ledger on the steps of City Hall Wednesday. “It should be the community. It should be the local organizations that are on the ground supporting these individuals that are living in these properties and transitioning them into local ownership hands.”

Fischer is a member of the East New York Community Land Trust, an organization working in East Brooklyn to do exactly that. The group recently opened a communally run space called the East Brooklyn Liberation Center, and previously made history after becoming the city’s first land trust to acquire an apartment building in 2024.  Several of the more than 200 groups that have supported COPA are community land trusts — a kind of organization governed by a board of local residents and community stakeholders that seeks to seize land from the private market to be put under community ownership. More than twenty Community Land Trusts (CLTs) currently operating in New York City, many of which are supported by the New Economy project 

“This is an organic movement of  neighbors and community members realizing that they have to do something to preserve their neighborhoods,” Spisak told the Queens Ledger at the rally before Wednesday’s hearing. 

“I think over time we’ll see CLTs continue to grow, not just in number, but also in the depth of work. We’ll see them acquire more properties, preserve more units, and hopefully grow their portfolios.”