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In its rush to force private landlords to sell their buildings to nonprofit outfits, the City Council looks to be favoring a new, even-harder-to-control class of slumlords.
The council’s looking to pass The Community Opportunity to Purchase Act in the year’s final weeks, before critical scrutiny exposes COPA’s rank insanity.
The law would grant “qualified” non-profit organizations and tenant associations the right-of-first-refusal to buy multi-family rental buildings when they’re put up for sale, in a scheme that would both delay any possible sale for months and discourage private bids in the first place, since potential buyers would know they could lose the deal at the last minute (among other hidden costs the plan imposes).
The rigged game would favor nonprofits run by insiders with the right political contacts, and reduce city revenues as it exempts the nonprofits from paying municipal real-estate fees..
Meanwhile, some city nonprofit “affordable housing” providers have “slumlord” levels of violations in their track record.
RiseBoro Community Partnership, for example, has 2,388 Housing Preservation & Development PD violations across its portfolio, with over 14,000 tenant complaints since 2019; its CEO pulls $570,00 a year plus $45,000 in annual benefits.
Meanwhile, COPA put HPD in charge of overseeing the whole “matching bid” process — when the agency has recently been overwhelmed by far smaller tasks.
The City Comptroller’s Office utterly eviscerated HPD’s oversight of nonprofit DocGo’s handling of its $432 million contract to house asylum-seekers: The agency paid out millions of dollars for rooms that were never rented, broker commissions that were paid on unrented rooms and payments to security companies that didn’t provide services.
Yet COPA’s scheme is vastly more complex than than a simple emergency contract, and more vulnerable to favoritism, fraud and abuse.
And don’t bet on Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani to magically make the sclerotic HPD bureaucracy work.
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By the way: Those hoping that Speaker-in-waiting Julie Menin will be a check on Mamdani’s worst instincts should note that she’s a COPA co-sponsor.
If the council does rush this madness through, Mayor Eric Adams should do right by city landlords and tenants by vetoing COPA.