CM Nurse presents COPA (Intro 905) as tool to combat speculative displacement

Thank you, Chair Sanchez.

Good morning, everyone.

Thank you, Chair Sanchez, for hosting this important hearing.

New Yorkers are living through a cost of living crisis decades in the making, and housing sits at the center of it.

Working class and middle income families are competing for fewer and fewer units every year, and landlords know it.

This drives rents higher and allows bad conditions to fester.

Yes, we need to build more housing, but I fundamentally disagree with a purely market-driven approach.

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.

And that's where the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act comes in.

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.

We can look at buildings like 2076 Creston Avenue in the Bronx, a 41-unit building that has racked up over 2,000 violations despite being passed from owner to owner while tenants remain living in untenable conditions.

We can look to Manhattan at 331 East 14th Street, a 20-unit building with 358 BNC violations bought by a private equity firm that has let the building rot, betting that tenants will simply give up and leave.

Once passed, the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act will give Mission

driven, vetted nonprofits the first right to make an offer on these distressed buildings before speculators can.

It brings these buildings into community ownership and public oversight.

It keeps rents affordable and most importantly it keeps people in their homes, near their schools, their jobs, their support systems and their lives.

62% of New Yorkers, about 5 million people, are not able to meet the basic cost of living in our city.

Over 70% of New York City children are growing up in households that cannot make ends meet.

And meanwhile, the top 1% has never had it so good.

Every affordable unit we lose is a family that is either going to shelter or finally leaving the city.

And we need to put every option on the table to give families a chance.

The Community Opportunity to Purchase Act does that.

The bill version we are discussing today is the result of dozens of conversations with stakeholders who are both for and against this bill, many of whom are here today.

I really look forward to the conversation.

I want to thank you, Chair Sanchez, Speaker Menon, HPD, the COPA Coalition, and everyone who gave us feedback and helped us shape this bill.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you so much, Councilmember Nurse.

And this is the third time we are hearing this bill together as colleagues.

It's the charm.

It's the charm.

I truly believe in this piece of legislation, and I'm excited about the discussion today.

Next, I want to call on Councilmember Epstein to talk about this bill.