Justin McCleary (Goddard Riverside, remote) on COPA and tenant organizing
McCleary, a staff attorney at Goddard Riverside's law project, describes working with distressed buildings where landlords are negligent or claim inability to afford repairs. He argues COPA would ensure the next owner is communicative and accountable, and sees it as infrastructure to incentivize more responsible ownership.
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Next is Justin McCleary.
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Thank you to the chair, the New York City Council Committee on Housing and Building for the opportunity to testify today.
My name is Justin McCleary, and I'm a staff attorney for the law project at Goddard Riverside, a settlement house serving over 22,000 New Yorkers a year across all ages.
Goddard's law project was founded in 1981 to empower tenants and preserve affordable housing through advocacy, legal representation, relationship building, and grassroots education.
I'm grateful to testify regarding Goddard's support for the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act.
A core part of our tenant organizing work involves identifying distressed buildings where there's already a strong tenant association or where tenants need support building one in order to organize for better building conditions and where needed, develop legal cases against landlords who have failed to make necessary repairs.
We often find the buildings our team is working with have landlords who are either negligent or tell tenants that they cannot afford to make these repairs.
When an owner will not or cannot maintain safe, healthy housing, they should be encouraged to sell the building.
However, the next owner should be one who
who will be communicative and accountable to tenants and is committed to working to maintain good living conditions.
We also see consequences where buildings change hands between owners, such as between LLCs.
Rental records can fall through the cracks during these transfers, particularly a transition where a new owner takes over control of a building or when records have not been properly maintained.
In our work with tenants who have recently moved into a building or whose tenancy records have not been maintained properly, we regularly find that their units were originally rent stabilized.
Finally, we continue to see private equity and other large-scale investors continuing to grow their ownership of New York City's housing stock.
These deep-pocketed investors can often move quickly when properties come onto the market, especially through incentives like cash offers to move an offer to closing quickly.
Often, these groups see housing as part of an investment portfolio and are not incentivized to invest in good living conditions and clear communication with tenants.
The combination of these factors continues to disempower tenants while degrading the quality and quantity of available affordable housing in our city.
From Goddard's view as a tenant legal service provider and a long-term nonprofit affordable housing developer and provider, we see COPA as a final infrastructure support to incentivize more...
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