🏡💚 Tenant organizing for community ownership
October 27th, 2023
As I mentioned in last week’s newsletter, I was able to spend some time at the CA CLT Network conference and learn more about the growing number of community land trusts in the state and some of the opportunities and challenges they are facing.
One thing that really struck me was the emphasis on the role of tenant organizing and tenant power in the broader success of community land trusts. Around the state, tenant organizing has led to successful fights to transfer properties to community land trusts, like the tenants that fought Boston University for ownership of their homes earlier this year.
When a community land trust buys a building, it owns the land under that building and promises to keep it permanently affordable. Tenants can then own the units they live in by way of a 99-year contract that hands over responsibility for the building to residents. This model advances a larger push for community control, where organized tenants can work with local community land trusts to not only purchase their building, but to also have a democratic say in the management and governance of their home, and guarantee that it is permanently affordable in perpetuity.
That is also why community land trusts are also fighting for policies called Tenant and Community Opportunity to Purchase Acts (TOPA/COPA). These policies give tenants or qualified nonprofit housing organizations the first chance to buy multifamily rental buildings when the owner decides to sell (right of first offer), and the opportunity to match a third-party offer (right of refusal). Community land trusts often serve as that “qualified nonprofit housing organization” that can help facilitate the purchase of the building and keep it in community control.
Part of the problem that these policies are trying to solve is the severe disadvantage that tenants, nonprofits, and community land trusts have in trying to purchase buildings on the housing market. One result of the housing crisis is a rapid rate of home sales and high offers from investors that result in bidding wars that privilege cash offers and put buyers who use conventional financing at a disadvantage. All of this means that low- and moderate-income tenants, first-time homebuyers, and affordable housing developers have a much harder time purchasing homes. This becomes all the more problematic when landlords sell to investors, real estate corporations, or other landlords who want to evict the tenants after purchase.
The prolific Alfred Twu has a great illustration of this:
Credit: Alfred Twu
There are a number of local TOPA/COPA campaigns, including an ongoing push in Berkeley (see and support the Yes2TOPA campaign!). There was a COPA campaign in San Jose that was voted down earlier this year, and campaigns in East Palo Alto and Oakland. San Francisco won a COPA in 2019.
Some of you may also know about AB 919 (Kalra) introduced in the legislature in 2023, which was the statewide TOPA/COPA bill. The bill was introduced, but didn’t even get a committee hearing, as it was quickly turned into a two-year bill. We’ll see if this comes back, and in what form, but is an important social housing policy for us to track.
WHAT WE’RE READING
Stable Homes and Resident Empowerment — hot off the press report from LISC looking at lessons learned from COPA and TOPA policies around the country
Wildfire smoke can linger in Mountain West homes, study shows (KUNC)
VIDEO: Social housing for all - not a new video, but great little explainer created by the Center for Popular Democracy
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We’ll be back with another newsletter next Friday morning. Please send any relevant topics, articles, reports, or intel to me at zach@apen4ej.org!
