Berkeley City Councilmembers and the Mayor put a hold on the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA)
Lukewarm politicians want further study about giving tenants and organizations first dibs on rental properties before they go on the open market for private buyers to scoop them up.
Whenever we hear about COPA and TOPA, we think about Barry Mannlow’s hit song, Copacabana. Yet Berkeley politicians want further study before entering into this love triangle.
It’s been a romance that began years ago with the aspiring idea that marginalized tenants can have a shot at the American Dream of home ownership, build generational wealth, and preserve affordable housing. Programs like TOPA allow and prioritize tenants or Qualified Nonprofits acting in their interest to make an offer whenever the landlord wants to sell their building.
This part of the larger social engineering policy of using carrots and sticks with the goal of enticing or compelling owners to use their properties for the greater public good.
Most landlord-tenant laws are imported, and TOPA is no exception. We like to call it a game of “follow the follower.”
When one ordinance is enacted to usher in greater tenant protections, another Bay Area locale follows suit. San Francisco was a pioneer in inking the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act, a law that gives an oligopoly of nonprofit organizations the right of first offer, and/or the right of first refusal to purchase certain properties for sale in the City.
Predictably, COPA in San Francisco has been met with ire from sellers of multifamily buildings faced with red tape, added administrative costs, and delays. Yet this whole movement of empowering tenants to have an ownership stake in the building they rent began in Washington, D.C. in 1980.
D.C.'s iteration of COPA has been touted as a tool to promote community stability, but it has faced many challenges and controversies that do not escape Berkeley lawmakers.
Berkeley Councilmembers have asked for further study on the impacts of TOPA in our nation’s capital and acknowledged how difficult and expensive it would be to implement such a program; while Washington, D.C. has vast financial resources, Berkeley is essentially broke.
Where do we go from here?
We can color this measure gone for now as there is little appetite among Berkeley lawmakers to pursue TOPA, but we may not have heard the last about this. Further research was directed, but the proposal has seemed to flame out for the time being.
For our part, we attended the virtual meeting and our public comment was to get the elephant out of the room: most tenants will not have the wherewithal to purchase the building or qualify for a loan unless they obtain a winning lottery ticket. This sentiment was echoed by Assemblymember Susan Wengraf.
