Hi First name / friend,
In just over a week from today, I’ll be blissfully home free; I’ll have turned in my final projects for the semester and will be just one more away from graduation.
But for now, I’m in the thick of it! Lucky for you, I’m studying really cool sh*t that translates well to this newsletter.
Sometimes I’m so IN IT that I kind of lose sight of my Why, but I’m taking today as an opportunity to reflect back on that (especially as I
shared big news in my feed).
Today we’re talking about a policy that is pretty unique to DC. It’s called TOPA, aka the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act.
In simple terms, TOPA gives tenants the right of first refusal – if their landlord wants to sell their building, they get first dibs.
Of course, it’s more complicated than that. Tenants have to form a tenant association, they have to pay market rate, and while TOPA gives them a little more time, pulling off a major (and expensive) real estate transaction like this one requires time, money, resources like attorneys, and power.
Without getting too deep into the weeds, some folks view a tenant purchase and conversion into a limited-equity cooperative to be the ideal outcome for preserving affordable housing. But TOPA purchases can lead to other outcomes too:
- tenants can remain tenants, but assign their right to purchase to a nonprofit developer that grants affordability guarantees in return;
- tenants can convert the building into condos (which may build wealth for those tenants but doesn’t preserve affordability;
- tenants can assign their right to purchase to a developer in exchange for buyouts – sometimes as high as $20k or more per tenant – so that the developer can do whatever they want to the building and start charging market rate rents;
- and the most despicable outcome – the seller or buyer can trick tenants into signing away their rights before the tenants even get a chance to form a tenant association and decide collectively what they want to do, leaving them with no guarantees about future rent, (sometimes) no buyout money, and no opportunity to purchase.
LOL okay I guess that was kind of in the weeds!
TOPA originated out of DC’s early Home Rule era, aka the 1970s and ‘80s when DC regained control over its local government (for decades, Congress was in charge of local matters. They still retain decision power over our laws, which they
recently put into practice). It was a period of time where seemingly radical policies that centered people power took effect.
And DC’s real estate market looked REAL different. Vacant buildings and neighborhood decline were issues of urgent concern, and targeted gentrification of neighborhoods like Shaw threatened to displace people, though there was not the widespread displacement and gentrification we saw in the mid-2000s and today.
I think what I find most intriguing about TOPA is what it says about ownership. It is morally just that a tenant, regardless of how long they’ve lived in a place, should have no rights at all to say what happens to that home? Is it right that they are stripped of any agency simply because they didn’t have the capital to buy it? And the doozy question: should real estate even be a wealth building mechanism, or should our GOAL be to make sure people have a safe, dignified place to live?
That last question is one I’ve wrestled with continuously in recent years. When there’s a profit motive tied to one of our most essential resources (shelter), who really wins?
Policies like TOPA change the terms of the game. For residents living in limited-equity cooperatives, no, their home isn’t going to provide for them in retirement. But they do provide predictability and relative stability of housing costs. And in an era where wealth inequality and the cost of living are at extreme highs, isn’t that stability kind of priceless?
Regardless of who owns the land, I firmly believe that we are all owed a place to live that we can afford. And that, dear reader, is my drumbeat.
It’s easy to get lost in the “how” (and sometimes very important to do so), but this is the “why” I keep coming back to.
Thanks for taking a step inside my brain.
Until next time,
Dominique
