Adams on Wednesday vetoed the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA), a measure derided by landlord groups as an unconstitutional intrusion on private deals. He also vetoed 18 other bills, including three that would create new rules for city-funded housing.
In doing so, Adams shot down a measure favored by the incoming mayor, while also blocking bills that the mayor-elect’s allies believe would harm Zohran Mamdani’s housing agenda.
It will be up to the next council and presumptive Speaker Julie Menin to try to override these vetoes, although it is unclear whether members will choose to do so. Most housing laws were passed by a supermajority of the Council, with the exception of COPA, which was approved by 30 votes. Notably, Menen was one of eight members who abstained from voting on COPA.
In a statement, Menen said the Council is considering its “next steps.”
“Rather than working with the Council, the Adams administration has too often sidelined the legislative process,” Menin said in a statement. “For years, agencies failed to provide basic data, commissioners skipped hearings, and meaningful negotiations were pushed to the last minute.”
COPA would give city-approved nonprofits and joint ventures between nonprofits and for-profit companies the first opportunity to purchase certain multifamily buildings that are in distress or that will soon need to be affordable. Landlord groups have said the measure will slow sales and discourage investment in the city.
Shortly after they were announced, real estate groups celebrated the vetoes. Jim Whelan, president of the New York Real Estate Board, said the mayor’s action “prevented our housing supply crisis from worsening and the cost of housing from becoming even more unaffordable.” Ann Korchak, of the Small Property Owners of New York, said “common sense prevailed.”
Mamdani has now done that cited COPA as part of its strategy to tackle bad landlords. If the veto is not overturned, the next Council could also work to pass another version of the bill with the support of the new government.
Three of the other vetoed measures imposed new restrictions on the types of housing the city finances, creating minimums on the percentage of two- and three-bedroom units, those affordable to New York’s poorest and those designated as homeownership.
Although the government expressed concern about the cost of another bill that would create a minimum wage for construction workers at certain housing projects, the mayor did not veto that measure. Under the Construction Justice Act, construction workers must be paid $40 an hour in wages and benefits for housing projects with 150 units or more with construction costs of $3 million or more and receive $1.5 million or more in city funding.
Housing groups warned that the measures threatened Mamdani’s plan to build 200,000 new affordable homes over the next decade. The administration estimated that these bills would add $600 million to the annual budget needs of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. The majority of those additional costs, $425 million, were attributed to the Construction Justice Act.
A spokesperson for City Hall could not explain the mayor’s decision not to veto the construction wage law, given the administration’s own calculations.
In a statement, Adams called the Council’s legislation “reckless” and said the vetoed housing measures would “exacerbate our affordable housing crisis with new, unfunded mandates and red tape.”
Adams also vetoed a measure that would have set minimum wages for building security guards and another that would have allowed the city to sell tax liens to a land bank, rather than a private trust. REBNY raised concerns about the legality of the city setting wages for these security guards, which appears to be part of the impetus for the mayor’s veto.
He also scrapped a bill that would have set time limits for co-op boards to respond to potential residents about applications to live in a building and to accept or deny them. This bill, as well as the land bank and security monitoring measures, was adopted by the city council with an overwhelming majority of support.
COPA has been active for a number of years, but has only gained momentum in recent months. It was first introduced in 2020 and has since undergone several changes that have narrowed the pool of eligible buildings and shortened the period in which nonprofits and eligible joint ventures can compete exclusively for properties.
The bill would require owners seeking to sell certain multifamily buildings with four or more units to first notify the city and its list of approved potential buyers.
Those potential buyers would then have 25 days to notify an owner that they are interested in making an offer on a property. Once that time has passed, interested qualified entities will have 80 days to submit a bid. Qualifying entities also have 15 days after a competing bid is received to match this.
The vetoes cap a bitter relationship between the mayor and Speaker Adrienne Adams, especially over the past two years. The housing bills, which passed at the City Council’s last meeting this year, came after the council unsuccessfully fought three ballot measures approved in November. The council’s leadership called the measures, which weakened the council’s influence over land use decisions, an unlawful power grab by the government.
“Through their actions, Council continues to demonstrate the importance of our administration’s proposals to streamline the city’s housing approval process, which Council strongly opposed but voters overwhelmingly approved in November,” the mayor said in a statement.
In a parting shot, Adrienne Adams said it was “not surprising that this mayor is ending his term by demonstrating once again that protecting and supporting working-class New Yorkers is not his priority.” She said the “vetos put special interests ahead of greater affordability and opportunity for hardworking New Yorkers.”
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