It’s the dream of some New York City tenants to purchase their building from their absentee or financially distressed landlords and shift their stakes in the places from renters to owners.
For a modest number of renters, the dream could come true under Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new housing plan, which he's set to release Tuesday morning. The plan includes a pledge to formalize the city’s funding process and issue $75 million in loans to help 300 renters turn apartments into co-ops over the next two years.
The plan also calls for the creation of 200,000 new affordable housing units over the next decade — a proposal Mamdani outlined on the campaign trail. And it lists broad-stroke goals of creating 1,500 homes for New Yorkers to own, not rent, building more apartments priced for the lowest-income New Yorkers, improving housing maintenance code enforcement and developing block-by-block housing goals for specific sections of the city.
New York City tenants have long organized to purchase their apartment buildings, or collaborated with nonprofit groups to acquire and repair their units ahead of eventual co-op conversions. Two years ago, tenants in Brooklyn worked with the organization East New York Community Land Trust to buy their building as a part of a conversion plan. Last year, the city seized a building from an owner who owed nearly $28 million in taxes and fines and turned it over to a nonprofit that could work with tenants on a plan to take ownership. And renters in East Harlem are now advocating a similar proposal for a row of five deteriorating buildings along East 103rd Street before a foreclosure sale scheduled for next month.
But Housing Commissioner Dina Levy said the process is complicated and that the city has lacked a formal procedure for financing such purchases and determining how to best fund renovations. Instead, she said, the department has relied on an ad hoc approach.
“ There hasn't, for a long time, been a financial tool within HPD that was specific to tenants taking over their rental building and converting it to co-ops,” she said. “Now there will be a clear pathway for the financing that would enable that to happen, but it does need to happen in conjunction with this thoughtful process of tenants being organized and making collective decisions about how they want to live.”
She said the Our Home program will feature a new “term sheet” — a document that describes the requirements for receiving city funds to finance a tenant takeover. The term sheet will outline what conditions must exist for the city to intervene, what tenants have to do to receive the loans and how many residents have to vote for a co-op conversion, she said.
There are plenty of buildings across the city where tenants have expressed interest in taking ownership, often as their landlords face foreclosure or attempt to sell properties that became less profitable than they had originally expected once strict tenant protection laws took effect in 2019. Those laws limited owners’ ability to raise rents on stabilized apartments.
Levy said some of those properties are prime targets for co-op conversion.
“We should be in buildings that are about to go through some type of transition, primarily thinking of foreclosure and sale,” Levy said.
She recalled her past experience leading the nonprofit UHAB, which specializes in helping tenants pursue condo conversion. She said she encouraged tenants to “organize yourself around a vision of how you want to live.”
“ Do we want to be owners? Do we want to be renters? Do we want to work with a nonprofit partner?” Levy said. “ If ownership is part of that, there needs to be a pathway to do that.”
Since taking office, Mamdani and top city officials have attempted to steer sales of derelict apartment buildings with thousands of tenants to new owners who they deem more responsible — a key aspect of the mayor’s tenant-focused campaign platform. The first effort targeting a portfolio of buildings slated for bankruptcy sale failed. A second, involving a collection of Northern Manhattan buildings, is still underway.
New city legislation could pave the way for more deals. The City Council is considering a measure that would allow the city to sell buildings with hefty unpaid property taxes or fines to nonprofit groups or other entities. The bill is modeled off a previous program called “Third Party Transfer” and would target “the worst of the worst” landlords, according to its sponsor, Councilmember Pierina Sanchez, a Bronx Democrat.
Another measure, known as the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act, would allow nonprofits, tenants groups and some for-profit developers the first shot at buying apartment buildings before they hit the open market in limited instances. Councilmember Sandy Nurse, a Brooklyn Democrat, sponsored a new version of the bill earlier this month after then-Mayor Eric Adams vetoed a previous iteration in December 2025. Nurse’s bill would apply to buildings with more than three violations per unit.
Mamdani's housing plan also includes other homeownership programs, including more funding for down-payment assistance to first-time homebuyers and loans up to $100,000 for owners to make critical repairs.
