Could Community Opportunity to Purchase Act Work for Food?

24 November 2025

You might have heard that landlords are going crazy about COPA.

Word is spreading that the City Council aims to reduce rents by giving nonprofits an exclusive window to buy apartment buildings before profiteers can.

Council members are close to voting on a bill from Sandy Nurse called the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act.

If COPA is a good idea, why not apply the same logic to things besides housing? After all, the affordability problem is also about food, clothing, energy and other necessities.

Take supermarkets, for example. These profit-seeking institutions buy food from wholesalers, then mark up the prices so they can make a profit. Outrageous, right?

Supermarkets’ profit margins range from 1 percent to as high as 3 percent. No wonder so many New Yorkers go hungry!

As socialists repeatedly tell us, profit makes things more expensive for consumers. The official slogan of the New York City tenants group Metropolitan Council on Housing is “housing for people, not profit.”

So, to make food cheaper, I propose COPA for Groceries. Let’s call it COPA-G.

Here’s the plan: Before farmers or manufacturers sell food to a store, restaurant, catering business or food cart, they would have to notify nonprofits of the opportunity to purchase it.

Soup kitchens and other charities would have an exclusive window to buy this food before the greedy capitalists do. When Zohran Mamdani opens his four city-run supermarkets, they could get in on the action.

The window would have to be shorter for fruit, vegetables, meat and other perishables so not too much of it spoils during the waiting period. For products with a long shelf life, such as cereal, nonprofits would have 120 days to put in their bids, just like with COPA for buildings.

Are you with me? Cheap food, people!

With a good video from Mamdani’s social media team and a door-knocking operation by the Democratic Socialists of America, we could quickly build popular support for this idea.

Once the law takes effect and proof of concept is achieved, as it surely would be, we could expand it to other products. Nonprofit thrift shops could get six months to buy clothing and shoes from manufacturers before evil retailers can get their claws on these desperately needed items and extort New Yorkers who need them.

A side benefit of COPA-C (for clothing) is that some items might be out of fashion by the time the capitalists get them, forcing retailers to put them on the discount rack. New Yorkers could then experience what it’s like to shop in Cuba, which would be a nice benefit to people who can’t afford international vacations.

Cynics might say this would never work. They note that COPA-type laws in other cities merely delay sales, and that tenants and nonprofits were already free to bid on buildings at any time.

Besides, the critics say, nonprofit landlords in New York City are struggling to keep their rent-stabilized buildings above water, because the HSTPA in 2019 put a tourniquet on rents, housing court makes it incredibly time-consuming to evict tenants who don’t pay and insurance premiums have soared.

The skeptics also point out that even if buildings are owned by nonprofits, they must still generate more revenue than they pay in operating expenses. This surplus is technically not “profit,” but it’s used to pay the salaries of staffers and executives.

For example, mission-driven Riseboro Community Partnership, one of the city’s best nonprofit housing providers, paid its staffers $30 million and its executives $2.5 million last year — which accounted for 46 percent of its expenses.

I have a message for all the COPA critics: Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.