Eric Adams Vetoes COPA

31 December 2025

In his final day in office, Mayor Eric Adams handed a win to multifamily landlords and brokers.

Adams on Wednesday vetoed the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act, or COPA, a measure derided by landlord groups as an unconstitutional intrusion into private deals. He also vetoed 18 other bills, including three that create new rules for city-financed housing.

In doing so, Adams both shot down a measure favored by the incoming mayor while also halting bills that the Mayor-elect’s allies believe would hurt Zohran Mamdani’s housing agenda.

It will be up to the next City Council and presumed Speaker Julie Menin to try to override these vetoes, though it’s unclear if members will elect to do so. Most of the housing bills were passed by a supermajority of the Council, with the exception of COPA, which was approved with 30 votes. Notably, Menin was one of eight members who abstained from voting on COPA.

In a statement, Menin said the Council is considering its “next steps.”

“Rather than working collaboratively 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 distressed or have a soon-to-expire affordability requirement. Landlord groups have said the measure will slow down sales and deter investment in the city.

Soon after they were announced, real estate groups celebrated the vetoes. Real Estate Board of New York President Jim Whelan 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 that “sanity prevailed.”

Mamdani, meanwhile, has cited COPA as part of his strategy to take on bad landlords. Absent a veto override, the next Council could also work to pass another version of the bill with the new administration’s support.

Three of the other vetoed measures set new restrictions on the kinds of housing that the city finances, creating minimums for the percentage of units with two- and three-bedrooms, those affordable to New York’s poorest and those designated as homeownership units.

Though the administration voiced concern about the cost of another bill that creates a minimum wage for construction workers on certain housing projects, the mayor did not veto that measure. Under the Construction Justice Act, construction workers must be paid $40 per hour in wages and benefits on housing projects with 150 units or more that have construction costs of $3 million or more and receive $1.5 million or more in city financing.

Housing groups warned that the measures threatened Mamdani’s plan to build 200,000 new affordable housing units over the next decade. The administration estimated that these bills would add $600 million to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development’s annual budget needs. Most of that added cost, $425 million, was attributed to the Construction Justice Act.

A spokesperson for City Hall could not provide an explanation for the mayor’s decision not to veto the construction wage bill, given the administration’s own calculations.

In a statement, Adams called the Council’s legislation “reckless,” and said that the vetoed housing measures would “worsen 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 allow 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 guards, which appears to be part of the impetus for the mayor’s veto.

He additionally axed a bill that would have set time limits for co-op boards to respond to prospective residents about applications to live in a building and for accepting or rejecting them. This bill, as well as the land bank and security guard measures, passed the City Council with a supermajority of support.

COPA has percolated for several years but only gained momentum in the passed few months. It was first introduced in 2020 and has since undergone several changes that reduced the pool of eligible buildings and shrunk the period of time that nonprofits and eligible joint ventures can exclusively vie for properties.

The law would have required owners looking to sell certain multifamily buildings with four or more units to first notify the city and its list of approved prospective buyers.

Those would-be buyers would then have 25 days to notify an owner that they are interested in bidding on a property. Once that time runs out, the interested qualified entities have 80 days to submit an offer. Qualified entities also have 15 days after a competing bid comes in to match it.

The vetoes top off what became an acrimonious relationship between the mayor and Speaker Adrienne Adams, especially over the last two years. The housing bills, passed at the City Council’s final meeting this year, came after the Council unsuccessfully fought against three ballot measures approved in November. City Council leadership called the measures, which weakened the Council’s sway over land use decisions, an unlawful power grab by the administration.

“Through their actions, the Council continues to demonstrate the importance of our administration’s proposals to streamline the city’s housing approval process, which the Council fiercely opposed but voters overwhelmingly approved in November,” the mayor said in a statement.

In a parting shot, Adrienne Adams said it was “unsurprising 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 “vetoes put special interests above greater affordability and opportunity for hardworking New Yorkers.”