(a) The City faces a severe and continuing housing crisis. Many City residents are unable to obtain or retain affordable housing.
(b) This crisis has profoundly negative effects on the City. It causes dislocation, which frays the social ties that bind our neighborhoods and communities together. It forces vulnerable residents to leave their home, the City, for new communities where they are strangers. And it contributes to homelessness—which is itself a severe and continuing crisis in the City.
(c) The City’s housing crisis is caused, in large part, by a shortage of affordable rental housing. The creation and preservation of such housing is therefore of paramount public concern.
(d) Obstacles to the creation and preservation of affordable rental housing include off-market sales, the transfer of multifamily residential building by foreclosure or deed in lieu of foreclosure, and rapid turnover in the City’s real estate market. Nonprofit organizations seeking to create and preserve affordable housing may be willing and able to pay market prices to purchase residential buildings for sale, but nevertheless find themselves often unable to purchase such buildings before they leave the market. Nonprofit organizations serving the broader public interest must often move more deliberately and borrow purchase money from non-traditional lenders in such real estate transactions than private entities concerned solely with profit. Nonprofit organizations may also have access to public funds dedicated to acquire multifamily residential buildings under the threat of foreclosure or subject to foreclosure proceedings, but such nonprofit organizations sometimes do not have the benefit of notice that such multifamily residential buildings are available for purchase.
(e) The purpose of this Chapter 41B (which may be referred to as the “Community Opportunity to Purchase Act”) is to enhance nonprofit organizations’ ability to purchase multi-family residential buildings, at market prices, within a reasonable period of time, and to thereby promote the creation and preservation of affordable rental housing.
(f) This Chapter 41B is intended to complement existing anti-displacement and preservation programs administered by the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development (the “Agency”). In particular, this Chapter is intended to complement the Small Sites Program and Preservation and Seismic Safety (“PASS”) program.
(1) The Small Sites Program was created to establish and protect long-term affordable housing in smaller properties throughout the City, particularly at sites were1 market pressures may otherwise result in tenant evictions and rising rents. By January 2019, the Small Sites Program had empowered local nonprofit housing organizations to preserve 28 buildings, containing 205 residential units and 13 commercial spaces.
(2) The PASS program provides low-cost, long-term senior financing to fund the acquisition, rehabilitation, seismic retrofitting, and preservation of affordable multi-family housing, funded through bond revenues previously approved by City voters. It is anticipated that the PASS program will preserve up to 1,400 units of affordable housing in the City.
CODIFICATION NOTE
1. So in Ord. 79-19.