As states and municipalities across the United States grapple with the housing crisis, “tenant opportunity to purchase” (TOPA) policies are being increasingly considered as tools to prevent displacement. However, without the necessary supports, including financing and technical assistance, it is difficult for these policies to achieve their intended impact.

This report explores the scope and financing needs for a proposed TOPA policy in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It then builds on the experience of technical assistance providers in Washington, DC—the city with the oldest TOPA policy in the nation—to identify challenges and lessons for other jurisdictions considering similar policies.

Why This Matters

For more than 40 years, Washington DC’s Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act has been a powerful tool to prevent displacement and support tenant empowerment. In that time, the city has developed a robust network of tenant service providers that has been crucial to the policy’s success. In this report, we explore common challenges faced by these providers, along with learnings and policy design features that could mitigate similar challenges in other jurisdictions.

This research may be useful for governments and tenant service providers in jurisdictions that have recently enacted a TOPA policy, such as Chicago, and in jurisdictions that are considering a TOPA policy, such as Minneapolis (the focus of this report.)

Key Takeaways

We analyzed the number of properties potentially eligible for tenant purchase under the proposed Minneapolis Opportunity to Purchase policy. We estimate that as of April 2023, if offered for sale, approximately 92 percent of units in Minneapolis would be eligible for tenant purchase, with a total assessed market value of more than $17 billion.

We also identified common challenges facing tenants seeking to purchase their buildings and potential policy responses. Key takeaways include the following:

• Organizing for tenant purchase presents unique challenges. With more traditional tenant organizing, harnessing and asserting the collective power of tenants is the principal goal and no formal structure is required. But tenant organizations that wish to exercise TOPA rights in Washington, DC, must clear a number of procedural hurdles and learn about the legal and financial aspects of tenant purchasing, which add layers of complexity to the already difficult task of organizing a building.
• A tenant opportunity to purchase policy requires a robust tenant technical assistance ecosystem in order to be successful. This ecosystem includes tenant organizers, development consultants, legal-aid providers, and government partners, all of whom play a crucial role in supporting tenants through the complex process of forming a tenant association and potentially purchasing a building.
• Jurisdictions should provide sufficient operating support for tenant service providers. Interviewees cited the limited capacity of tenant services providers as a key challenge across all stages of the TOPA process. By providing grants and other funding to local tenant services providers, jurisdictions can play a key role in ensuring providers can support tenants.

How We Did It

We engaged document review, interviews, and a review of publicly available demographic, administrative, and property data. We collected qualitative data on technical assistance from interviews with DC TOPA technical assistance providers, a government agency, and development consultants. We used an April 2023 extract of Minneapolis’s open-source rental license database for information about property characteristics (such as unit count), which we combined with Hennepin County’s parcel-level property assessment data (also from April 2023) to obtain additional information.