If the landlord of a large Massachusetts apartment building decides to sell it off, the tenants inside have few options other than hope the next owner doesn’t have plans to price them out. Occasionally a local community organization or city partnership will manage to step in to buy and preserve the building as affordable units.

More often, the waves of the market wash the housing out of reach for longtime, lower-income tenants.

Housing advocates say working to build new homes, including subsidized affordable housing, is essential, but can’t make up for the loss of existing lower-cost units. “We like to say trying to solve the housing crisis without preserving affordable housing is like trying to fill up a bathtub with the drain open,” said Ann Jochnick, a housing attorney with the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute.

The social justice advocacy group is one of the organizations backing legislation that advocates say could go a long way toward preserving existing lower-cost housing by giving tenants a chance to band together and buy a building being put up for sale.

The House and Senate each tucked a version of the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, or TOPA, into its economic development bond bill this summer. A six-member conference committee is now negotiating a single version of the omnibus bill to send to Gov. Maura Healey.

Broadly, the policy would let renters in a multifamily building being put on the market organize to match an outside buyer’s offer and purchase the property themselves, or hand that right to a nonprofit or community land trust.

Right to purchase laws for tenants first arose in the late 1970s, with one of the strongest measures now on the books in Washington, DC, which adopted the policy in 1980.

Advocates credit it with preserving more than 16,000 units of affordable housing in DC, and a government study found that housing production continued apace, but real estate groups say it needlessly extended the period of time it took to sell buildings and drove away third-party bidders. They argue that recent changes to DC’s policy were necessary because the tenant right-to-purchase rules were slowing down the sale process and putting landlords in a bind.

More Context

• Housing, AI, and labor issues up for debate in House economic development package (July 2026)
• For Mass. residents, housing is where affordability hits hardest (May 2026)