Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA)

What is it?

TOPA is a unique DC law that gives tenants the right to purchase their buildings if they are sold, demolished, or discontinued. TOPA’s objectives include affordable housing, mitigating tenant displacement, and fostering tenant engagement.

Who Does it Benefit?

TOPA notably protects renters from displacement and provides power to tenants surrounding the future of their building. By offering a structured process, TOPA allows renters to organize and form tenant associations, present purchase offers, and even assign their rights to a purchaser of their choosing. For affordable housing developers, TOPA can create an important pathway to acquire and preserve existing rental housing. Developers can partner with tenant associations to purchase and rehabilitate properties, often pairing the tenant association’s assigned TOPA rights with public financing and other affordable housing resources. This creates opportunities for mission-driven developers to preserve affordability while addressing building conditions and long-term housing stability. Community Based Organizations play a pivotal role throughout the process by raising awareness, providing technical assistance, aligning financing, and advocating for tenant rights.

Why TOPA Matters:

This comprehensive law addresses the complexities of gentrification, rising housing costs, and displacement, particularly when affecting marginalized communities. TOPA provides safeguards that encourage housing stability, tenant empowerment, and affordability preservation. While tenants can use this opportunity to buy the property themselves, others have used TOPA to leverage contractual agreements with the chosen buyers that protect their interests and priorities. It has primarily served to ensure that tenants in the District, which is majority renter, have a say in the future of their homes and communities.

Regardless of the outcome, TOPA works to cultivate a more positive tenant-landlord relationship. These processes help DC residents stay in their homes, paying the same rent, and support the opportunity to build equity through homeownership. 

By using TOPA as a seat at the table, tenants can ensure greater stability between owners by having expectation-setting conversations before the sale even closes.

16,224 affordable housing units have been improved and preserved through TOPA.

How it connects to our work

TOPA plays an important role in the affordable housing landscape of DC and informs the discussions our member organizations have about the future of housing and ownership in the District. In 2024, The Coalition was tasked by the District to develop a comprehensive impact study on TOPA. The report, Sustaining Affordability: The Role of the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) in Washington, DC, discusses the past and future of TOPA  while also presenting recommendations for new iterations and improvements.

The Coalition recognizes TOPA as an essential tool in maintaining housing affordability and building tenant empowerment. We advocate for continued resources, evaluation, and improvement of the law.

“We believe in a future where everyone has a seat at the decision-making table” 

- President and CEO Stephen Glaude

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