Jeff Albanese, program director at SquareOne Villages, an affordable housing co-op developer in Eugene, Oregon, notes that Oregon’s housing crisis has become so severe that it has vastly expanded the range of the possible. “There’s a lot of stuff that is on the table, including TOPA [tenant opportunity to purchase act] and social housing. We have [a] statewide rent control law now in Oregon,” he says. “Ten years ago, that just wasn’t on the table.”
One sign of what Albanese is referencing: During a February work session, the Eugene City Council voted by a unanimous 7–0 margin to “ask the city manager to bring back more information on the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act for the council to discuss as a rental protection.” A report from the city manager is expected this fall.
If adopted, a policy concept outlined by advocates would give tenants in multifamily buildings with five or more units that are up for sale 45 days to exercise a right of first refusal to purchase. Under the proposed provisions, if a tenant majority wished to acquire a building, they would need to form a tenants association, secure a financing letter of interest within 120 days, and close within 240 days (technically, the proposal says that the sale should close in 120 days; however, it also says that if a financing letter of interest is secured by day 120, that period can be extended to 240 days). As is typical for TOPA, the purchase price would have to be consistent with market rates.
There’s a lot of stuff that is on the table, including TOPA and social housing. We have [a] statewide rent control law now in Oregon. Ten years ago, that just wasn’t on the table.”
Jeff Albanese, program director at SquareOne Villages
Signatories of the policy concept are a wide range of Oregon housing advocates, including Housing Oregon, SquareOne Villages, CASA of Oregon, the Eugene Tenant Alliance, and the Springfield-Eugene Tenant Association, along with 1000 Friends of Oregon and the Democratic Party of Lane County.
The Eugene city report mandated by the Council’s February resolution is still not expected for a few months. Kevin Cronin, director of policy and advocacy at Housing Oregon, says he hopes “we’ll see an ordinance sometime this fall and that city council will then choose to hold a public hearing and then move forward with adopting it.”
Despite the initial unanimous vote in favor of a city report, passage of legislation is far from a done deal. “The devil,” cautions Albanese, “is going to be in the details.” Still, Albanese is optimistic. “It sounds like there’s some appetite for doing something like this,” he says.
One positive sign, Albanese adds, is that “a question that we’ve been asked by some of the city staff is, ‘Why wouldn’t you propose this cover single-family homes that are … occupied by a renter?’” The query suggests that city staff may be considering expanding the scope of the bill, rather than restricting it.
How TOPA Came to Eugene
The movement to adopt TOPA in Eugene is the latest step of a multiyear effort by housing nonprofits and tenant organizers to address what advocates describe in the concept paper as “a severe housing affordability crisis … driven in part by out-of-state corporations aggressively purchasing our naturally occurring affordable housing.”
City figures document the scope of the challenge. “Forty-five percent of extremely low-income renters (0–30% AMI), 80% of very low-income (30–50% AMI), and 74% of low-income (50–80% AMI) are renting units that are not properly matched to their income level,” a report published by city officials in February details.
These figures hold despite the passage of previous city measures designed to protect renters. In 2022, Eugene passed so-called Phase 1 protections that included creating a rental navigator position to help renters find homes; a rule that photos must document move-in and move-out conditions (to protect tenants from facing security deposit withholdings); and a $10 cap on application and screening fees.
In 2023, the city adopted Phase 2 protections, including limits on security deposits and a requirement that landlords pay two months’ rent in relocation expenses in many instances, such as in the case of a no-cause eviction or if a tenant moves due to cost-related reasons.
If it becomes law in Eugene, TOPA would be considered Phase 3.
Part of what has inspired TOPA, explains Cronin, was the 2022 acquisition of the Eugene Hotel, which had long been used to provide apartment housing for seniors, by DiNapoli Capital Partners, a real estate investment firm. The acquisition was followed by rent increases that displaced several renters, leading a 96-year-old resident to testify on behalf of her fellow residents at a city council meeting.
Residents “were very loud at city council,” says Cronin, “and they were trying to get a CDC [community development corporation] to acquire them. They were unable to do that. We didn’t really know how to go about that for the seniors.”
At a national conference, however, Cronin connected with folks in Washington, D.C., a city that has had TOPA protections in place in one form or another for over 40 years. Cronin worked with Stephen Glaude of the D.C.-based Coalition to help design a proposal for TOPA in Eugene.
An additional influence, Cronin notes, was the long-standing practice of residents cooperatively taking ownership of the land in manufactured housing parks. While not the same as buying a multifamily apartment building, the processes, advocates note, are similar. Moreover, the right to first purchase for manufactured housing residents when a park is placed on the market has been part of Oregon state law for nearly 20 years. In this light, establishing TOPA in Eugene essentially involves extending principles that have long applied in the state to multifamily apartment buildings.
Cronin says he sees a TOPA law as “a meaningful way the city can spend a small amount of resources and buy down people’s rents and increase their overall affordability.” The policy concept paper advises creating “an Opportunity Fund that sets aside funding from Eugene’s Housing RFP process” for this purpose.
As part of the campaign to push the council to consider TOPA, Cronin says he collected data on which buildings would be TOPA-eligible if they went up for sale, “so we would have hard data about what buildings we are actually talking about.” Cronin identified over 400 units in multifamily buildings that would be subject to the law, and thus eligible to be converted into tenant-owned housing cooperatives or otherwise preserved by a tenant-chosen buyer, as “best meets the tenants’ needs and goals.”
A Policy Struggle in Two Parts
Albanese emphasizes that there are two parts to the policy struggle. One is getting a TOPA measure passed. The second is securing access to financing to make conversions easier to carry out.
If TOPA rights are enacted into law but there are no provisions for financing, the impact would be limited to a couple of motivated owners, says Albanese. It wouldn’t be large, but it might grow, he adds. “If a project is preserved, that’ll generate more interest.”
On the other hand, having a source of funding that tenants could readily access to take advantage of their rights under TOPA could scale up the effect and help preserve hundreds of units of affordable housing, given Cronin’s findings on eligible buildings. Connection to existing housing bond finance programs is one option. So could making TOPA conversions an eligible use for Eugene’s affordable housing trust fund. The potential scale of TOPA is illustrated by the experience of Washington, D.C. A 2023 report found that 16,224 affordable housing units were preserved through TOPA between 2006 and 2020.
[RELATED ARTICLE: TOPA Needs Capital to Succeed]
Albanese says he’s optimistic that efforts to obtain access to funding will ultimately bear fruit. “If we’re just talking about what we were looking at a couple summers ago,” he observes, feasibility would be a key question. Now, he says, “I suspect that there will be some more resources in the near future.”
Another challenge is field infrastructure. “We need to start building that ecosystem,” Cronin says. Washington, D.C., “has had 40 years of building that climate. They have specialized lawyers” and other supporting organizations.
Legislative Hurdles
To date, opposition to adopting TOPA has been relatively quiet, largely because a city council framework resolution has yet to be introduced. Cronin expects opposition to come from landlords. Albanese agrees, noting that although TOPA requires tenants to pay market rate, financial and capital interests tend to object to “any type of friction to their ability to [sell] buildings that they own.”
The number of Eugene property owners who would be affected by the legislation appears small because ownership of multifamily buildings is concentrated. Cronin says his research identified only 10 owners who have listed TOPA-eligible properties over the past two years.
While advocates wait for the city’s report, for Cronin, the organizing imperative is clear: “We need to expand our coalition now. That’s the assignment this summer.”
Why It Matters
“Why are we doing TOPA?” Cronin asks. “Well, we are doing it for the people in our community. We are doing it for the seniors at the Eugene Hotel who were displaced. That’s kind of where my heart is at. Some of those people have passed. I want to honor their memory.”
Cronin acknowledges that TOPA is just one piece of a broader housing agenda. Housing Oregon, he says, focuses much of its work on securing hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for affordable rental housing at the state level. “The TOPA stuff,” Cronin concedes, is “a small regional thing.” But, he emphasizes, for the tenants he has worked with as an organizer, “it is a big impact.”
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5 thoughts on “In Eugene, Housing Advocates Call for a Tenant Right to Purchase Act”
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This sounds like a great idea on paper that falls apart during execution. It’s tough for me to imagine a group of random tenants cooperating well enough to pull this off. Most tenants don’t even know their neighbors and can’t even solve problems like noise without being assholes.
April,
Thanks for your comment. To be clear, TOPA laws where they exist (for example, in Washington, D.C., a TOPA law has been in effect for over 40 years), a majority of tenants must sign on to the purchase effort and to carry out the purchase, they typically work with a nonprofit partner in order to purchase the property. For more details, I encourage you to watch this 3-minute Shelterforce video explainer.
Left out the link: https://shelterforce.org/2026/01/01/what-is-topa/
I left off the link. Here it is: https://shelterforce.org/2026/01/01/what-is-topa/
Thanks for this article, Steve. I was a TOPA lawyer in Washington, D.C. for 12 years. I represented DC tenants associations as they exercised their TOPA rights. You are correct in your response to April, TOPA can and does work. It has enabled many thousands of tenants in DC to stay in their homes over the past 46 years while DC has gentrified around them and priced-out so many. My clients were able to use their TOPA rights to convert their properties to limited equity cooperative and affordable condominiums, or sometimes they simply used their rights to choose a new landlord willing to commit to keeping rents affordable and make long-overdue repairs. I found that tenant purchase outcomes for low-income tenants, such as limited equity cooperatives and affordable condos, are possible when a state or local government is able to pair the TOPA right with gap financing. When this isn’t possible, tenants can still benefit tremendously from TOPA if they have the right to transfer their purchase agreements to other private landlords because TOPA gives the tenants association power to negotiate for rent protections and repairs.