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After Gov. Charlie Baker vetoed the state legislature’s previous attempt last year to guarantee apartment tenants the right to purchase the building they’re living in, senators and representatives are back with a revised bill they say addresses some industry concerns.

The tenant right to purchase, or TOPA, bill (S.890), would let towns and cities opt into a single regulatory system its backer say is aimed at helping stave off some displacement in lower-income neighborhoods statewide.

The bill would require landlords who own seven or more units in a municipality that adopts the state TOPA framework to notify tenants if they decide to sell the building. A tenant association made up of at least 51 percent of the units in a building must then make an offer within 30 days of being notified. The tenant association then has 90 days to obtain financing and 160 days from executing a purchase and sale agreement to close on the property. Separate time frames govern short sales and foreclosure sales.

While few, if any, tenant associations would likely have access to the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars necessary to buy a building on short notice, the TOPA bill lets associations assign their rights to a nonprofit, a community development corporation or a public housing agency, among other groups that might have access to that kind of financing. Tenants would not be able to sell their rights to speculators or others.

“It is much cheaper and much quicker to buy and stabilize naturally occurring affordable housing than to build new affordable housing,” S.890 sponsor state Sen. Pat Jehlen, D-Somerville, told the Joint Committee on Housing at a Tuesday hearing, saying “we are at a crisis point” as lower-end rental units – often called “naturally occurring affordable housing” – are sold off to investors for conversion into higher-end units. 

Jehlen and state Rep. Jay Livingstone, D-Boston and a sponsor of S.890’s companion house bill, said they believe this year’s version of the bill will protect the smallest landlords, many of whom run their units as a side business and a not insubstantial number of whom in the state’s urban neighborhoods are people of color. The new version of the bill also specifically exempts sales to immediate family members at less than a property’s assessed value.

“Small property owners will not be impacted by this,” Livingstone said at Tuesday’s hearing. “We tried to be as thoughtful as possible to apply the remedy to where it’s needed by people who need it the most.” 

Local officials testifying Tuesday urge legislators to pass the bill, to give them a tool to prevent lower-income renters, particularly seniors of color, from being displaced by a sale. Multifamily buildings are not infrequently sold on the condition they are delivered without tenants.

“Boston, Somerville, Cambridge and others have the infrastructure to make this successful,” Sheila Dillon, head of Boston’s Department of Neighborhood Development, said.

The communities’ developed networks of tenant advocacy groups and community development corporations would provide ready and experienced buyers for multifamily property, she said.

Efforts to achieve similar results without TOPA have been a hard slog. Outgoing Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone told legislators that his city’s existing attempts to purchase multifamily housing and convert it to scattered-site affordable housing have been hampered by a lack of information about new properties coming on the market.

Landlord groups told legislators the bill is still highly problematic because it would throw a wrench into real estate deals where time is of the essence. Baker raised a similar fear when he vetoed the last 2020 version of the bill: “Because a viable exit strategy often is critical to a developer’s willingness to undertake a project, I am concerned that making multifamily sales more unpredictable will result in less investment and construction of fewer new rental units.”

“Anyone who has bought or sold rental property in the real world will tell you these bills are unworkable,” Small Proeprty Owners Association President Allison Drescher said. “They will destabilize the market for multifamily homes just at a time when we need this type of housing.”