Mainstay Co-op in Flushing, Queens, doesn’t make the news much. One of us lives there: 110 families, mainly working class and retired, who bought their homes, maintain their building, and keep largely to themselves. They live in a ground lease co-op, meaning residents own their apartments but not the land underneath, which belongs to a separate landlord they lease from.
Mainstay is now at the center of a fight in Albany between working families and the real estate lobby that will determine whether tens of thousands of New Yorkers living in ground lease co-ops will lose their equity and homes.
The real estate industry is attempting to block the only bill standing between ground lease residents and their displacement, arguing that these co-ops are filled with wealthy investors and part-time residents who don’t deserve tenant protections. But the numbers tell a much different story of who actually resides in this class of housing.
Ground lease co-ops first came about in New York during the mid-20th century as a more practical path to homeownership for working- and middle-class families who couldn’t access traditional housing options in the city. Today, more than 25,000 New Yorkers live in ground lease co-ops, the majority of whom are concentrated in middle-class neighborhoods across Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, where most residents earn just above the city’s median income.
For decades, this model worked. Families bought in, put down roots, maintained buildings, and built equity. What they didn’t anticipate was that the land beneath their buildings would eventually change hands, often to real estate developers and private equity firms with no connection to the original agreements. Residents are left with landlords who have unlimited power to reset rents, while unprotected and very likely will be displaced due to market forces and changing economic conditions.
At a nearby co-op in Flushing, Murray Hill Cooperative, residents face the threat of non-renewal entirely. At Mainstay, they are not far behind with a looming lease renewal. Neither have a backup plan. If their ground rent resets to a level residents cannot absorb, hundreds of families will be forced to start over in a city where affordable housing and accessible transit neighborhoods are nearly impossible to find.
The Ground Lease Co-op Bill (S2433A/A2619) would give them a fighting chance. It would restore their ability to borrow for necessary maintenance and repairs, grant them the right of first refusal if their landlord decides to sell the land, and ensure that if the building is ever forced to deconvert to rentals, existing residents get reasonable first rents rather than being priced out on the spot.
These are the same baseline protections that rent-stabilized tenants, mobile homeowners, and other housing classes already have in New York State.
The real estate industry is arguing in the final days of the legislative session that this bill benefits wealthy investors and part-time residents rather than working families. We’d invite anyone making that argument to spend an afternoon at Mainstay and meet their neighbors: working families, retirees — including immigrants and those with disabilities — people who spent decades paying off their apartments and have nowhere else to go.
For 25,000 New Yorkers, this is their only chance to close a loophole that leaves working-class homeowners exposed and at risk of losing their homes and equity. We are asking for the bill to be passed so these families do not run out of time.
Rosenthal represents the 67th Assembly district in Manhattan and chairs the Assembly Housing Committee. Maiman is the board president of Mainstay Cooperative Section One.