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New York City’s controversial tax lien sales system for collecting unpaid property and water debts expires at the end of next month — without any clear path toward what comes next.
Mayor Eric Adams and City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams have both come out against the longtime practice of selling off tax liens to investors, which generates tens of millions of dollars each year and steps up pressure on property owners to pay their bills.
The city sold the liens from 2,841 properties in December 2021. It was the first sale since May 2019, after postponing the 2020 sale because of the pandemic.
The mayor campaigned on ending the sales, declaring they threaten “generational wealth in Black and Brown communities.”
But neither Adams nor Adams has unveiled specific plans.
Advocates for small property owners are pushing for significant reforms for how the city collects the unpaid debts, and they’re hopeful new city leaders will come up with a way that doesn’t further burden those already stretched thin financially.
And some grassroots activists want to get rid of the lien sale in favor of a community land trust model, in which nonprofits would take ownership of the property and maintain income-restricted units, in consultation with the indebted previous owners.
“There’s this opportunity to create the replacement system with the Council and with the mayor, and that’s an exciting prospect,” said Hannah Anousheh, a coordinator for the East New York Community Land Trust, which was created at the start of the pandemic.
Through the lien sale, which Mayor Rudy Giuliani created in 1996, the city sells debts of property tax and other municipal charges to a trust of investors at a discount. It was conceived as a way to address property abandonment and to collect unpaid taxes after City Hall had struggled for years with both.
Today, tax lien sales are a revenue-raiser for the city, with private investors responsible for collecting the debt. The liens sold this past December are valued at $145 million, according to the city Department of Finance.
Often, property owners late on their bills must pay more fees and interest on top of what they already owe, sending them further into debt, and sometimes resulting in foreclosures if debts remain outstanding.
The lien sale disproportionately impacts homeowners of color, a report from homeownership advocacy group Coalition for Affordable Homes found, as well as smaller property owners, and can lead to negative effects on tenants, too.
Landlord groups have been pressing for an end to lien sales.
7 comments:
How about you pay your debts?
From the story: "The lien sale disproportionately impacts homeowners of color"
Lol! Of course it does, because people of "color" have a well known habit of NOT PAYING WHAT THEY OWE. But of course, in the Current Year that can only be portrayed as some kind of mysterious racism.
Like blacks get arrested a lot more than whites and Asians. Well yeah, because they commit a lot more crimes, and everyone knows it, but we pretend something else is going on.
Lots and lots of NYC landowners are also foreign carpet-baggers who come in and buy up properties, milk them for a while (ignoring all tax bills) and then go back to whatever shithole they crawled out of, scot free. Oh and then they might come back again under a new name and do it all over again. Nobody cares, nobody checks. We have no immigration controls to speak of.
This is called anarcho-tyranny. You can't keep your job unless you get the poison jab, but Abduhl Badubah can float in from Crapistan, run an insurance fraud racket, make a few mil and hi-tail it back to Crapistan, and nothing ever happens to him because the authorities simply don't care. But boy oh boy, you can BET they're gonna get YOU if you don't get your jab. It's like 15 FBI agents rush to check out a garage pull for racism (it happened!), but massive criminality goes on all around us and the FBI just shrugs. Gotta hunt down those "white supremacists."
But according to NYCHAs appointed social workers harassing landlords and myself over private listings, proof of employment, credit and criminal history checks, officials do have plans, BIG communist plans. I have received earfuls of communistic ideology. .
What's needed to get those plans moving is to bring every small homeowner to his are her knees first so they have less resistance to enact it all.
The above needs to happen first, so I think they are letting things cook as new housing controls are being made up.
For sure thinks like making private listings, proof of employment, credit and criminal history checks illegal.
The biggest fix will be to hand small private landlords suffering the most a NYCHA sec 8 plan and say:
"accept & sign this contract or sink" (that's already happening with people who had homed damaged in the Hurricane and were promised money who didn't read the "fine print catch"
Include: Making private listings, proof of employment, credit and criminal history checks illegal even if the homeowner resides in the house.
That's all eventually gonna be the "fixes" and is by design!!
Chip away all a homeowners rights piece by piece.
Get assigned 3 Bibis, (or 3 Bobos) as tenants or perhaps some good for nothing welfare case with 3 or more unsupervised gansta kids living in your house for life.
Yea, then come 6+ bicycles and an e-scooters in the hallways, walls and all your stair banisters destroyed. Say no STOP THIS and you'll get called racist, more damage and a visit from the city who will always side with the "poor underprivileged or mentally, chemically unstable innocent tenant".
Section 8 tenants are the city's worst problem people and with NYCHA plans once the bad are in your home its near impossible to get rid of them. By then the house is usually destroyed or you have no choice to sell it.
Its YOU the owner who must then:
1-Move out and hire a super or maintenance company run the house (this costs $$$$)
2-Learn to live with such people (alcoholics, druggies, get-overs, brats, nutters, and 100+ different types of problem people)
3-You will need to sell the house with the tenants and take a huge loss.
The only say you have with a NYCHA contract is how you get shit on or lose
-Gee
Is about taking the properties.
Grand Theft Properties - GTP.
Gee speaks the truth. Government should never, under any circumstances, pay as much as one dime in housing costs for anyone. Government should NEVER be a landlord, nor have ANY say in who you can or can't rent to. Alas, those days are long gone.
The more they raise the property taxes, the more the city shoves homeless shelters and homeless violent drug addicts, career criminals, and sex predators in residential areas.
This is no accident. The city wants law-abiding citizens out of New York to house the derelict, low-life, non-working violent individuals so they can get more money from the government to house them and make the city more "diverse".
@Gino
Cry me a river snowflake. We all feel so bad for you. Maybe someone should start a collection for ya.
@The more they raise the property taxes, the more the city shoves homeless shelters and homeless violent drug addicts, career criminals, and sex predators in residential areas.
Correct. Stalin once said the Americans will hang themselves with the rope we provide.
We are paying to be raped, murdered, looted and terrorized.
Thanks to the Bolsehvik, Communist Social Democrats (the slave owners mafia).
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