Opinion: Mayor Adams’ Tax Lien Sale Task Force is Failing NYC Tenants and Homeowners

Mayor Adams Task Force has an opportunity to ease New York City s perpetual affordable housing emergency and promote permanently affordable housing The question is will he choose Wall Street and real estate speculators or New Yorkers A rally outside City Hall in calling to abolish the tax lien sale John McCarten NYC Council On Wednesday organizers activists and other advocacy groups in the Abolish the New York City Tax Lien Sale Coalition disrupted the masses hearing held by the Tax Lien Sale Task Force We took this action to let Mayor Eric Adams appointees to the Task Force know that we will not be silent as they violate the law by failing to consider just and equitable alternatives to the racist predatory lien sale On May the city will sell liens on New Yorkers homes for the first time since December The only eligible buyer in that sale will be a trust managed by big banks and Wall Street set up by the city to have investors make money Through the sale the city offloads the unpleasant task of being its own tax collector and misses opportunities to protect low income homeowners stabilize neighborhoods and create new parks and neighborhood spaces As of April there were properties at pitfall of having liens sold on them including one- to three-family homes Protections established last year by the City Council that were promised to spare homeowners from being put at jeopardy of losing their homes are reaching extremely insufficient the city s highly touted Easy Exit operation for low-income owner-occupants has only received applications as of April Fewer than half of those have been approved There is little reason to believe the sale will be much different than lien sales of the past The lien sale puts Black and brown homeowners at menace of losing their homes and incentivizes landlords to disinvest in their buildings to increase profit while rent-paying tenants live in unsafe and unsanitary conditions The lien sale disproportionately impacts lower-income homeowners of color and their communities liens are six times more likely to be sold in Black neighborhoods and twice as likely in Hispanic neighborhoods The lien sale also encourages predatory real estate speculators Small debts rapidly increase after liens have been sold forcing distressed Black and brown homeowners to sell their properties below domain value The majority of residential properties impacted by the lien sale are rentals These landlords fail to make repairs and evict residents at rates higher than those of similar buildings The violence that the lien sale represents for Black and brown New Yorkers and their communities was something that Mayor Adams clearly recognized as both candidate and mayor The mayor s commitment to explore alternatives to the current lien sale is nowhere to be seen in the Temporary Task Force on Tax Liens preliminary recommendations Adding insult to injury the task force that was mandated to examine whether alternatives to such tax lien sale trust exist or could be developed in last year s reauthorization measure is abdicating its duty by offering largely inconsequential preliminary recommendations none of which include an exploration of more racially just and equitable alternatives to the lien sale Mayor Adams squad is lacking in vision and follow through at a time when we need local leadership desperately Instead of building up our local housing and parks agencies and protecting New Yorkers this administration continues to put Wall Street first It doesn t have to be this way Since the Abolish the New York City Tax Lien Sale Coalition has been organizing to replace the current lien sale with a system that keeps people in their homes and creates permanently affordable housing Our record Leaving the Speculators in the Rearview Mirror offers a roadmap that the Task Force should follow Also majority other cities in the U S including large cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco do not hold a lien sale yet have lower tax delinquency rates than New York City New York is one of only states that even allows liens to be sold to private investors Albert Scott is a lifelong East New York resident and activist a founding member of the East New York Society Land Trust chairman of the East New York Homeowners Associations Inc and serves on the board of the Coalition for Public Advancement Progress for Cypress Hills and East New York Jakob Kendall Schneider is a board member of the East New York Population Land Trust and a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center The post Opinion Mayor Adams Tax Lien Sale Task Force is Failing NYC Tenants and Homeowners appeared first on City Limits