“Mayor Adams’ Task Force has an opportunity to ease New York City’s perpetual affordable housing crisis 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 2023, 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 public 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 20, the city will sell liens on New Yorkers’ homes for the first time since December 2021. 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 community spaces.
As of April 17, there were 21,546 properties at risk of having liens sold on them, including 10,963 one- to three-family homes. Protections established last year by the City Council that were promised to spare homeowners from being put at risk of losing their homes are reaching extremely few: the city’s highly touted Easy Exit program for low-income owner-occupants has only received 168 applications as of April 10. Fewer than half of those have been approved.
There is little reason to believe the 2025 sale will be much different than lien sales of the past.
The lien sale puts Black and brown homeowners at risk 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 market 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 legislation 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’ team 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 2020, 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 report, “Leaving the Speculators in the Rearview Mirror,” offers a roadmap that the Task Force should follow. Also, most 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 29 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 Community Land Trust, chairman of the East New York Homeowners’ Associations Inc. and serves on the board of the Coalition for Community Advancement: Progress for Cypress Hills and East New York. Jakob Kendall Schneider is a board member of the East New York Community Land Trust and a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center.
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