Hochul touts ‘affordability’ but won’t reform NYC’s out-of-whack property taxes

It’s January, and New York City homeowners know what that means: Time to warily watch the mailbox to see just how far our property-tax bills will rise this year.

On Tuesday, Gov. Hochul dashed our hopes — yet again — that Albany will step up to make our out-of-whack taxes fairer.

Another State of the State speech has come and gone, and once again property tax reform was left off the proverbial to-do list.

Since 2018, the Property Tax Reform Commission that we helped create has fought for specific ways the state Legislature can make our system fairer, simpler and more transparent — to no avail.

There’s nothing like basic, obvious, in-your-face unfairness to bring two people like us, the City Council’s Democrat Finance Chair and its Republican Minority Leader, together.

Unfortunately, that’s the kind of blatant inequity we have in our property tax system.

A state-mandated cap on the annual growth of assessed value, unchecked and untouched for nearly 40 years, has created different effective tax rates on small homeowners from neighborhood to neighborhood.

That’s how you get a working-class family in a $700K home in Bay Ridge or on the South Shore of Staten Island paying three times the property taxes of a wealthy family in a $5 million brownstone in tony Manhattan. 

Tax classification quirks and disparities mean working-class co-op shareholders sometimes get hit harder than the owners of 1- and 2-family homes — while those in luxury condo units can get some of the sweetest deals around.

On top of these and the many other glaring problems and calcified inequities, our property taxes are so esoteric and opaque that it feels intentional.

Despite the annual Notice of Property Value homeowners will be receiving soon, and the city Department of Finance’s efforts to talk people through their tax calculations and help them apply for benefits, most New Yorkers never fully understand how our system works.
It’s not because we’re stupid, it’s because it was designed that way.

The good news is that it’s within our power to change all this.

We can put our neighborhoods back on an even playing field by phasing out and replacing assessed value caps, so that homeowners pay taxes based on the actual values of their homes.

We can create a new classification for lower- and mid-value co-ops and condos, alleviating their disproportionate burden and making sure the wealthiest luxury property owners are paying their fair share.

And we can insist that every homeowner’s tax calculations are thoroughly explained and as easy to understand as possible.

By law, these changes have to be made by the state Legislature in Albany. But we’re feeling the impacts of the system here within the five boroughs, so we can’t just sit back and wait for them to act.

That’s why, based on the work of the Property Tax Reform Commission, the city specifically advocated for these changes as well as several others in a list of 10 total recommendations in 2021.

Those recommendations have been wrapped up and ready to go for three years now, just collecting dust on a shelf.

Heck, we got so tired of waiting that in 2022, together we fought to pass the first property tax rebate in nearly 20 years!

We’re fed up. It took years to build up enough momentum for the city to get on the same page here, largely because we needed cooperation from elected officials and communities who benefit from these inequities.

Overburdened neighborhoods like the ones we represent needed enough people from elsewhere to admit that fair is fair, even if it meant giving up an advantage.

We got to that point after years of fighting at the city level, but our communities can’t afford to wait longer while we fight with the state.

We’ve been working at this long enough; we know property tax reform can feel like a pipe dream. But it doesn’t have to be.

Every candidate running for mayor rightfully focused on affordability should be talking about how they will finally deliver true, meaningful property tax reform to New Yorkers.

And no politician in 2025 can be serious about pushing an “affordability agenda” without embracing a plan that could actually help achieve that goal.