Maybe property taxes should be lowered everywhere so people don't have to make tons of money to live in places that they already own...
8
Horrible just horrible. This brought by the crew in city hall, such as Corey Johnson, which chased away Amazon and its 25k+ high income jobs. Now no jobs created by that bunch, but hey lets call it a WIN!
Now the brilliant idea coming from these clowns is to put even more of a tax burden on the middle class and upper middle class, who are already fronting the bulk of the taxes paid to the City. Watch the money flow out of NYC even faster than it is now! Stupid stupid stupid!
5
About time.... a total reassessment in each borough long overdue.
Assessments are supposed to be generally equitable based on values.
What have the assessors been doing since their jobs are to release
Accurate assessment rolls to the state each year.
1
I currently pay $6k in taxes per year on a 600sf bare bones Condo in Brooklyn. On top of my property taxes I also pay another $6k in combined city state taxes. Whilst I’m all for being fairly taxed and contributing to society and the community I live in I am beginning to debate if it is really worth it to live in my tiny box of an apartment and pay so much money for such terrible services that I receive in exchange for my taxes. The question that haunts me most is how will NYC cope when people like myself, which fill the city/state Coffers, begin to seek better living standards and less taxes?
6
NYC is already raising taxes on Brooklyn homeowners. This new system is even more convoluted and opaque than the current system, since it depends on exemptions and caps based on who lives in the house. The vast majority of Brooklyn homeowners, who bought when prices were under $500K, can’t pay taxes on multi million properties. This is truly an attack on middle class homeowners of all colors like my neighbors who are nurses, teachers, mail carriers, bus drivers and elderly. If New York City is so concerned with fairness, let us lower the taxes in areas such as Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island.
9
This property tax proposal = demographic cleansing. This is what NYC has been doing and continues to do - to price out anyone in the middle income group.
14
yay! more property taxes for mayor deblahsio ... finally, he can make a small contribution to NYC!!
and, the ground hog nonsense ... spring equinox is conveniently on the calendar, it occurs in 46 days. no rodent needed.
3
NYC to middle-class co-op owners: DROP DEAD.
13
Pegging tax rates (which must be paid today) to a hypothetical market value is ludicrous. Once should not have to pay taxes on a gain that has not been realized, because that gain does not exist until the apartment is sold.
While there clearly must be an equitable distribution of taxes, linking them to unrealized property value is a disservice to all. Tax the gain once realized.
13
Property taxes are levied on a form of wealth, not income. Unrealized gains are taxed as income only upon sale and realization, but that has nothing to do with property taxes, which provide annual revenue for municipalities (and states) that is somewhat correlated with the wealth of the taxpayers.
Income taxes are inherently inefficient, as they disincentivize income-producing activities (and as for capital gains taxes on sale of a highly appreciated home, they incentivize hoarding til death and a basis step-up; bad for both the public fisc and the undersupplied housing market).
wealth taxes are generally efficient, as they encourage consumption or donation of accumulated wealth, either of which circulates it downstream and deters excess concentration of money-producing-money (or the negative externalities of money buying political influence).
we should want more wealth-focused taxes like the property tax, with a tradeoff in the form of fewer income-focused taxes. That would be good for everyone who isn't a trust fund baby who has never received a paycheck or filled out a W2 in their lives.
3
@Alex: As a middle-class person who is now retired after working my entire adult life, and as someone who paid off my own 30-year mortgage, I don't at all agree that I (and others in my situation) deserve to be soaked with higher property taxes in our senior years.
I represent the middle class in this city - a middle class that the city seems determined to destroy.
Many of us who own co-ops we purchased many decades ago do NOT have "wealth" - we have social security, our savings, and possibly some kind of pension (iffy). NYC is proposing to increase property taxes go up based on co-op sales prices nearby - which has zero to do with what middle-class retired people can afford, nor even with what any individual co-op apartment might sell for.
18
Question: will this make it harder for NYC borrowers to obtain new home mortgages? How does a lender assess debt to income ratio (of which property taxes are a component) when significantly higher property taxes are likely but unknown? Higher property taxes will also result in a decline in real estate values. How will appraisers arrive at a value for purposes of developing a loan to value ratio? People will seek to sell, causing a further deterioration in real estate values, which will result in less tax collected than forecasted. Does anyone really expect their real estate taxes will decline once this is full implemented?
10
Sounds like a great idea if they're trying to accelerate gentrification and have two types of neighborhood: lower income and very high income. We aren't there yet, but I guess that is what many are going for.
16
For me, any increase in property tax on my very modest pre-war will truly be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Goodbye, NYC.
19
I pay $26,000 a year in real estate taxes on unrenovated, not fancy, 1350 ft.² co-op inTribeca. I moved here before the neighborhood became so chic. I guess The City wants me to move out.
21
And I still work and I am not anywhere near retirement!
8
It's ironic that they use Park Slope as a benchmark since prices have been going down over the past few years. There are over 40 houses for sale there that have been on the market for over a year & don't move, even w/ several significant price reductions. Their owners would be pleased to get the City estimates of values.
9
New York City is not the only locality in New York with a perverse real property tax system. Property taxes throughout New York state are incomprehensible and unfair. Some homeowners and businesses pay a lot and others pay practically nothing. I live in the Southern Tier and we pay $7,500 in taxes per year on a house that is valued at $150,000. Localities in upstate New York have little or no local control on how their taxes are spent since over 90% of our county taxes go to pay unfunded state mandated programs.
13
The more I think about it, the more I suspect this plan is designed to demolish brownstone brooklyn and replace it with high-rises. After all, that is what Professor Vicky Been actually wants: The destruction of Historic Districts and their replacement by high rise towers (see her paper to that effect).
14
@Le
Yes - we need to destroy low rise development, especially of many areas that really aren't historic in nature, and replace it with more concentrated development!!!
What side of the progressive divide are you on?! This is a hot topic throughout the social justice world about how zoning and development restrictions are seriously impeding equity, growth and advancement for the young in the non-white in older urban core cities like NYC, Boston, SF, etc.
This is the true kind of socialist revolution we need! Bring it on!!!
The "social justice" movement is anything but. It's more like payback and free things.
Living on the "hallowed" grounds of the UWS and in Senator Robert Jackson's district, I can safely vouch for the fact that there are some VERY expensive homes up here and the people who own them would probably be in the position to take on a property tax increase.
But my rage squarely rests with those multi-billionaires who buy fiendishly expensive market-rate apartments as a pied-a-terre or tax-shelter, and get away with murder.
There's no way to make everybody happy with a tax increase, but some kind of equal distribution would be a good start.
17
"One resident, Mark Chalfin, bought a three-story home near Prospect Park for $125,000 in 1980.
"In the past two years, homes on either side of him sold for around $4 million each. Now, his home has a market value of $4.63 million, but his property taxes remain at about $12,000 a year, in large part because annual increases are capped by law."
And what makes anyone think that people like Mr. Chalfin have the income to pay a new hefty property tax? Just because one is sitting on four million doesn't mean that there's a cash flow for anything more than what one has been doing: maintaining the house and living a relatively simple life.
Someone will say: So let him move. Really? It's been his home for over forty years.
Or someone will say, Let him take out a reverse mortgage to pay his taxes. Well, reverse mortgages are not for the unwary and can be pretty problematic.
That same someone would be screaming bloody murder if a middle-class homeowner in Bed-Sty or Crown Heights had to sell his house because his property tax went up. Or even if someone else shrugged and said, So let him move.
A late cousin of mine bought a smallish Upper East Side coop cheap in the bad old 1970s. In later years, it was all he could do to pay the ever-rising and, indeed, to me, astronomical maintenance. And who would have wanted to purchase a smallish apartment with a sky-high maintenance? Someone might have said to my cousin, So sell. Not that easy.
33
@B.
Life is about choices. Some we make on our own, some are forced upon us.
There is nothing in the Constitution guaranteeing permanency of residency for perpetuity. Why, even nobles houses of Europe have seen themselves brought low by death and taxes - look at how many thousands of manor house were sold or demolished by the English upper class since the early 1900's.
As to Mr Chalfin, he could easily sell his house and buy a downsized apartment in his neighborhood and still have plenty of money in the bank. Same goes for many of the house rich, cash poor in NYC. In lower income areas, many of these are doubled up families where adult children should be helping their aged parents carry the cost of owning a home, not the rest of us through lower property taxes.
The rest of us New Yorkers are sick and tired of paying more and more through higher income taxes, sales taxes, subway fares, etc while entitled homeowners are paying as little as 1/3 of what they should be. We're all in this City together - we all need to be paying our equitable share.
10
Capital seeks efficiency. Selling at a profit and purchasing something more appropriate by size and costs is efficient. Railing about liquidity is not.
2
Lower-income families who are "doubled up" are doing just what you say: helping one another keep a roof over their heads.
8
On the property tax overhaul - hope for the best, but at worse expect that nothing will change with perhaps some very minor incremental changes.
As to this "partial homestead exemption", this should be considered very carefully. Homeowners who are house rich and cash poor are contributing to the constricted housing market here in NYC. Many of these homeowners are senior empty-nesters. If there were a more robust market of apartments available to them, to own or to rent, many could cash in and still afford to live out their golden years in their NYC neighborhood with dignity.
6
Or, it might be that they put their own sweat into their homes and love them, and it would break their hearts to move.
To many people, houses are beloved homes and not investments.
The "So let them move" crowd needs to rethink its glib mantra.
25
One problem in NY with selling is the way the roll-over tax works. It penalizes those who want to sell and buy a smaller less expensive home.
17