In mid-March the city announced an amazing statistic: the delinquency rate for property taxes plummeted to a five-year low of 3.62 percent.
The Department of Finance points to its $400 rebate carrot as a contributing factor. Indeed, because any delinquency of $25 or more on Oct. 15, 2004 would have nixed the booty, an astounding 40,156 homeowners ponied up to get the money back.
Additionally, the strong sales market caused homes to appreciate so that others could obtain homeowners loans at lower rates than Finance charges to ensure payment of taxes.
Finance also began taking credit card payments online which means these folks may find their home belonging to Master- Card or Visa somewhere down the pike. Don’t take that literally, but at the high interest rates those cards charge, allowing the tab to pile up for more than miles could cause later financial disaster.
But here’s where I have a problem. This apparent triumph obscures the fact that the city is purging its lists of properties owned by low-income residents, a good many of which may have been obtained through legal manipulations that took advantage of old tenant protection regulations.
Until reforms in the late 1990s, New York’s housing laws were vulnerable to significant abuse by tenants, often at the expense of middle-market property owners, rather than the abusive landlords who were the object of this legislation.
Way back in the 1970s, tenants did not pay their rents. In fact, for more than 50 years, city tenants were trained by ludicrous rent-control laws and ill-informed lawmakers to not pay rent.
It was a well thought out game halted finally by the Pataki administration, which administers the State Division of Housing and Community Renewal and oversaw rent-regulated units.
The game consisted of renting an apartment and promptly finding any reason not to pay, all fully backed by the city and state laws. Complaints to Department of Housing and Community Renewal were almost routinely handled in the tenants’ favor.
The fabled treble damages award was the ultimate payoff for a litigious tenant: after many years of court wrangling, a suit against a landlord could result in the tenant obtaining thousands and thousands of dollars in refunds of overpayments plus the additional treble damages from the apartment building owner.
When I call these laws unfair, to put it into perspective: I am not talking about infamous property owners who actually deserve the moniker “slumlord,” and do not supply heat or hot water or make any attempt to fix what’s broken. I’m talking about the typical businessman or woman who owned the properties as investments and knew they had to make repairs or not get the rents due.
Small buildings had it worst: if two units in a ten-unit building didn’t pay their rents, it could cause a catastrophic failure whereby the oil bill couldn’t get paid, the electric bill wouldn’t get paid, and eventually the property taxes.
Like chumps, the city took back these buildings which could not support themselves, and cost the city millions. Eventually, someone decided to “sell” these buildings to the poor tenants. They paid a nominal $250 to become the “owner” of their unit. Then they paid very minimal rents and were supposed to reenter the tax rolls.
A tiny little line in the law forbid the city to sell the “tax liens” to other parties, so the buildings stayed in the hands of tenants. That’s because bulk buyers of these liens actually end up foreclosing on and selling some of the properties.
Meanwhile, the city was spending more on these buildings than it would have received from the back taxes in the first place. According to an Arthur Anderson report cited by the City Council Finance Committee on the increase in tax lien sales, “Although each in rem property owner only owed an average of $36,000 in back taxes when the City took title, each in rem property was costing the City an average of $2.2 million to acquire, manage and prepare for sale.”
Back in 2001, I tried to look at this issue for the prior tax year. Eventually, the city’s Department of Housing Development and Preservation advised me they had removed over 1,700 properties from the lien sale. Many of these were Housing Development and Finance Corporation properties that were supposed to have returned to the tax rolls, and instead effectively continued to avoid paying taxes.
According to HPD, in 2004, 375 HDFC’s were excluded from the lien sale, owing $74,393,365. This year, 302 buildings were excluded, including 216 that were excluded the year before. Those 216 owed $57,816,131 in 2004 and increased to owing $63,317,500 this year. The total 302 HDFC exclusions currently owe $79,740,650.98.
“We tend to exclude the same HFDC’s every year,” said Carol Abrams, a spokesperson for HPD.
[In contrast, a spokesperson for the city’s Finance Department did not think they could supply me with the information, and thought I would have to submit a Freedom of Information Act request.]
Remember, the city and state encouraged these people not to pay rent, which put the private owners into tax foreclosure. That meant properties were handed over to these very same tenants for bupkis, and the new “owners” have not renentered the tax rolls. In fact, the City Council and city agencies also continue to provide them help with normal, ongoing maintenance issues, such as the money to repair a roof, because these buildings are simply not functioning financially.
The in rem program removed properties from the City’s tax rolls for an average period of 19 years, as they vanished from the City’s list of tax delinquency properties, artificially inflating the tax collection rate.
So while the Finance Department touts the low numbers of properties on the lien sale, it’s worth remembering that numbers may not lie, but statistics can certainly fudge the truth.
However, it’s not all bad news. Some progress is being made in dealing with these properties, which will be examined in next month’s column