Posted on 02/21/2005 9:03:47 PM PST by TBP
AFTER struggling to fix up a brownstone in Harlem for the last 16 months, Meyghan Hill, a model and actress, and her husband, Daniel Scarola, a ballroom dancing instructor, are thinking about giving up and moving out. But what may drive them away is not the neighborhood, which they have come to love, nor their four-family house, where they have painstakingly stripped a century of varnish and paint from doors and balusters, but the shock of a tax notice they received last month from the New York City Department of Finance.
The notice indicated that the taxes on their 19-foot-wide house, only $4,100 when they bought it, would be going up in July to about $23,600, a fivefold increase of $19,000 - more, they say, than they can possibly afford after paying their hefty mortgage. Right now, they have no tenants.
Like thousands of other owners of homes and small apartment buildings, they have been abruptly caught up in a new campaign by city tax officials to enforce laws that allow them to raise taxes sharply when owners file for permits for major renovations of older buildings.
These large increases are being imposed at a time when state law requires the city to slowly phase in regular assessment increases for other homeowners over years or even a decade or more in some cases.
"We are panicked and we can't afford it, and if we sell, the price will be lower because of all the taxes," Ms. Hill said. "We are being punished for fixing up the building and trying to improve the neighborhood."
It turned out that while Ms. Hill was working on her modest renovation, with $60,000 in construction funds after a second mortgage fell through, city tax assessors were busily reviewing her filing with the Department of Buildings. The filing showed that she planned to convert a single-room-occupancy building to a four-family dwelling, and using its standard construction cost guidelines, the city increased the value of her home by $370,000.
The largest tax increases were in small apartment buildings and four-family brownstones, which pay a much higher tax rate than one- to three-family homes. For every $100 of improvements, they are being charged $5.50 in extra property tax, compared with 91 cents for owners of one- to three-family houses.
In short, the couple and other brownstone owners like them have been caught up this tax season in the netherworld of New York City's property tax system, which under state law protects the low taxes of some groups of taxpayers while allowing huge increases for others.
A review of tax assessment records shows that about 460 of these four-family houses and small apartment buildings were facing tax increases because of renovations, nearly three times the number the year before, including more than 260 row houses. Taxes are scheduled to rise by $10,000 or higher in more than 200 of these buildings, including 76 row houses, an increase from 20 the year before. The figures exclude buildings with city tax exemptions.
Martha E. Stark, the city finance commissioner, confirmed that in the last few months the department had reassigned 40 assessors, mainly from the Manhattan office, to catch up with a backlog of permits from several years ago, and to impose assessments for them.
She said that she was aware of concerns that the high assessment increases might lead some homeowners to delay maintenance or renovations and allow properties to decay, but that her assessors were fairly applying existing state property tax law. "Our job is to reflect the market value in property under state law," she said. "If this is unfair, we need to work to change the law."
Town houses on the East Side, West Side and downtown also saw their taxes rise, but the greatest increases, both in numbers and percentage of tax increased, appeared to be in Harlem and in parts of Brooklyn like Bedford-Stuyvesant; both are in the midst of a wave of renovation and reinvestment in older buildings.
This increase punishes people for wroking hard to reclaim rundown properties and make them nicer. It punishes people for upgrading the neighborhood. That is a silly, counterproductive policy that serves only to keep poor neighborhoods poor longer.
That may well be by design, as we know liberals profit from other people's misery.
Thank you Mayor Mike! Now all the "brownstoners" will simply cash out and start fixing up similar properties in Jersey City.
Didn't Bloomberg only switch to the GOP because he couldn't win the Democratic primary? So this is no surprise at all.
Yikes, $2K/month in property taxes is insane.
I'm looking at this from the other side. Any landlord in the city of New York who pays $4,100 in taxes on a four-family apartment building is shafting the other taxpayers of the city (including me) in a big way. Just think of all the public services these families use in New York (including 40,000 police officers, the best fire department in the nation, the most expensive school system, etc,) -- and ask yourself who the hell is supposed to pay for it if the people who live in the city don't.
NY City needs to take a chainsaw to its municipal government, whether that be family services, legal aid, the police department, etc.
Even worse. I don't even live in this city (I work there), but I get to pay taxes to support all the folks who do.
Ahh, the "commuter tax." Gotta love it! :-)
They can always forego their proposed upgrade in the occupancy of the building. The article gives the impression that the tax increase is tied directly to their conversion of the building to a four-family home.
They add 370,000 in value supposedly, and get a 19,000 tax increase. That's a 5.1% tax rate. That's insane.
I agree with you 100%, but if the city is going to be a Marxist toilet, then everyone ought to pay the price.
Does that policy make the slightest sense at all, in anyone's universe?
That's not much different than what you see all over the state of New York. A few weeks ago I saw a post from a Freeper in upstate New York who was paying $5,000 in property taxes on a home with an assessed value of something like $90,000.
Anyone that choses to live in that crime-ridden, liberal ruled helhole gets what they asked for.
Don't like it? Move to a red state.
The woman was on Hannity. He asked if this has made her more Republican. She said no. My sympathy level dropped significantly.
Glad I live in FLY-OVER Country
That's not unusual. Most municipalities treat "private homes" differently than "apartment buildings." In my town, I think anything over two families is considered an "apartment building" . . . it looks like New York uses three families as the limit instead of two.
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