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.
Well California doesn't, and the policy that does is nutter. It is kind of a snob zoning ordinance. The public policy implications suck any way you look at it.
I have this strange picture in my head of a character whose visage is a cross between that of Scrooge McDuck and the Parker Brothers' Millionaire sitting in the middle of a bleak block in downtown New York City throwing little green houses and red hotels in the air while kicking huge piles of Monopoly money with both of his spat-clad feet while the hydrants drip droplets of rusty water on the dust in the deserted streets.
New York City is going through some very interesting times right now. The residents of the city used to pay property taxes that were much lower than their suburban counterparts, due to the substantial property tax revenues collected on commercial buildings in the city. But every time a major employer threatens to pack up and leave the city, the government throws all kinds of tax abatements and other incentives their way in an attempt to keep them. Someone has to make up for that lost revenue, and to be honest with you I really don't have a problem passing the tax burden to the people who live in the damn city.
You are a prophet!
It's not necessarily a "snob zoning ordinance" at all . . . it's an incentive provided by the municipality to ensure that the number of homeowners exceeds the number of renters to whatever extent possible. New York City is a perfect example of what happens when most of the residents don't own their homes -- the place turns into a dump.
ROTLOL!!
Communist apparatchiks in NYC government always inventing new ways to confiscate property.
Anybody who still lives in NYC ought to have his head examined.
That policy dictates that folks with lower middle class incomes will live in slum housing or public housing, or not live in the city. It is a recipe for a third world city.
As I said, snob zoning. No renters need apply. But the odd thing is that NYC does it in Harlem. I don't understand NY. The place is a corrupt nut house.
A cautionary tale on would-be Carleton Sheets up in Harlem.
Folks with lower middle class incomes haven't been paying their fair share of taxes in New York City in about 100 years. I don't understand why a tax policy that goes some way toward ensuring that every resident of the city pays the cost of living in that city is a bad thing.
BTW $10,000 per student per school year works out to about $55/day/student or about $10.00/hour of actual class. I think that's about 50% higher than our highly rated schools that are in relatively high cost areas. Yet another example of failed Gov't services IMHO.
That's not snob zoning -- that's called protecting your municipality from an influx of people who don't have a vested interest in the stability of your municipality.
If NYC got rid of gun control that only disarms the honest citizen then they wouldn't need 40,000 cops. As for the most expensive school system, don't forget to add it's also the most corrupt and most incompetent school system. And I'm sure the city will tell this homeowner that they can only charge so much rent, so they're being squeezed from both sides. Owning rental property in NYC is a lose-lose situation for the landlord. But she still doesn't want to be a Republican, so she's somewhat at fault too. She allows the crooks in office to rob her. And yes, I know Bloomberg is a Republican, but in name only.
The difference, though, is that at least the people who live there would have the ability to affect tax policy through the democratic process. So let them do it. I have to pay a city income tax, and I really have no say in the matter because I don't live there -- I only work there.
Which explains why cops and firemen live in Orange County, some even defying the law and going out to the Poconos, while single-mom secretaries either live in the projects or with their parents.
Owning rental property in NYC is only a lose-lose situation if the property is specifically covered under the city's rent control or rent stabilization guidelines -- and most apartments in NYC are not. There's no indication that this is the case in this situation. In fact, this landlord can probably get at least $2,500 per month for each of the four apartments in that building -- which means a total rental income of $120,000 per year.
Carleton Sheets, as in "get rich quick throw no down payment" Carleton Sheets?
That's the kind of nanny-state racket you see repeated in almost every major city in the Northeast. Many of the people who work for government live in places outside the city where the cost of living is so much lower -- mainly because places like Orange Couty and the Poconos don't have as many people working for government.
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