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.
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.
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.
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.
A cautionary tale on would-be Carleton Sheets up in Harlem.
"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."
Yep. It is a myth that we pay low taxes here in NYC. IT will also make destroy the value of real estate, since the real costs are always the taxes and maintenance fees.
2k a month is taxes along ? It won't be long now, this country is going to implode on itself. And, bigger is not better, we shall soon find out how true that statement is.
They vote the politicians in, they get the taxes they deserve. What can you say?
Of course. No good dead goes unpunished.
Admittedly, I did not review this in detail, but I saw the woman on H&C last night. She said they paid $850k for the property and put $60k plus their labor into it.
A tax of $23,000 on something probably worth about $900k is about 2.6%, which is probably not unreasonably for a super-high tax area.
My question is why the taxes were low to begin with.
And, what should the taxes be on a million dollar, income producing property?
This is just a surcharge for the privelege of living in Harlem and accessing their diversity.
Remembering this makes the buy vs. rent equation a lot easier to untangle, especially in areas like New York and California where prices have run way ahead of rents and your monthly mortgage/tax/insurance bill comes out to about twice the rental rate. As long as the government favors renters and punishes owners, the answer is easy.
And as for the old saw about making your landlord rich...well, today buying in an overheated, liberal-governed market, just makes some mortgage broker (and worse, some local government) twice as rich. Rent, stay flexible, buy investment property when appropriate, and don't be fooled by all this "American Dream" nonsense. It's the greatest method ever devised for parting fools from their money. ;)
Blame Bloomberg all you want, but the scheme for taxing real property in NYC comes not from Bloomberg, but from state statute passed years ago in Albany. Perhaps Bloomberg is guilty for enforcing the law as written, and perhaps the best way to change bad law is to experience the harsh reality of the law when enforced.
With that said, residential real property tax rates in NYC are relatively low compared to what we pay in the burbs with limited services. Read the real estate section in Saturday's New York Post or Sunday's New York Slimes, and you will see real property taxes in the $2,000 to $6,000 range on properties selling from $500,000 to $3 million in some of the hottest neighborhoods in NYC. Compare that to the burbs where we pay $10,000 or more on properties selling at $500,000, and NYC taxes are a bargain. Oh, and BTW, the $10,000 a year that we pay in the suburbs buys us a part-time volunteer fire department, an overweight, underworked, and totally unnecessary police department, and some of the worse public schools in the country. And on top of the $10,000 per year, we still have to pay for our own sanitation and private school tuition,
How much you wanna bet that this "model and actress" and her "ballroom dancing instructor" husband vote Democrat? Or the other New York urbanites who are suddenly getting (even more) taxed into oblivion? And now what? They move out and infect some other place? I just hope they stay out of Pennsylvania - - we got enough scumbags here as it is, thank you.
Say I move into a house that I buy for $200,000, with an annual property tax of $4,000. It is a single-family home. I then put a deck on the back, maybe redo the kitchen. The local municipality comes along, reassesses it, and tells me my taxes will now be $6,000. Why? How is the increase justified? My house does not cost the town one extra penny, I have placed no additional burden on it.
The answer, of course, is that the government basically assumes that if you can afford to improve your property, then you can afford to give them a bit more "protection" money. But this ignores the fact that I am already punished whenever my income goes up by having to pay more in income tax.
Taxation as it stands today is a twisted mess.