BY BEN BRACHFELD
The city’s highly controversial
“tax lien sale” expired
on Monday, but the future is
uncertain for a program long
derided as predatory towards
communities of color, particularly
those who have built
wealth through homeownership.
Legislation authorizing
the sale, which dates back to
the administration of then-
Mayor Rudy Giuliani, sunsetted
on Monday — meaning
the sale will not happen again
unless the City Council and
Mayor explicitly authorize a
new one.
City Council Speaker Adrienne
Adams said on Monday
that she would like to put
the sale in the past and enact
“new solutions” to replace it.
Mayor Eric Adams campaigned
on ending the sale,
and on Tuesday, a rep for the
mayor said Hizzoner is committed
to “exploring alternatives”
to the sale.
“Mayor Adams believes
the City should explore alternatives
COURIER L 6 IFE, MARCH 4-10, 2022
to the current lien
sale that ensure the city can
continue collecting its debts
while helping homeowners —
particularly Black and Brown
homeowners who have been
disproportionately impacted
by the pandemic — retain
ownership,” a city hall spokesperson
told Brooklyn Paper.
Longtime advocates for
ending the sale, like the East
New York Community Land
Trust, are cautiously optimistic.
Debra Ack, the group’s
secretary, told Brooklyn Paper
that she is glad to see the
program sunsetting for now,
but that at the end of the day,
the city could still quietly reauthorize
it if it’s looking for a
quick buck.
“We still need to work on
legislation so that it can not
ever be reauthorized,” Ack
said. “They could do anything.
Just because today
it’s sunset doesn’t mean in a
month, three, four, six months
down the line, they may go,
‘oh, okay, let’s bring back the
tax lien sale.’ No, we don’t
want that. We want it to die altogether.”
The sale was created to
farm out the collection of unpaid
property tax debt to the
private sector. Every year,
the city would hold the sale
where delinquent homeowners’
debt was sold at a discount
to a private trust, which could
then hire private servicers to
collect on the debt, often adding
steep interest and fees
that only make the debt even
harder to pay back. The trust
was also empowered to eventually
foreclose on people’s
homes. The most recent lien
sale, which may prove to be
the last, took place in December
of last year, after a twoyear
COVID-induced delay.
The sale allowed the city
to easily and quickly generate
millions of dollars in revenue
on debt that would otherwise
take signifi cant resources and
manpower to collect. But yearafter
year, the liens sold to
the trust disproportionately
belonged to homeowners in
lower-income communities,
Members of the East New York Community Land Trust hold a banner at
the city’s Racial Justice Commission meeting. Photo by Ben Brachfeld
and communities-of-color in
particular, and many homeowners
came to see it as an engine
of displacement and harassment,
and a destroyer of
generational wealth particularly
among Black homeowners.
For those debtors who don’t
get foreclosed on, the pressure
of being unable to pay the
bills and constant harassment
from bill collectors often leads
people to sell their homes.
“The trust is only interested
in making money off
of someone’s misfortune,
someone’s debt, then acquiring
the home and fl ipping it,”
Ack said. “The predators will
come out, ring people’s doorbells,
knock on their doors,
call them, follow them I’ve
been told, and try to pressure
them to sell their homes.”
Those who do sell their homes
often do so “out of fear of being
totally put out on the street.”
When distressed homeowners
are backed into a corner
and sell their homes, the
owners are not the only ones
displaced: oftentimes, so are
any tenants who may be leasing
units on the property, who
may be forced out by a new
owner intent on fl ipping the
building or bringing in new
clientele.
In the 2021 sale, the
Brooklyn City Council district
with the most liens sold
Controversial tax lien sale
comes to a bitter end, for now