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It’s January, and New York City homeowners know what that means: Time to warily watch the mailbox to see just how far our property-tax bills will rise this year.On Tuesday, Gov.Hochul dashed our hopes — yet again — that Albany will step up to make our out-of-whack taxes fairer.Another State of the State speech has come and gone, and once again property tax reform was left off the proverbial to-do list.
Since 2018, the Property Tax Reform Commission that we helped create has fought for specific ways the state Legislature can make our system fairer, simpler and more transparent — to no avail.There’s nothing like basic, obvious, in-your-face unfairness to bring two people like us, the City Council’s Democrat Finance Chair and its Republican Minority Leader, together.Unfortunately, that’s the kind of blatant inequity we have in our property tax system.A state-mandated cap on the annual growth of assessed value, unchecked and untouched for nearly 40 years, has created different effective tax rates on small homeowners from neighborhood to neighborhood.That’s how you get a working-class family in a $700K home in Bay Ridge or on the South Shore of Staten Island paying three times the property taxes of a wealthy family in a $5 million brownstone in tony Manhattan. Tax classification quirks and disparities mean working-class co-op shareholders sometimes get hit harder than the owners of 1- and 2-family homes — while those in luxury condo units can get some of the sweetest deals around.On top of these and the many other glaring problems and calcified inequities, our property taxes are so esoteric and opaque that it feels intentional.Despite the annual Notice of Property Value homeowners will be receiving soon, and the city Department of Finance’s efforts to talk people through their tax calculations and help them apply for benefits, most New Yorkers never fully understand how our system works.It’s not because we’re stupid, it’s because it was design...