Testimony: End Tax Lien Sales and Promote Community Ownership
Samuel Stein
Thank you to the Mayor’s Office for holding today’s hearing on the future of the New York City tax lien sale and the ideas that were put forward by the Tax Lien Sale Taskforce participants. My name is Samuel Stein. I am a senior policy analyst at the Community Service Society of New York (CSS), a nonprofit organization that combines research, advocacy and direct service to advance the causes of alleviating poverty and pursuing racial justice in our city and state.
Given our mission, ending the tax lien sale has been on CSS’s agenda for a long time. From our perspective, this Giuliani-era policy represents five simultaneous and compounding problems:
- It accelerates the loss of equity in low-income communities of color
- It fuels speculation in the housing market
- It lessens the city’s leverage over delinquent landlords and subjects their tenants to ongoing harmful conditions
- It squanders opportunities to create much-needed affordable housing and community facilities on tax-delinquent lots
- And it privatizes core aspects of city government
For these reasons and more, we have joined our partners in the Abolish the NYC Tax Lien Sale Coalition – including Task Force member Debra Ack – to call for an end to this exploitive practice and the development of equitable alternatives. Our coalition has made the case that a) New York City’s bulk tax lien sale is an aberration among US cities; b) it has deeply harmful impacts on low-income communities, communities of color, and seniors; and c) a public alternative can be crafted to keep low-income homeowners in their homes while providing pathways for Community Land Trusts and other means of community ownership.
We were pleased to see several of these ideas represented in the Task Force ideas document. The proposed “Lien Bank,” for example, presents a promising alternative, as does the discussion of ending securitization. However, each of these good ideas is proceeded by the phrase “With no consensus yet” and accompanied by several proposals to only moderately adjust the status quo.
But the status quo is untenable and cannot be fixed with marginal changes. Our coalition’s participation in this task force represents a good-faith effort to think through alternatives to this broken system. This taskforce’s final recommendations should not call for the preservation of the lien sale, but rather for a new and better way of dealing with delinquency. The Abolish the NYC Tax Lien Sale Coalition has been clear on this point from the very beginning. We at CSS urge the Task Force to heed the call to abolish the tax lien sale once and for all and leverage public resources to preserve and expand community ownership. This bold action is the only way to meet the severity of the injustice and the challenge of this moment.