A pox on all our houses

Hiding in plain sight, a profound injustice afflicts New York City, so woven into its fabric that it no neighborhood stands untouched and city government itself rests on its foundation. Property tax assessments — yielding $28 billion a year and racing upward at more than 5% annually — fall on homeowners and (through their landlords) renters with such extreme inequity, and so little rhyme or reason, that a judge last month told Mayor de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo that the status quo may well not stand.

Watching the receipts grow and the inequities persist under a mayor who claims to care more than any of his predecessors about economic fairness, we consider it imperative to explain to New Yorkers, in language as plain as we can manage in this space over the coming weeks, the terribly tangled tax mess in which the city is trapped. Where to begin? Homeowners in working-class and majority-minority neighborhoods, from Woodlawn to Canarsie to Stapleton, routinely pay higher effective tax rates than well-off owners of Park Slope and Upper West Side brownstones, among them Bill de Blasio.

We’re not talking about a little discrepancy on the margins; poorer New Yorkers in one part of the can be forced to pay, as a percentage of their property value, three, four, even six times what wealthier New Yorkers in another part of the city pay.

Homes that recently sold for the same price get tax bills thousands of dollars apart, even though their taxes are supposed to be based on property values. Hell if homeowners know how the Department of Finance determines those values.

Meantime, New York City taxes rental apartments more severely than any city in the nation, exacerbating our affordable housing shortage and driving up rents.

Ritzy co-ops on Park and Fifth Aves. pay a fraction of what humble outer-borough shareholders shoulder as a share of the price their property would sell for.

All of these inequities and more, the combined result of statutes passed over decades and more recent local decisionmaking, run counter to the state Constitution and state law, which assure uniform assessments grounded in some semblance of market reality.

Since lawsuits have a way of clarifying priorities, de Blasio and City Council Speaker Corey Johnson summoned a commission that’s been holding public hearings in every borough (next up: the Bronx on Thursday).

The Legislature and governor own this problem, too, and need to do their share.

So maddeningly complex is the system, so many its perversions, that we will take our time spooling out the insanities and inequities one by one in future columns.

The mayor who aims to make this “the fairest big city in America,” and a governor who talks almost as much about fairness, owe wronged taxpayers and tenants a vast debt.