Fix property taxes, spare homeowners

We started 2020 by finally making some progress on reforming New York City’s broken property tax system, but COVID-19 halted our efforts in its tracks. Now, with the city slogging through billions in brutal budget cuts, we must break from the history of city leaders looking to the middle class as a personal ATM for closing budget gaps.

Unfortunately, we’re headed the opposite way. Last month, the City Council voted to add interest collection to property tax bills that go unpaid, despite the fact that many homeowners are unable to make their payments due to the pandemic. The Council had an opportunity to alleviate the burden on homeowners, but instead opted for sprinkling a little pay-day loan ethics on top of the property tax system and exacerbating the unfairness and capriciousness which have become its hallmark.

Every homeowner is acutely aware and terrified that plunging tax revenue from sales, tourism and hotels is making them a very ripe target for carrying even more of the tax burden.

Now, with legislative operations slowly returning back to normal, we must pick up where we left off with property tax reform. We cannot allow Mayor de Blasio to use this crisis and bureaucratic inertia to continue to kick the can down the road, regardless of the consequences to families who are struggling to maintain what they have.

Homeowners and renters who have been paying an outsized share of the city’s property tax burden have been remarkably patient for years. There is no more time. It’s too easy to let this go for another year, too easy to let our colleagues off the hook now to campaign for new offices next year, while putting off the single most important issue to thousands of families struggling just to keep what they have. How many times have we heard this will be fixed after the next election?

Homeowners are a hardy bunch. When the city plants trees on their sidewalks which cause the concrete to buckle and break apart, it’s homeowners who pay. When homeowners sort and tie up their recyclables neatly and place them at the curb and a stranger tosses a glass bottle into cardboard recycling, it’s homeowners who pay the fine. Their resilience should be admired by our city instead of being exploited to saddle them with more than their share of the burden.

Maybe it’s not the case in Manhattan, but out here in the exotic “outer boroughs,” homeowners are not the super-rich. They are seniors on fixed incomes, retired city workers and working families that are the second or third generation of their family to live in their childhood home. They need relief just like everyone else.

Sometimes we get the feeling that some of our colleagues hear “property taxes” and think we’re talking about the mighty 1%. That’s a joke, and in many ways a sick one.

That property taxes as a share of city revenue will rise is as certain as the sun will. How we collectively decide to share the pain should be up to every New Yorker. But it won’t be unless we make our values and expectations of fairness clear. It is up to homeowners to make their voices heard now and refuse to be crushed by evaporating revenue streams simply because they are the most convenient target.

All cities experience hard times. The difference between a real city, one for which we all feel a shared sense of pride and community, and one which exists as a legal definition on stacks of paper, is that when you experience hard times in a shared community, everyone assumes part of the burden so that their community makes it through the crisis intact. In a city without that binding sense of collective interest and values, it’s every man for himself; may the most clout win.

Which one do we want to be?

Brannan represents Bay Ridge and other Brooklyn neighborhoods and Borelli represents Staten Island in the City Council.