Fair taxes can’t wait

Ravenous for revenue, New York City and state leaders have long indulged an injustice against working-class neighborhoods to the benefit of wealthier ones, baked into the city’s byzantine property tax code. Mayor de Blasio balks, but a class-action lawsuit filed in Manhattan Supreme Court Tuesday could be a galvanizing force for change, already shaking a complacent City Hall out of its stupor.

Represented by lawyers including former New York Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, fresh from his panel calling to close Rikers Island, homeowners and landlords seek to end a cockamamie system that has owners of million-dollar homes in places like brownstone Brooklyn — including the mayor himself — paying far less in property taxes than owners in far humbler hoods.

They allege the system perpetuates racial as well as economic divides, backed by powerful analysis from former city Department of Finance Commissioner Martha Stark finding that the city burdens homeowners in majority non-white districts with an extra $344 million a year in taxes, or $844 for the average owner, over counterparts in majority-white neighborhoods.

That’s because state law caps the amounts assessments may rise in any one year — insulating old-timers in booming neighborhoods from unaffordable tax spikes but also amounting to a generous gift from other taxpayers to gentrifiers.

Also overburdened are landlords and tenants of rentals, suffering tax burdens shirked by luxury co-ops and condos that pay far less than their fair share, because the city insists on taxing them as though they were rent-regulated apartments.

Wrong and wrong. And the city’s self-ordained progressive leaders know better.

In 2014, Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito said she would have a commission find a fix — only to drop the effort. That’s more than de Blasio, content until now to avoid a politically radioactive project prone to leave many homeowners unhappily paying more than they currently do.

Rattled by the lawsuit, de Blasio now declares himself “ready to tackle it” — but only if and after he gets reelected in November.

No, Mr. Mayor. Now.