“The old system enabled debt collectors and hedge funds to make millions at the expense of New York families and neighborhoods,” said Paula Segal, Senior Staff Attorney at TakeRoot Justice.
Although New York’s tax lien sale is intended to incentivize property owners to pay, it can pressure owners to sell to speculators or cut corners with maintenance, without oversight from the city and at the expense of tenants.
Rents came down for, like, a month or two, and then everyone started trying to make up for what they lost,” said Paula Segal, an attorney with TakeRoot Justice, which offers legal services to small commercial businesses.
Small businesses often given cheaper rents for the first year of a lease as an incentive, but then “it doubles in year two because the landlord is trying to make up what they lost during Covid.”
Program Overview The Designed by Community Fellowship was a paid fellowship and project funding opportunity to support community members in designing and developing hyper-localized solutions related to the COVID-19 crisis for and with NYCHA communities. The Service Design Studio at
NYCHA Real Talk is a train-the-trainers program to support community members in informing their neighbors on how to develop hyper-localized strategies related to public housing, land use and healthy homes for and with NYCHA communities.
In January 2021, in response to advocacy the Abolish the NYC Tax Lien Sale Coalition, the NYC City Council passed legislation charting the course for ending New York City’s tax lien sale (Local Law 24 of 2021).
We are looking for partners who will be able to review translated materials and conduct test workshops with their members in the target language. Materials address housing conditions and NYCHA’s privatization schemes.
The lawsuit describes the slight-of-hand that the City Planning Commission used to incorrectly certify the developers' application to start the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) without an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).
If the owner still could not pay back the lien, Segal said, they could “decide that they want to transfer the value of their land to the community land trust as a way of resolving the debt.”
