Black Homeowners Unfairly Targeted By City Tax Program: Cornegy

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK — A de Blasio administration housing policy could be unfairly seizing homes from people of color, City Council members said at a City Hall hearing Monday.

Bed-Stuy City Councilman Robert Cornegy accused the Department of Housing Preservation and Development of using the Third Party Transfer program — which allows the city to seize buildings with due taxes and fees — to target historically black areas, such as Brooklyn, and not white ones.

"Are there really no distressed buildings in Staten Island?" Cornegy asked HPD Commissioner Louise Carroll. "Can you explain how that can not be seen as racially insensitive?"

Cornegy, the Committee on Housing chairperson, also raised concerns about seizures of Housing Development Fund Corp apartments, which were handed over to tenants in the 1970s through a program that transferred ownership of poorly kept buildings in neighborhoods that now face gentrification.

"Many of these stakeholders put time and money into their properties when the city wanted nothing to do with them," said Cornegy. "There was no concern at any point that we would transfer that much equity or wealth to zero in that much time?

"I ask as a human being because these are people's lives."

Carroll testified TPT serves only as a tax enforcement mechanism for properties that owe more than $1,000 and that homeowners were given three years and hundreds of opportunities to clear their debts before HPD seized a building, which owed about $800,000 on average.

"When we do the selection we are not looking at racial data," Carroll said. "We're looking at properties that owe the greatest amount to the city."

But Bronx Councilman Ritchie Torres disputed Carroll's testimony.

Torres said his Committee on Investigations found seven of the 420 buildings claimed in the most recent round owed less than the $1,000, the city's minimum requirement.

"There is something arbitrary about targeting a building for simply be at the wrong place at the wrong time," said Torres.

He also argued Carroll's characterization of the program contradicted past descriptions of TPT, from the Department of Finance and Mayor de Blasio, as a means to claim "distressed properties" in "blighted" neighborhoods.

"We did not pluck these ideas out of thin air," said Torres. "We're quoting your own policy makers."

The hearing comes seven months after Cornegy helped homeowner Marlene Saunders, 74, reclaim her Crown Heights brownstone from the city, who mistakenly seized her home through TPT because of a record-keeping error, which Carroll apologized for during the hearing.

"We will look at this program completely, soup to nuts," said Carroll. "I assure you as a cochair of this committee we're going to work to figure out what the right criteria should be."