In Brownstones, Taxes Suddenly Rise
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Susan Farley for The New York Times A HOUSE IN After Meyghan Hill and Daniel Scarola did some renovations on their new home, they got a notice that their taxes will go up by $19,000 a year. Theirs is a four-family house, taxed at a much higher rate than other houses in the city. |
By JOSH BARBANEL
Published: February 20, 2005
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FTER struggling to fix
up a brownstone in
The notice
indicated that the taxes on their 19-foot-wide house, only $4,100 when they
bought it, would be going up in July to about $23,600, a fivefold increase of $19,000
- more, they say, than they can possibly afford after paying their hefty
mortgage. Right now, they have no tenants.
Like thousands
of other owners of homes and small apartment buildings, they have been abruptly
caught up in a new campaign by city tax officials to enforce laws that allow
them to raise taxes sharply when owners file for permits for major renovations
of older buildings.
These large
increases are being imposed at a time when state law requires the city to
slowly phase in regular assessment increases for other homeowners over years or
even a decade or more in some cases.
"We are
panicked and we can't afford it, and if we sell, the price will be lower
because of all the taxes," Ms. Hill said. "We are being punished for
fixing up the building and trying to improve the neighborhood."
It turned out
that while Ms. Hill was working on her modest renovation, with $60,000 in
construction funds after a second mortgage fell through, city tax assessors
were busily reviewing her filing with the Department of Buildings. The filing
showed that she planned to convert a single-room-occupancy building to a
four-family dwelling, and using its standard construction cost guidelines, the
city increased the value of her home by $370,000.
The largest tax
increases were in small apartment buildings and four-family brownstones, which
pay a much higher tax rate than one- to three-family homes. For every $100 of
improvements, they are being charged $5.50 in extra property tax, compared with
91 cents for owners of one- to three-family houses.
In short, the
couple and other brownstone owners like them have been caught up this tax
season in the netherworld of
A review of tax
assessment records shows that about 460 of these four-family houses and small
apartment buildings were facing tax increases because of renovations, nearly
three times the number the year before, including more than 260 row houses.
Taxes are scheduled to rise by $10,000 or higher in more than 200 of these
buildings, including 76 row houses, an increase from 20 the year before. The
figures exclude buildings with city tax exemptions.
Martha E.
Stark, the city finance commissioner, confirmed that in the last few months the
department had reassigned 40 assessors, mainly from the
She said that
she was aware of concerns that the high assessment increases might lead some
homeowners to delay maintenance or renovations and allow properties to decay,
but that her assessors were fairly applying existing state property tax law.
"Our job is to reflect the market value in property under state law,"
she said. "If this is unfair, we need to work to change the law."
Town houses on
the East Side, West Side and downtown also saw their taxes rise, but the
greatest increases, both in numbers and percentage of tax increased, appeared
to be in Harlem and in parts of Brooklyn like Bedford-Stuyvesant; both are in
the midst of a wave of renovation and reinvestment in older buildings.