Over the last several months, I have written multiple times to the New York City Office of Management and Budget (OMB) about how the speculative nature of the New York City real estate market has caused property values to balloon at the expense of local residents. This, in turn, has caused an exponential increase in property taxes because  comparable assessments rise to such a degree that long-time residents who own their homes are unable to keep up and risk losing them. I represent a community that has experienced rapid gentrification. The middle-income individuals and families who purchased homes in the 1970s and 80s, working to revitalize Greenwich Village and Lower Manhattan when New York City was dealing with urban blight and population loss, are today the victims of their own success.

Because of this problem that is very real to my constituents I submitted testimony in April 2019 to the OMB’s Advisory Commission on Property Tax Reform asking for the City to reassess how it evaluates property taxes and look into the option of creating a circuit-breaker formula that would help long-time owners at risk of selling because of high property taxes.

While there are many mitigating factors that contribute to the rise of property values, escalating property taxes, and the high cost of living that makes our communities unaffordable, property tax reform would be a start along the road of improving the lives of long-time residents. I hope that OMB and the City Administration will work to ensure that some solution is found to help alleviate this problem.