Freeze the property tax, not the rent |
The city’s Rent Guidelines Board has unsurprisingly voted for the rent freeze on which Mayor Mamdani campaigned. As board member Christina Smyth put it in a pointed resignation letter, “This year’s RGB order was decided last year on the campaign trail.”
Here’s what won’t be frozen: the expenses of the thousands of small landlords in lower-income parts of the city such as the Bronx and Brooklyn. But there’s one expense that the city should do something about; increased property tax bills that are hitting owners of multi-family apartment buildings especially hard.
A mayor focused on both affordability and fairness would pay close attention to a powerful new research report from NYU’s Furman Center on Real Estate and Urban Policy explaining the disparities in the city’s property tax system: how owners of multi-family apartment buildings are carrying far more of the tax load than they should.
The Furman Center report compares the share of........