New York City Property Taxes Continue to Soar

The true killer in New York City’s soaring property tax bills is not the tax rate; it’s the method of assessing property values. And efforts to reform the tangled and inequitable assessment system have failed repeatedly because, in the words of Manhattan borough president Gale Brewer, the issue is “just too political.”

So it should come as no surprise that property tax bills in New York continue to soar. The Wall Street Journal reports that tax bills for co-ops and condos have risen by 26 percent from fiscal 2013 and fiscal 2017, which ends on June 30 of this year. In that time, the average bill for co-ops and condos jumped from $6,086 to $7,644, according to the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonpartisan watchdog group.

The news is even grimmer for commercial properties, where the average tax bill, without abatements, is set to jump to $111,023 this fiscal year – up from from $85,841 in 2013, the last full fiscal year former Mayor Michael Bloomberg was in office. That’s a staggering 29 percent jump.

The force driving tax bills, as we’ve said, is the assessment, not the overall tax rate, which has remained flat. “The property tax rate has not increased since Mayor de Blasio took office [in 2014], and the mayor has been very clear he has no plans to change it,” says de Blasio spokesman Freddi Goldstein. “The rate remains the same today as it was on Jan. 1, 2014, and it is significantly lower than all of NYC’s neighboring communities.”

Swell. Now if some brave New York City politician would just deal with that political hot potato known as tax assessments.