Good morning, Chair Sanchez and thank you for holding this hearing today. I am representing Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who continues to work with this Council on multiple efforts to combat our housing crisis.
The Borough President wants to commend the City Council for your advocacy on housing. Thanks to last year’s Homes Now, Homes for Generations campaign, and the City for All commitments that accompanied the passage of City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, your investment in housing capital has achieved record numbers. Given the severity of our housing crisis (as the BP often mentions, the Regional Plan Association estimates that our region needs 500,000 more housing units just to meet current demand), we always need more investment in affordable housing development.
However today, we want to focus on preservation, specifically protection of small homeowners. We hear a lot about rent burden, but not as much about the approximately 40% of NYC homeowners with mortgages and 25% of homeowners without mortgages who are considered cost-burdened (paying more than 30% of their income toward housing costs) according to analysis from Comptroller Lander.
It is no surprise then that there are over 26,000 properties with municipal debt on the 60-day tax lien sale list released this month, or that we continue to see an uptick in scams targeting homeowners with debt and older homeowners, especially in communities of color. Scammers use fraudulent refinancing offers, equity stripping, and foreclosure bailout loans to take over properties, resulting in the displacement of our neighbors and the loss of generational wealth.
This is why New York City needs a true Tangled Title Fund to assist homeowners whose ownership is unclear or disputed, either because the previous homeowner died without a will or because the property has already been a target of deed theft. The City of Philadelphia has such a program, funded through its Division of Housing and Community Development. In their program, an independent Advisory Committee oversees the fund, which is administered through a non-profit called Philadelphia VIP. The fund provides up to $4,000 each for qualified homeowners to cover administrative, legal, and other costs that may arise in resolving a homeownership issue. Homeowners are eligible if they make less than 80% of Area Median Income and have less than
$10,000 in assets, meaning they would be unable to afford these costs on their own and would be much more likely to lose their home.
BP Reynoso commends the City Council for starting to think about what this would look like through its FY2025 Estate Planning Initiative. However, the required funding to make this work at scale is much more than provided so far, so he encourages the Council to increase that allocation this year, and to increase funding for community lawyers generally. In addition to the Tangled Title Fund work, local legal services organizations provide educational outreach, workshops, and other essential legal support, making them a critical line of defense against scammers.
Thank you again for holding this hearing today and for your ongoing partnership on efforts to help our constituents stay in their homes now and for generations.