[bberenberg]

Am I understanding your point correctly as you hoping that an increase in tax rates drives property values down enough thay aggregate tax amounts are reduced?

The practical rental math in NYC is simple. Buy a $1M coop in a building with near zero costs. HOA will be at least 2k per month with the majority of that being property taxes. Thats your base rent. If you have a loan, add that to the base. You will not get cheaper rent until you drive aggregate taxes or interests rate down. There isn’t a huge profit margin on rents in NYC. I looked at a unit next door, and if we wanted to have rents break even on mortgage we would need to offer 85% cash up front. Im on the board of our coop, so I see how all of our financials function and same for prior buildings.

[robhlt]

Your coop building is on the unfair side of the "eclectic sometimes regressive" property tax calculation the parent comment mentions. Large (10+) multi-family rental properties are taxed at a much higher rate than single-family and 2-4 family properties. Correcting this imbalance would lower property taxes on your coop building while still raising overall tax revenue for the city.

[bberenberg]

We have 36 units in our coop iirc, so we are “large”. Generally I think our taxes are fairly reasonable. I just don’t think there is any reasonable solution here that isnt focused on a simple triangle:

- Build more, destroy short term value of existing owners

- Lower taxes, hurt short term city functioning

- Lower interest rates, drive up inflation

The only “fun” solution IMO is cut taxes and cut jobs programs that don’t deliver city value. DOE is a welfare scheme at this point.

[mapt]

NYC is home to ~half of the co-op housing in the United States. This is a relatively unusual arrangement. Co-ops generally forbid renting / subletting, they practically ban REITs, new resident-owners go before a board to get approval. They should be considered the same as owner-occupied housing, and for long-term owner-occupied houses where the asset value isn't a big deal, higher property taxes are on average a wash - they pay higher amounts for higher levels of public services. Perhaps your $2k/month goes to $3k/month but transit becomes free, trash collection becomes effective, and the schools become better. Or in the alternate universe your $2k a month goes to $3k a month and then we hand residents a $12k check at the end of the year.

Either way, vacancy gets punished, landlords can't treat the city's housing like gold boullion, and the price of housing is fractionally more tied to the cost of living than the future economic outlook in potentia.

Picture a conventional Ponzi scheme operating in the Lower East Side, which has scaled to be 30% of the city's economy. Whole industries have risen up around this scheme, it's essentially printing money in a way that seems like it might be legal if you squint, and you're not trying to regulate/tax it. It's growing so fast that it's actually causing problematic inflation for the rest of the city.

Can you afford to let it grow unchecked, indefinitely?