No wonder the rent’s too damn high — property taxes on apartment buildings in New York top every other major city in the country except Detroit.
It’s been an open secret for years that when it comes to the tax system, homeowners in New York City get the breaks, while apartment dwellers get the shaft.
Now, NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate & Urban Policy has provided the hard numbers.
They are not pretty.
According to Furman’s annual report of housing trends, apartment buildings are being taxed at five times the rate of small homes, even though two-thirds of the city’s residents are renters and not owners.
Guess who pays a good chunk of those taxes! Tenants in rent-stabilized buildings, who don’t seem to realize they’re getting their pockets picked because higher taxes get passed on in the form of annual rent hikes.
Homeowners have been known to scream and yell when their taxes go up.
NYU found the effective tax rate on apartment houses here was 4 percent of market value in 2010, highest of the nation’s 50 big cities except for Detroit, which came in at 4.1 percent.
The owners of 1-, 2- and 3-family homes, meanwhile, are living large, with an effective tax rate of 0.6 percent, lower than any but five other cities.
The researchers did suggest that if tenants figured out what was going on, they might get more involved in the debate and put pressure on the government to make changes.