Some Jersey City housing information and data from our meeting last night, courtesy of @CivicParent and @EllenXSimon:
Tax revaluations are about working out property taxes based on the value of a home or building. Since market values change all the time, this needs to be done regularly to keep taxes fair. Before this latest reval, Jersey City hadn't done one since 1988.
While Jersey City is diverse, it's also very segregated. And since taxes were based off of old property value assessments, they didn't capture how market values had skyrocketed in majority white downtown.
Essentially, poorer black people in Greenville and on the West Side have been subsidizing rich white people downtown for the past 20 years.
With the latest reval, 202 of 206 total properties (mostly single family homes) on Neptune Avenue in Greenville were shown to be overtaxed -- this reval gives them a total of a $500k tax decrease.
One administration after another delayed the reval, until the city was finally sued by the state and forced to perform one.
That's how you get a situation where a homeowner on Van Nostrand Avenue is paying $10k/year in property taxes and someone downtown pays $7k/year on a property 3 times the value.
Now many of those downtown homeowners are seeing their taxes double in single year. While the rebalancing of taxes is just, the way it has been done will force many longtime residents out of their homes.
Normally this would happen gradually, but politicians trying to protect people within their base of power have ultimately ended up hurting them. This is a failure of policy and politics.
All of this also relates to school funding. The school budget comes from property taxes, but homeowners are disproportionately bearing the burden of the school budget. The reason for this is tax abatements and payments in lieu of taxes (PILOTs).
With normal property taxes, 25% goes to fund Jersey City Public Schools. But currently 1/3 of properties in Jersey City are tax abated, and instead pay money to the city through PILOT agreements. With these PILOTs, only 1% goes to the schools.
Mayor Fulop has pledged to change that amount to 10%, but that's only going forward and doesn't apply to the 1/3 of city properties currently abated. And these agreements are long: 10, 15, and even 30 years of not paying taxes into schools.
What that means is that the city is relying largely on state aid. Local taxes should be providing $370M of the school budget, but a state subsidy of $151M is currently being provided on top of the normal $255M of state aid. That subsidy will be decreased over the next 7 years.
That doesn't even factor in charter schools, which take money from district schools on a per child basis. Charter enrollment is up 20% in recent years.
As public schools close, it opens up even more paths for gentrification. More neighborhoods will be wiped out as developers with political connections get tax abatements.
And that brings us to eviction. Jersey City has strong tenants' rights laws. The problem is enforcement.
There are limits on how much your landlord can raise your rent. Even if you're not in a rent-controlled building, a 20% raise in rent without improvements to the building can be considered unconscionable and can be stopped.
That restriction doesn't exist when someone moves out and there's a new tenant. If a landlord can evict you, they can raise the rent to whatever they want without it being considered unconscionable.
Last year there were 18,000 cases in the Hudson County landlord-tenant court. That is a well-oiled machine that requires tenants to not show up so landlords can win default judgements.
But when tenants have legal representation, their chance of being evicted is reduced by 77%! That's why we're planning to follow the strategy by @StompSlumlords: connect people with pro-bono legal representation, keep people in their homes, and keep neighborhoods together.
We can build a city where housing for all is a priority. But to beat the money of developers and landlords, we need to come together and build a mass movement for housing justice. They've got the money, but we've got the numbers.
