Policy Pulse: The Fight to Reverse Black Homeownership Loss in NYC

By Josephina Oluwanifise (she/her) and Kevin Wolfe (he/him)
With contributions from Sabrina Bazile (they/them)

Josephina Oluwanifise is program manager at the Center for NYC Neighborhoods. Sabrina Bazile is senior program manager at the Center for NYC Neighborhoods. Kevin Wolfe is deputy director of advocacy at the Center for NYC Neighborhoods.

Since 2002, New York City has lost over 30,000 Black homeowner households—a decline of approximately 13 percent. Ranging from unsustainable and predatory lending practices to gentrification and displacement, to the adverse financial impacts of deed theft, scams, home flipping, and tax liens, as well as the impacts of climate change and flooding, the causes are wide, but the net result has been acute. While these factors have caused high housing costs and limited affordable homeownership opportunities for every New Yorker during this time frame, a disproportionate impact has consistently fallen on Black communities. 

BACKGROUND

The biggest catalysts for The Black Homeownership Project (“BHP”), a project of the Center for NYC Neighborhoods, were the consistently observed barriers faced by Black homeowner households, as identified through housing data analysis and during interviews with Black homeowners, real estate professionals, and community leaders. For example, Ms. V is a first-time homebuyer who purchased an affordable home in 2024. Despite being a high-income earner, being a Black woman, and an immigrant, profoundly shaped her homebuying experience as she was denied access to a traditional mortgage and felt steered to buy in the working-class neighborhood of East New York. What was supposed to be a dream became a nightmare as her new home was later entangled in bureaucracy, lawsuits, and violations stemming from prior illegal construction. As a result, she now risks losing her home.  

The lack of a traditional mortgage and limited knowledge about the homebuying process in New York City increased Ms. V’s risk of displacement. She was not aware of the severe challenges that Black New Yorkers face when trying to purchase a home, which arise from ongoing exclusionary and racist housing policies and practices. Black homebuyers pay more to buy a home and pay higher interest rates than White homebuyers. Investors, corporations, and high-income all-cash buyers drive up housing prices, causing many Black homebuyers to look for lower-priced homes, such as foreclosed homes, which often require renovations and repairs that new homeowners may not be able to afford. The Center developed BHP to increase awareness about the challenges Black homeowners face, create programs to stabilize and protect Black homeownership, and advocate for policy and legislative changes and investments. 

Stories like Ms. V’s galvanized BHP to launch two pilot programs to address the immediate needs of Black homeowners in 2022—Homeowner-Landlord Services and Generation 2 Generation Estate Planning. Later, BHP would unveil its Black Homeownership Agenda, which called for policymakers to implement the structural changes and long-term investments necessary to stabilize homeownership for Black New Yorkers across five key pillars:

1. Stopping predatory and speculative activities targeting Black communities.
2. Committing to long-term investments in homeownership stabilization.
3. Increasing the supply of affordable homeownership models.
4. Prioritizing healthy and resilient housing.
5. Growing Black community wealth.

NYC CAN REVERSE THE TREND

Today, many key priorities in the Black Homeownership Agenda are finding champions across Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new administration as well as the City Council. Specifically, the city’s leaders have shown their intention to directly address three drivers of city policy that promote gentrification and displacement: 1) tax liens, 2) property taxes, and 3) deed theft.  

Tax Lien Sale

Tax liens are unpaid property taxes, water bills, and other charges, including code violations, that are sold in a tax lien sale to a third-party lien servicing company, which often adds more fees and interest to the owner’s debt.  The tax lien sale program dates back to the administration of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and, from its inception, has disproportionately displaced Black New Yorkers from homeownership. In fact, Black homeowners are six times more likely to be on the tax lien sale than White homeowners, and last year, 4,000 Black homeowners lost their homes due to the tax lien sale. Furthermore, the ten council districts with the highest number of lien sales are predominantly majority-Black districts, with Queens ranking first among the boroughs, followed by Brooklyn.  

Property Taxes

In addition to abolishing the lien sale, overhauling the property tax code can ensure a tax collection system that operates more fairly. Research shows that neighborhoods with predominantly Black and Latino homeowners pay higher property taxes than more affluent neighborhoods with luxury condominiums. This mismatch is due to New York City’s property assessment system, which limits how much a property’s assessed value can increase each year. The net effect is that homeowners in gentrifying neighborhoods face a disproportionate impact from rapidly appreciating home values and constrain the finances of house-rich/cash-poor homeowners, while wealthy New York City neighborhoods experience lower effective tax rates due to relatively stable home values. Absent meaningful reform, property taxes will remain another mechanism driving the steady erosion of Black homeownership in New York City.  

Deed theft

Real estate speculation and gentrification not only drive up housing prices and increase the risk of displacement, but they also create additional barriers to sustaining homeownership. In a 2025 report about home loss and deed theft, researchers found that Brooklyn and Queens accounted for 88 percent of all homes at risk of deed theft in New York City.  With risk indicators that can include a deceased person on the deed, no recorded deed, or no mortgage on the property, there are clear links between predatory real estate actors that target financially vulnerable homeowners, as well as their heirs, and the unethical use of publicly available information, such as tax lien sales, obituaries, and court records. With 3,500 reported cases of deed theft since 2014, and 45 percent of deed theft cases coming from Central and East Brooklyn alone, one can also argue that predatory actors actively target at-risk homeowners in predominantly Black neighborhoods. As a result, Black homeowners increasingly face legal battles against real estate corporations and investors as they fight to protect their homes from deed theft. 

CONCLUSION

Since 2002, New York City has experienced a reversal of the Great Migration, with Black populations moving from northern cities to southern states like Georgia and North Carolina.  Predatory real estate and lending practices, along with real estate speculation, gentrification, deed theft, and issues within the tax lien and property tax systems, have priced out and displaced Black New Yorkers, leading them to relocate to the South. Homeownership remains a primary way to accumulate wealth, yet discriminatory and exclusionary housing policies continue to undermine Black households’ ability to build intergenerational wealth and keep their homes.  Without policies to stabilize and protect Black homeowners—policies that prioritize affordability, target deed thieves and predatory real estate actors, increase the supply of affordable homeownership models, promote resiliency, and build Black wealth—New York City will continue to lose Black political power. As a result, Black New Yorkers will not have an equal opportunity to shape and influence how development and change occur in their communities.  

If New York City is truly committed to addressing displacement and gentrification, the overhaul of these systems represents a pivotal opportunity to stabilize Black communities, preserve generational wealth, and reverse decades of loss.