City Council hearing spotlights plan to replace tax-lien trust with public land bank and stronger owner protections

A City Council Finance Committee hearing on tax-lien enforcement on Wednesday brought council members, agency commissioners, housing advocates and affected homeowners into a heated but mostly technical exchange over a five-bill package intended to curb foreclosures and keep homes in community hands.

Council Member Brannon, who chairs the committee, said the bills aim to let the city collect overdue taxes and water charges "without pushing working people out of their neighborhoods" and to add oversight and compassion to a system that for decades relied on private, investor-backed trusts. "What we're talking about today might sound technical, property tax enforcement reform, but this is something very, very real to people, their homes," Brannon said.

The package includes legislation to establish a city land bank (Intro 5-70a and companion bills), to require council approval or additional oversight when the Department of Finance sells liens (Intro 14-07), to require condo-board notification when a secondary-unit lien is to be sold (Intro 14-11), to require annual reporting on liens unresolved for more than 36 months (Intro 14-19), and to transfer existing liens to the land bank once it is established (Intro 14-20).

Why advocates back the bills

Speaker Adrienne Adams, the prime sponsor of the land-bank bill, framed the package as an equity remedy: she said lender- and investor-driven lien sales disproportionately affected Black, Latino and Asian New Yorkers and stripped intergenerational wealth from neighborhoods. Adams said the land bank would replace…