‘Stop this madness!’ AG James demands NYC delay or cancel Friday’s tax lien sale
It’s urgent that the city delay or cancel altogether this Friday’s planned water and tax lien sale, New York Attorney General Letitia James said on Wednesday. If Mayor Bill de Blasio won’t act in time, she will ask Gov. Andrew Cuomo to “step in and stop this madness.”
In the middle of a pandemic and with massive unemployment, thousands of New Yorkers could lose their homes in a city procedure James called flawed and heartless. James was joined by Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and other officials at a rally in front of the city’s Department of Finance.
Roughly 9,000 properties are on the lien sale list, but the list “is rife with errors,” James said. About 4,700 of the buildings on the list are small one- to three-family homes, in neighborhoods already reeling from the pandemic. The majority are in communities of color, including Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Jamaica and Richmond Hills.