Published in the Jersey Journal, October 31, 2024 (photo by Mariano Mantilla)
By Luisa Reyes and Rosemary Nwabueze
We are two of approximately 300 Jersey City residents who bought homes 30 years ago through an affordable housing program with the hopes of building equity, living safely and being part of a dynamic community. When the program was announced, it seemed almost too good to be true. Finally, hard-working Jersey City families and individuals could become homeowners and wealth builders, just like every other ethnic group that had preceded us in the city.
Little did we know that the fine print in our contracts implied that, when we sold, the city or state would get 95% of the equity we built, and we would get just 5%.
Little did we know that the deed restrictions in these agreements would not expire after 20 years, as we were led to believe, but would continue until the present.
Little did we know that the city and state saw this program not as an equity builder for the buyers, but as a revenue source for the city and state bureaucracies that administered the effort.
We didn’t know in part because when the program started, we were told that we really didn’t need the expense of hiring our own lawyers. Decades later, when some of us started to retire and sell, we learned the bitter truth. We were not really homeowners at all. We were glorified tenants. And all the money we put into maintaining and improving our homes, into upgrading our kitchens and replacing our roofs, and upgrading the electrical and plumbing systems in our homes was money lost.
When we approached Mayor Fulop, we laid out our situation and were pleased to learn that he had agreed with us. The city revised the agreement so that we now kept approximately 75% of our equity, with the city receiving 25%. He deserves credit for that accommodation while the state, which administers the program for others, has still not responded.
Then we began to receive our property tax bills and were shocked to learn that those bills were now three or four times higher than they had been in the past. So some of us escaped one form of exploitation only to find ourselves subject to another form.
Many of our fellow homeowners are at retirement age and are unable to afford these increases. This practice seems illegal at best. Paying full, market-rate taxes on homes while the city and state recapture part of the sales price can’t possibly make sense to anyone. However, this is what is happening here in Jersey City.
Therefore, we who are homeowners and members of Jersey City Together are calling for a wholesale reassessment of properties with the 95/5 deed restrictions in place. And we see no reason why we should have to pay $105 each to appeal something that seems to be a mistake on the part of the Jersey City Tax Assessor’s noffice.
Homeowners simply want justice in this situation. To complicate matters even further, the city of Jersey City and the state of New Jersey’s Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency are using different recapture formulas. This means that two homeowners who purchased homes through the same program, at the same time and following the same criteria could see up to a $500,000 difference in the sales price of their homes simply because someone arbitrarily placed them on the city list or the state list.
Home ownership is supposed to build generational wealth but for approximately 300 property owners the reverse is happening. We are seeing equity captured by the city or the state while we are bounced around from agency to agency.
We found an ally in U.S. Housing and Urban Development Regional Administrator Alicka Ampry-Samuel. More than two years ago, she wrote that “HUD does not support or authorize the recapturing of HOME funds after the affordability control period has ended.” For most of the homes, the affordability period ended 10 years ago.
Close to 300 homeowners are in limbo and have been actively trying to remedy this situation for well over three years. The city and the mayor made one constructive commitment, then imposed those back-breaking property tax burdens on us. The state has simply been unresponsive, in spite of all the lip service paid by the governor to the notion that equity building is important, especially for the state’s minority residents.
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