Housing TPT program is also an issue in the Bronx and Queens.

put a moratorium on and investigate the 66 properties that were bundled together and taken through in rem foreclosure proceedings and judgment in December 2017.

The city’s Department of Housing Preservation & Development (HPD), through its Third Party Transfer (TPT) program, filed a request for the foreclosure judgement on Nov. 27, 2017, and State Supreme Court Judge Mark Partnow signed a judgement of foreclosure on Dec. 5, 2017.

KCP has found four property owners that produced compelling evidence of improprieties in the seizures of property. All say they received no notification of a court proceeding, and only learned of it after notices of new ownership was sent to tenants in the building. Further all four property owners were either black or brown, owned their properties free and clear with no mortgages and lived in increasingly gentrifying neighborhoods where property values are now worth in the millions of dollars.

The letter also went out to the Hon. Lawrence K. Marks, Chief Administrative Judge of the Courts New York State Unified Court System, and to the Hon. Janet DiFiore, Chief Judge New York State Court of Appeals

The letter goes on to question the city’s current TPT initiative to fulfill a purpose other than that which was intended by New York City Local Law No. 37, as adopted in 1996, and by the authority given by the state to the city to engage in in rem foreclosure proceedings in the prior decade. 

The letter notes that most of the properties taken were in rapidly gentrifying, black and brown communities such as Bedford Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, Brownsville, Bushwick and East New York where displacement of working families and seniors from these communities is at an all-time high

A single misstep in a program such as this is one too many when it can result in one of our constituents losing their home, and the families’ equity and investment in such properties, unjustly or unfairly,” wrote the lawmakers.

However, the State Court System denies any wrongdoing and believes that the City has to be charged with the responsibility of preserving homeownership across the five boroughs. 

“We have nothing to do with New York City’s Third Party Transfer program – you would have to speak with the City. In regards to the in rem foreclosure process, we are solely the venue, the statutes were promulgated by the state legislature and the process [is] the same in every county,” said Lucien Chalfen, the Public Information Officer for the Office of Court Administration.