A Brooklyn Church Owed Nothing. Its Tax Debt Was Sold Anyway. New York Changed the Law

• New York City Council unanimously passed Intro 245 in February 2020
• It shields about 13,000 charitable and religious properties from the tax lien sale
• Devoe Street Baptist Church in Williamsburg faced a lien of about $203,000 despite qualifying for exemption
• In 2019, 610 exempt property owners got lien-sale warnings and 27 liens were sold

Devoe Street Baptist Church has stood in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, since 1904, first as an Italian-American congregation and later a predominantly African-American one, worshipping in a Romanesque Revival brick sanctuary built in 1940. Under New York law it should never have owed property tax. Yet one lien on the building was sold and a second, worth around $203,000, came close to being sold too, City & State New York reported.

The cause was administrative. The church qualified for a charitable exemption, but its property still landed on the city’s annual tax lien sale list, where unpaid property debts are sold to private buyers. A legal aid group eventually helped the church get the debt removed.

Devoe Street was not alone. According to the report, 610 property owners that had held exemptions received 90-day lien-sale notices in 2019, and 27 liens were actually sold. About 150 charitable properties remained at risk over water and sewer arrears, with 56 more exposed over other debts.

In February 2020 the City Council unanimously passed Intro 245, sponsored by Council Member Antonio Reynoso. It requires the Department of Finance to automatically exclude from the sale any property that held a charitable exemption in the previous two fiscal years, along with those with pending exemption applications or appeals, protecting roughly 13,000 properties. Reynoso contrasted the city’s treatment of churches with its approach to builders: “When it comes to developers, the city’s willing to bend over backwards to make sure they get help.” A Finance Department spokesperson, Miranda Marcy, said the department would “fully support the new legislation that would help protect nonprofits from landing on the lien sale list.”

For Jamaican congregations in Brooklyn and Queens, and for churches back home, the warning is the same: a tax exemption is only as good as the paperwork behind it. In Jamaica, where church property tax relief has been debated publicly, trustees should keep exemption certificates current, read every notice from the tax authorities, and never assume that a building used for worship is automatically safe from a debt it does not owe.

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