Poster Child for Reform of NYC’s Tax Lien Sale

14 minutes read

The mayor is trying to reform the tax lien sale. Sound familiar?

I’m not sure what’s worse — that the city implemented such a flawed debt-collection process or that it has failed for decades to fix it. How hard can this be?

“It’s a very difficult balancing act,” tax lien sale expert Jennifer Polovetsky told The Real Deal last month. OK, maybe it is hard. But still. This has taken forever.

The issue dates back to 1996, when Mayor Rudy Giuliani had the city begin selling property liens to investors because it was lousy at collecting debt and managing buildings it had seized.

Two months ago, the City Council passed bills that could eventually allow a land trust rather than private investors to foreclose on indebted properties. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who supports that effort, this week suspended the lien sale for six months to review the process, which he had campaigned against.

The Adams and de Blasio administrations went down the same road and ended up just about where they started.

Everyone agrees that people should not be losing homes that are worth far more than their unpaid water bills or other debts. And if they do lose them, they should be paid the difference between the sale price and the debt — as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Tyler v. Hennepin County, Minnesota, in 2023.

But the goal is never to get to that point. It’s to collect the debt without foreclosure.

Which brings us to Filmore Brown.

I looked into an East Flatbush resident’s case this week because Attorney General Letitia James had made Brown the poster child of her call last year for lien sale reform. I was curious. Who bought Brown’s three-family? Was he able to get it back?

First, I needed an address. Googling “Filmore Brown Brooklyn” turned up coverage of his plight. A News 12 report had said the home was on East 89th Street. In the background of an ABC7 clip I saw the house number, 227.

Now I could check property records. They showed a referee had sold the three-family home to an LLC on June 16, 2025, for $735,000.

I looked deeper.

Brown had bought the property in 1996 with a $216,000 mortgage that he paid off in 2019. The media reported that — but missed that in 2014, his home at 227 East 89th Street and hundreds of other Brooklyn properties appeared on a tax lien sale certificate. I found Brown’s house on page 116. The lien amount was $7,397.60.

That didn’t match the $5,000 figure that Brown had shared with reporters. I kept digging.

I found another tax lien sale certificate, dated 2019. Brown’s home was on page 82, with a debt of $5,567.87.

This was the one that led to the sale of his home and his prominent mention in Tish James’ op-ed.

Brown had told reporters that he was shocked that the home had been sold without his knowledge — and that he only found out when men sent by the new owner tried to drill out the locks.

He failed to mention that his home had been on the tax lien sale list before. His lawyer, Alice Nicholson, told me she didn’t know about that. She surmised that Brown’s mortgage lender had paid the 2014 debt to avoid foreclosure, but didn’t rescue him the next time because Brown had paid off the mortgage.

So, Filmore Brown might not be the best example of an innocent victim. But we can still learn something from his case.

At some point he had reportedly missed a $600 water bill. In my experience, anyone relying on the Postal Service to deliver bills is at high risk of not getting them.

The debt was sold and disappeared from the DEP’s system, so Brown reportedly didn’t see it when he paid subsequent water bills. With fees and interest, it ballooned. But water bills are issued quarterly or monthly, so Brown should have seen the arrears before a lien was issued and sold.

That said, the big problem with the tax lien sale is that whoever buys the debt has an incentive to not collect it. In Brown’s case, the lienholder, which property records show was Bank of New York Mellon servicer MTAG, tacked on penalties and interest until it grew to $5,567, then foreclosed and sold his house for $735,000.

Did Brown really not get any notices, including one allegedly hand-delivered to someone at his address? Perhaps his tenants got them and threw them out. But it’s possible he missed them by design, given the creditor’s incentive to sell the home for a huge profit if the debt went unpaid. Brown’s lawyer said he is in state court challenging the service as improper and remains in the home.

As for the East Flatbush three-family home, I traced the LLC that bought it to Malka Lax of Monroe, New York. Lax and other investors behind the LLC, who Nicholson said buy a lot of homes in foreclosure, promptly got a $717,000 mortgage from Broadview Capital, aka Broadview Funding, of Great Neck. No transactions have been recorded since.