When Patrick Silberstein moved to a townhouse in the Roslyn Landing development from a house in Kings Point, he and his wife intended to downsize.
“We felt that it would be the absolute best place,” Silberstein said. “We waited for a long time to find the perfect place, and the Village of Roslyn was the place where we wanted to go.”
But after settling into their 3,100-square-foot home, they received an alarming surprise when it came time to pay taxes.
“We expected reasonable taxes,” Silberstein said. “And when the tax bill came we were very, very surprised.”
The Silbersteins’ property tax bill came to “around $55,000,” and an additional $9,000 in village taxes, “which is absolutely enormously expensive,” he says, totaling about $65,000 a year, nearly 30 percent higher than the $45,000 in taxes they paid in the final year of living in Kings Point.
Silberstein’s bill, and those of many North Shore residents who live in new developments, came from an unintentional result of Nassau County’s countywide reassessment, first announced in 2018.
A bill passed by the Nassau County Legislature in 2020 sought to limit immediate tax hikes because of reassessment, and allows most owners of residential properties in Nassau to phase in changes to taxes over a five-year period. New homes and developments, however, do not count, and must be based on their full valuation since they’re being assessed for the first time, Conal Denion, special counsel for Nassau County, told Newsday.
“To the extent that anyone receives an exemption for any purpose, it results in a shift in tax burden, to other property owners who don’t receive that exemption,” Denion said. “If you don’t have the exemption, which is very widely being applied to other residential property, then you’re going to feel that tax burden shift … It’s not being reassessed — it’s being assessed for the first time. So the law is designed to address changes [due to reassessment] … and this property that’s new doesn’t have any changes. It’s all new, there’s nothing to transition from.”
Denion also told the paper that taxes on the developments would decline following the reassessment phase-ins.
“After five years, everyone who’s entitled to the five-year exemption would be rolling off, and the people who had new construction who weren’t being phased in would be obviously impacted less,” Denion said.
Silberstein, who owns the Thomaston Building in Great Neck, said the circumstances are “upsetting.” He added that while he and his wife own the inside walls of their townhouse, they do not own the outside walls, and that if anyone is hurt on Roslyn Landings property, they are liable to be sued, resulting in “very costly” insurance.
“We have a nice townhouse but it’s modest,” Silberstein said. He said the cost of the Roslyn Landing townhouse is not much different from his former Kings Point home, and yet they must pay $20,000 more in taxes.
“It’s a very archaic way to tax,” he added.
