Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the creation of New York City’s first Office of Deed Theft Prevention on Friday, pairing it with a six-month pause on city tax lien sales for property owners with outstanding city debts.
The announcement came five days after Council Member Chi Ossé was arrested at a Brooklyn eviction protest in Bedford-Stuyvesant, an episode that pushed deed theft and displacement back to the front of the city’s political conversation. Mamdani, speaking in Bed-Stuy, said the office had been in development “for months” and traced its origin to a campaign promise, pushing back on the suggestion that City Hall was reacting to last week’s headlines.
Deed theft is surging. The city logged 517 complaints in 2026 alone, up from 149 in 2023, according to figures Mamdani cited from Attorney General Letitia James’ office. Between 2013 and 2023, more than 3,500 deed theft complaints were filed across the five boroughs, concentrated heavily in Brooklyn and Queens. Mamdani tied the trend to what he called the broader displacement of Black New Yorkers from the city.
The new office will sit inside the Department of Finance and will be led by Peter White, a longtime homeowner assistance attorney at Access Justice Brooklyn. White said the office will focus on three areas: deed fraud identification, prevention, and correction and remediation. He said seniors in Brooklyn and Queens face the greatest vulnerability to these scams, and that the office will coordinate attorneys and housing professionals already working with homeowners rather than building a parallel system from scratch.
City Hall said the office will flag suspicious property filings, share data across agencies, connect homeowners with legal help, and work with law enforcement. It will also explore new city- and state-level legislation.
Collaboration is central to the plan. Mamdani said the office will work with the Commission on Human Rights, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the Attorney General’s Office, and district attorneys. AM New York first reported the details of the coordination structure, which spans at least five agencies.
James showed up in Bed-Stuy to lend weight to the announcement. She called deed theft “a heartless crime” and pointed to the 2023 state law criminalizing it, which she said gave prosecutors jurisdiction to pursue cases and “pauses eviction proceedings with a deed theft case that is pending, so that families can stay in their homes and justice runs its course.” She also pressed for expanded legal representation for homeowners and for cease-and-desist designations in central Brooklyn.
Ossé was also there. He said his office had worked with Mamdani and his team to help conceive the new office. His arrest at a Wednesday eviction protest drew swift attention citywide and gave the Friday announcement the kind of political backdrop City Hall didn’t exactly need but probably didn’t mind either.
Mamdani created the office via executive order. No Council vote required. No waiting. That speed, advocates said, matters when homeowners facing fraudulent deed transfers often discover the theft months or years after the fact, well past the point where quick intervention would have helped.
What Mamdani didn’t do is also worth flagging. He stopped short of endorsing an eviction moratorium, which housing advocates have demanded, particularly in the aftermath of Ossé’s arrest. The lien sale pause gives property owners six months of breathing room on outstanding city debts, but it doesn’t touch the underlying pressure of evictions more broadly.
The New York City Department of Finance processes thousands of property transactions annually, and housing advocates have argued for years that its data systems aren’t built to catch suspicious filings before they ripple through the chain of title. White’s office is meant to change that, though the agency hasn’t said how many staff positions the new office will carry or what its initial budget will be.
Attorney General Letitia James’ office has a deed theft resource page that offers homeowners direct access to complaint filings, a mechanism that already exists but that advocates say too few vulnerable homeowners know about. White said part of the new office’s job is closing that awareness gap, particularly among seniors who own homes in neighborhoods where property values have climbed sharply over the last decade.
The six-month lien sale pause takes effect immediately. The Office of Deed Theft Prevention’s timeline for full operations wasn’t specified at the Friday event.