ACRIS Reform Proposal – To Honorable Mayor Mamdani

Beth Din Homeowners’ Advocacy  |  Blanche Oneal, Executive Director

 

BDHA: DEED THEFT PROPOSAL

“Thank you for making time to hear from our Managing Directors with Beth Din Homeowners’ Advocacy.

BDHA stands on behalf of all New York City homeowners, particularly our most vulnerable: the elderly, communities of color, and long-term residents who are losing their homes to Mortgage Fraud, homelessness, deed fraud, and third-party tax lien theft.”

THE PROBLEM – 30 SECOND E-FILE RECORDATION

“Right now, once a fraudulent deed is filed in this city, it is too late.

• “Recordation literally is the Key that ultimately locks our Homeowners out of their own homes.”

• The ACRIS system records a deed in one business day, with no meaningful notice to the existing owner it affects.

• And here is what makes it worse: individual homeowners, especially Black homeowners, face informal ‘suspicion’ reviews with no written standards and no appeal.

• There must be an “ADMINISTRATIVE APPEAL PROCESS” before requiring an ADMINISTRATIVE COURT PROCESS.

• LLCs, meanwhile, some using the property’s own address as their name sail right through.”

WHAT WE ARE PROPOSING – THE 5 POINTS

“The good news: much of this does not require waiting for Albany.

The City Register sits within the City of New York Department of Finance. A Mayoral Executive Order can put the 30-60 Day Appeal/Review Period and LLC documentation requirements in place immediately.

For the perjury provisions and the Affidavit of Sale, we will need the City Council, and we are prepared to support that legislation every step of the way.”

“Every day without this reform is another day a homeowner loses everything – and never sees it coming.

We are not asking for bureaucracy. We are asking for a warning.

Thirty days. A letter. A phone call. That is what stands between a family and losing their home.”

“This proposal sets out everything in full: the legal pathway, the five reforms, and a day-by-day implementation timeline. We would welcome the opportunity to walk your team through it.”

Blanche O’Neal, Executive Director

[email protected]

There is a particular kind of injustice that does not announce itself loudly. It arrives in the language of helpfulness. It speaks in the vocabulary of assistance, of paperwork, of process. It wears the face of an attorney, a lender, a broker, someone who was supposed to help. And then, quietly, systematically, it takes everything.
Beth Din Homeowners Advocacy (BDHA) was founded to stand in the path of that injustice and refuse to let it pass unchallenged.

We are a self-supported ministry, rooted in the conviction that a family’s home is sacred, that their legacy is not negotiable, and that justice must be made to fit everyone, not only those who can afford the rooms where it is decided. We serve the grandmothers who signed documents they were not given the time to understand. The families who built equity brick by brick over thirty years only to discover that someone has filed paperwork claiming it was never theirs. The elders whose trust was exploited by the very professionals sworn to protect them. The homeowners who were targeted not in spite of their vulnerability, but because of it.
BDHA was called into existence by a pattern we could not ignore: predatory lending, deed theft, attorney malpractice, malicious prosecution, and elder abuse, woven together into a system that has stripped generational wealth from Black and brown communities across New York City and across this country.

These are not isolated incidents. They are a coordinated erosion of the most fundamental thing a family can own: a place to stand, a place to return to, a place whose walls hold the memory of everyone who ever lived inside them. When the home is lost, so is the story. So is the lineage. So is everything that a neighborhood represents.

We answer that erosion with legal advocacy, with community education, and with an unflinching willingness to walk into the courts, the hearings, and the conversations that these families were never meant to reach. We take the measure of every person who comes to us, not just the legal contours of what was done to them, but the human contours: who they are, how long this house has stood, how many children grew up on those floors, how many grandchildren were promised those walls. We do not offer families an off-the-rack solution and tell them to make do. We build every case to fit the precise dimensions of their need, because justice built on wrong measurements is not justice at all.

We also know this fight from the inside. Those who serve BDHA include individuals who have themselves survived predatory lending, attorney malpractice, malicious prosecution, and elder abuse, who had their own properties stolen by the very people trusted to protect them. We do not speak about these injustices from a distance. We carry them. And we carry them forward, transformed into purpose, into advocacy, into action.

It is our declaration. It is a gathering of artists, advocates, community members, and changemakers who understand that culture and justice are not separate conversations. That the home and the family and the neighborhood are not separate from the painting on the wall, the artifact on the shelf, the garment passed down through generations. Everything that makes acommunity beautiful is also what makes it a target, and everything we do to protect it is also, in its way, an act of art.

For the families of this city, for the communities of Brooklyn and Harlem and the Bronx and beyond, this night is the answer to every institution that has ever said: you were not worth the effort of getting things right. We are here to say otherwise. We are here to stitch back what was torn, to restore what was taken, to press the garment flat and hold it up to the light and say: this is still here. This is still beautiful. This still belongs to the people who made it.

To support our work, attend the May 3, 2026 Gala at the Crownhill Theatre in Brooklyn, or contact us to learn how you can stand with the families we serve.