By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew
This article has been edited for length and clarity.
What happens when a homeowner falls behind on property taxes, set high to offset the lack of income or sales tax in New Hampshire? One local paper explored that question in depth. On this episode of “The State We’re In,” Melanie Plenda discusses the Concord Monitor’s “Seized and Sold’ a series that explored property tax-related evictions and foreclosures in the Granite State. The series told the stories of residents who fell behind on those taxes due to illness, job loss and other factors and what happened to them. Here to discuss the series is Concord Monitor reporter Michaela Towfighi.
Melanie Plenda:
Michaela, tell us about the series and what inspired it.
Michaela Towfighi:
The series is something that we've been thinking about for a while now. It started in 2015 or ’16, when an old Monitor reporter, Elodie Reed, wrote about property taxes and tax deeds and people losing their house due to unpaid property taxes in Franklin. She interviewed a man named Larry Davis, and Larry lives on his family's old property, but off to the side in a converted garage that honestly is hardly a home. For a while he didn't have running water, no electricity, but he still was taxed living in this garage, and he was unable to pay his taxes. She had interviewed him a few times about his situation. When the readers read the story in the paper, an anonymous couple paid off his taxes for that year and put money forward for a few years.
I started at the Monitor in 2022, and one of the first assignments my editor gave me was to go check in on Larry. Money had been put forward and he should have been fine for a few years, but my editor imagined he's behind on his taxes again, and that was the case. We went up to Larry's house at Franklin, and it was the same thing. He lives off Social Security, he's unable to work and his property tax bill just grew and grew.
I wrote a story that summer that looked at Larry's situation. We then started thinking that this is most definitely happening to homeowners across the state. Being hired at the Monitor through the Report for America means we were able to get a grant through the Investigative Editing Corps to start looking at this at-large. That involved compiling statewide data and trying to see how many people are behind on their taxes in New Hampshire, what happens to those people, and when that's the case.
Melanie Plenda:
Tell us about some of the people who were featured in the series and how you found them.
Michaela Towfighi:
There were a few common themes we found when it came to people who lost their house to tax deeds. The first is that they often were elderly. They had paid off their mortgage, they thought that they had saved and were ready for retirement, and then they had some sort of life event or medical catastrophe that drastically changed their income, and they couldn't keep up with their bills on a fixed income. They also often lived in inexpensive housing, a lot are in manufactured houses, where really quickly the property tax bill can grow to be near the total value of their house.
We found people mostly by knocking on doors. I narrowed in on a few communities, Franklin was one of them since they had one of the highest deed rates in the state. I went to a city council meeting last July where the council voted to seize a dozen homes for unpaid taxes. The next day, I took that list of addresses and just went door to door knocking on the door to see if anyone was home and if they would talk to you about their situation.
That is how I found John Jones, who was featured in one of the first stories. When I first knocked on his door, John had no idea that this was happening. His partner Jessica answered the door and I said my spiel and she had no idea what I was talking about. She was like, “I think you have the wrong house. That didn't happen to us.” I went back a week or two later, and she had called the city and hadn’t received the notice in the mail the city sent them letting them know that this had happened. John had had a stroke and was paralyzed basically on half of his body lying in a hospital bed in the living room. She invited me in to sit in their living room and chat with him, and that started a relationship that is still strong a year later. That was just one example.
Melanie Plenda:
How common is it that homes are taken by municipalities? What cities or towns did these seizures happen most often or happen a lot?
Michaela Towfighi:
What was really interesting and what we found is that it's hard to say how common this is. It’s even harder to know what happens to the homes after they're taken. Some, like Berlin, had the highest number of seizures — they had seized over 200 properties in that 10-year span we looked at. But I went up to Berlin as part of my reporting and talked to the assistant city manager there, and she told me that they take a lot of houses, but those houses are often vacant. They're left behind by former owners. They’re dilapidated, and they end up getting torn down.
So they're not displacing people in their process. Instead, they're basically getting this property back on the tax roll, and it's getting sold to the next owner. That's drastically different from Concord. Concord has only seized a handful of properties in the last 10 years, but of those properties most are sold at auction. When they go to auction, it doesn't matter if they're occupied by the owner or not — whoever buys it is then responsible for evicting people if they currently live there.
I talked to over 50 tax collectors in the process of reporting this, and it really just varies town to town. Some of these towns are really small, and the town clerk or tax collectors say, “These are our neighbors. We don't want to displace them. We don't want to put people out of housing. We will take ownership of their property, but we won't kick them out. We'll start a payment plan. We'll try to work with the homeowner to have them back paying taxes ,even if it's not in full.” Other tax collectors read the law really thoroughly and say, “It's our job to take these houses. After three years, we sell them, and we recoup the costs. We need to do that to be fair to other taxpayers who are paying on time”.
Melanie Plenda:
You mentioned in the series that other states do have some safeguards in place to prevent residents from losing their homes due to property taxes. Can you tell us about those and how they work?
Michaela Towfighi:
New Hampshire is an outlier among New England states when it comes to what help is available. Most states have what's called a circuit breaker system that basically says if your property tax bill exceeds a certain percent of your income, the state will kick in the difference to pay your bill. That is just a protection in place, especially for people who are elderly and on a fixed income. Their property tax bill might be growing and outpacing what their Social Security payments are. If their taxes are more than 10% of their income the state will say, “You pay up to that 10%, and then we will pay the rest.”
New Hampshire has a very, very small version of that program in place right now. It applies to the statewide education property tax. It's called the Low and Moderate Income Property Tax Program, I believe, but the reality is that the SWEPT portion of your bill is less than 5%. So again, it equates to people maybe getting a $50 discount on their taxes, but nothing to the degree that other states have.
Melanie Plenda:
You also noted in the series that foreclosures were supposed to be suspended during the pandemic but that didn't necessarily happen. So can you tell us more about that and what you found?
Michaela Towfighi:
That was one of the most interesting findings throughout this whole process. That came from just calling random tax collectors with my spreadsheet pulled up in front of me. I had the data on how many deeds they'd issued in the last 10 years. Then I would ask tax collectors to walk me through that. I'd mentioned earlier that Berlin had the highest number of seizures — they seized over 200 properties in this 10-year period. When I called the tax collector, she showed that if you're looking at a year by year, you might notice that there were zero in 2020 and again in 2021 because they weren’t allowed during that time. That was the first I'd heard that.
When I had looked at the numbers, there were hundreds of deeds during that period. It basically turns out that when the governor was suspending evictions he had issued a moratorium which provided more forgiveness on mortgage foreclosures — things like that. He also issued an executive order that paused the tax deed process. It said that municipalities were not allowed to deed during the state of emergency for the pandemic that began in April of 2020. What then was confusing was in July he lifted the eviction moratorium and the moratorium on foreclosures, and after that the Municipal Association and other lawyers provided advice to towns and cities that it applied to the tax deed process so that they could resume taking properties. Some followed that — they only suspended the process for a few months. Others followed the original order, which said it was in place for the duration of the state of emergency, that would have been through June of 2021.
But what was most puzzling about the whole order and its enforcement was that the governor's office and the attorney general's office, who were responsible for enforcing it, refused to answer our questions about the order. We asked them numerous times, “Can you provide the duration of the order? Can you provide what was the intention with it? If a town were to seize property during this time and violate the order, what are the implications? Who's responsible for enforcing that? What penalties are involved?” They declined to comment on all of those fronts.
Melanie Plenda:
What's the status of this series? Is it still going? Do you think there is more reporting to do?
Michaela Towfighi:
I definitely think there's more reporting to do. I mean, we'll continue to follow tax deed sales and auctions. An exciting follow-up is that someone had read the series, and they looked at John Jones's current tax bill and saw that he now owed another $2,000 for the next year and paid off that portion for him. So he'll be set for the next year or so. But I think there are definitely more conversations to be had about the property tax burden growing bills, especially on the elderly, and what assistance is available to them and how that's communicated.
Melanie Plenda:
Monitor reporter Michaela Towfighi, thank you so much for joining us today.
The State We’re in a weekly digital public affairs show is produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communications. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members.These articles are being shared by partners in The Granite State News Collaborative as part of our Race and Equity Initiative. For more information visitcollaborativenh.org.