Ropes & Gray Leads Team that Secures $60 Million Civil Rights Settlement Against New York City Over Unlawful Property Seizures

Ropes & Gray LLP has reached a $60 million class action settlement on behalf of homeowners whose properties were seized without compensation under New York City's Third Party Transfer program. Ropes & Gray served as lead pro bono counsel alongside co-counsel Valli Kane & Vagnini and White & Case. The settlement, which is subject to preliminary court approval, is believed to be one of the largest paid by the City in the past decade.

“Hundreds of New York families, overwhelmingly in communities of color, had their homes taken and their equity wiped out, all without compensation and without meaningful notice or a day in court,” said Gregg Weiner, global co-chair of Ropes & Gray's litigation & enforcement practice. “This settlement begins to make them whole. It took seven years, a Second Circuit reversal, and a Supreme Court ruling to get here, and I could not be prouder of the team's persistence.”

The TPT program, created in 1996, allowed New York City to seize homes from tax-delinquent owners and transfer them to developers and nonprofit organizations, without meaningful notice or compensation. Longtime homeowners lost not only their properties but generations of accumulated equity. The program had a stark and well-documented disparate impact on Black and Latino communities: approximately half of the properties in the most recent round of property seizures under the TPT Program were concentrated in neighborhoods where residents are primarily people of color.

The case was filed in 2019 in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and initially dismissed on jurisdictional grounds. In 2021, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the dismissal, holding that plaintiffs could seek the lost value of their property in excess of the taxes owed.  The legal team’s arguments to the Second Circuit also received support from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the Pacific Legal Foundation as amici curiae.

The case gained further momentum after the Supreme Court's unanimous 2023 decision in Tyler v. Hennepin County, which held that government seizure of surplus home equity is unconstitutional, a ruling that attracted cross-ideological support from the ACLU, the Cato Institute, and others. Following Tyler, the legal team moved for class certification and summary judgment before the parties reached the settlement through mediation in 2025.

The settlement resolves claims arising from the program's most recent round, which occurred in 2017 under the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio. Claims covering earlier rounds of the program, dating back to 1996, remain pending. Preliminary approval is expected later this year, after which class members will be notified.

The team was led by litigation & enforcement partners Gregg Weiner and Alexander Simkin, and included litigation & enforcement associates Will Piereson, Cambrey Dent, Mohammed Hassan, Chloe Aubuchon, Bradley McKnight, Briana Thomas, Matt Kaufman, and Jared Coltey.