For the past six months, People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH Buffalo) has been waging a guerrilla war against the State of New York’s Municipal Bond Bank Agency (MBBA), a division of the Housing Finance Agency which holds the liens on 1,499 tax-delinquent properties in the City of Buffalo.

In 2002, the State of New York created a public benefit agency to buy up selected delinquent tax liens from several of the state’s larger municipal entities, including Binghamton, Plattsburgh, Syracuse and Buffalo—as well as the Buffalo Sewer Authority, since the City of Buffalo tax delinquent list includes homeowners who have fallen behind on their water bills. In September 2003, MBBA bought the liens on 3,500 tax-delinquent properties in these municipalities, including 1,500 in Buffalo, through a trust created and wholly owned by MBBA. The transaction—a complicated one that involved the selling and reselling of debt—yielded $4 million for the city and relieved the city of the burden of auctioning off or maintaining the properties.

MBBA, meanwhile, contracted with the Connecticut-based firm JER Revenue Services to manage the properties and sell them Problem is, MBBA had traded the debt represented by the liens based on grossly inflated assessments of the value of the properties. JER might insist on a buyer paying $30,000 for a shell of a house on the West Side that any Buffalonian knows isn’t worth more than $5,000. Why? Because the supposed value of the liens will collapse if the real value of the properties becomes clear.

So JER hasn’t sold any properties, nor have they maintianed them—in a city plagued by absentee landlords, real-estate flippers and housing scams, one of the biggest and most negligent owners of derelict porperty in the city is now the State of New York.

On Wednesday, September 27, members of PUSH staged the latest skirmish in their campaign to embarrass MBBA and Governor George Pataki at 221 Rhode Island Street on the West Side. There used to be a rundown house at that address, an MBBA house. An arsonist burned it down, and now there’s just a vacant lot—still controled by MBBA and now worth even less. According to PUSH’s Eric Walker, numerous MBBA houses on the East and West Sides have attracted arsonists, who went on a tear this summer.

“It’s almost at epidemic proportions, the number of arsons that have been perpetrated across the city this summer,” said Walker. “We all know that abandonment creates more abandonment, and those abandoned buildings become targets for arsonists, which further plagues our neighborhoods.”

PUSH is calling for Pataki to fire the current heads of MBBA and its parent, the Housing Finance Agency—Stephen Hunt and Jerome Becker, respectively—for failing to live up to the mission statements of the public benefit corporations they control.

PUSH likes street theater as a means of protest: On Wednesday, PUSH’s Aaron Bartley stood on the porch of a nearby MBBA property with a suit coat stuffed with fake dollar bills. He played Pataki, pretending to have a conversation with Becker and Hunt about fundraising for a presumed presidential run in 2008. Other members of PUSH gathered around and petitioned him for relief on behalf of the City of Buffalo, but Bartley waved them off: “I have no time for you,” he said. “I’m running a legitimate campaign for president of the United States.”

“Pataki has obviously abandoned us,” said Markeeta Walker. “The houses are dilapidated, no one is taking care of them. The money is there but they’re not supplying us with the money…they’ve been basically putting Band-Aids on the problems, as far as properties are concerned.”

In fact, there has been a scheme proposed to provide state money to subsidize purchase and repair of MBBA-controlled properties. It amounts to this: One state agency will loan money to potential buyers of properties owned by another state agency, thus supporting the inflated prices MBBA and its manager JER are demanding for these derelict properties—prices that buoy the value of MBBA’s portfolio and at the same time ensure that the properties will never be bought and will continue to rot.

“It’s a house of mirrors,” said Eric Walker.