The fastest way to lose a Bed-Stuy brownstone your family has held for generations is not a missed mortgage payment. It is a forged signature. Deed theft, the fraudulent transfer of a home out from under an elderly or grieving owner, has gotten bad enough in central Brooklyn that it forced a new city office into being and turned a June primary into a referendum on it.
The numbers are climbing. More than 3,500 deed-theft complaints were filed citywide between 2014 and 2023, and the annual count rose to 517 in 2025, concentrated in historically Black neighborhoods. The mechanics, as one Amsterdam News piece laid out, are forged signatures, predatory contracts and opaque LLC transfers that families often do not discover until eviction papers arrive.
One of those families put a face on it. Carmella Charrington’s relatives had owned 212 Jefferson Avenue for 60 years before it was sold to an LLC for $1.4 million, and Charrington, a grandmother, was held at Rikers Island for five days this April while fighting the eviction. At an April 22 protest outside that home, Council Member Chi Ossé was among four people arrested trying to block the eviction.
Two days after Ossé’s arrest, City Hall acted. Mayor Zohran Mamdani created the city’s first Mayor’s Office of Deed Theft Prevention, named veteran housing attorney Peter White its director, and paused the city’s tax-lien sale for six months, the mechanism that can tip a behind-on-taxes family into losing the house. But the office arrived funded at $500,000 this year and $1 million a year after that, far below the $10 million Mamdani floated on the campaign trail, which is the gap worth watching: a real office, a fraction of the promised money, against a problem measured in hundreds of homes a year.
The politics have hardened around it. Deed theft is now the defining issue in the 56th Assembly District Democratic primary, where housing lawyer Michael Bailey, who briefly represented Charrington, is challenging incumbent Stefani Zinerman and 2024 near-winner Eon Tyrell Huntley on an eviction-moratorium-and-legal-defense-fund platform. And the stakes are cultural as much as financial: the landmarked mansion and Paul Robeson Theatre tied to Dr. Josephine English, the state’s first Black female OB-GYN, are on the market in a family-feud sale, the exact kind of legacy loss the crisis keeps producing.
If you own a home in Bed-Stuy, especially an inherited one, the new Mayor’s Office of Deed Theft Prevention sits inside the Department of Finance and is the city’s front door for help, and recording a fraud alert on your deed with the City Register is the cheapest protection there is. The primary on June 23 is where voters get to say how hard they want the next assembly member to fight it.
Featured image: Bushwick Daily
