Brooklyn Residents Insist They Owned The Building Because They Walked Past It
Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat file this dispatch from the five boroughs and one borough-adjacent New Jersey diner.
NEW YORK, N.Y. — Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s newly established Mayor’s Office of Deed Theft Prevention announced today that, in its first month of operations, it has uncovered an estimated 184,000 acts of “spiritual deed theft,” a previously unrecognised category in which a New Yorker simply feels the building used to be theirs.
Director Peter White, appointed by Mamdani earlier this month, said the new category emerged organically during outreach in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, and Queens Village, where residents reported “deep, persistent ownership feelings about brownstones they had never legally held the title to.”
The New Category
“We came in expecting to investigate the standard, painfully real forms of deed theft, in which fraudsters forge documents and steal generational wealth,” said White. “What we found was a parallel epidemic in which the entire population of central Brooklyn, plus a chunk of Astoria, believes that buildings are theirs because they used to walk past them.”
White confirmed that the Office had received approximately 31,000 complaints from individuals who said they “definitely owned that bodega in the early 2000s,” and another 22,000 from people whose grandfathers had “implied” they owned the airspace above a particular intersection.
Investigative Approach
The Office’s spiritual deed theft unit will be led by a new specialist team trained in property law, anthropology, and what the job description calls “compassionate disambiguation.” Caseworkers will visit complainants in person, offer tea, and gently explain that walking past a building, even for many years, does not constitute ownership under New York law.
“This is also community work,” said White. “Half the time the complainant simply needs someone to confirm that the building was, indeed, very nice, and that it would have been theirs in a fairer city.”
Real Deed Theft Continues
Despite the spiritual category, the Office reaffirmed that actual deed theft remains a serious crime, with an estimated $1.2 billion in property fraudulently transferred in the city in the past five years.
The Office urged any New Yorker who suspects their home has been targeted to contact the New York City Sheriff or the New York Attorney General, and reminded residents that under no circumstances should they sign anything brought to their door by a man in a suit who calls himself “an associate of the family.”
“Our message is simple,” concluded White. “Real deed theft, we will fight. Spiritual deed theft, we will validate, in moderation, with snacks.”
For more dispatches read further at prat.uk satire and Bohiney Magazine. For a second opinion that is also wrong, see Private Eye.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/category/satire/