Two four-bedroom colonials, built the same year, five minutes apart on a Clarkstown map, can carry property tax bills a few thousand dollars apart. The houses aren't different. The line running between them is.
That line is a school district boundary, and this year it matters more than usual, because the asset propping up one side of it just sold at foreclosure for a fraction of what the town said it was worth.
The Mall That Sold for a Third of the Town's Number
In February 2026, the Palisades Center in West Nyack changed hands. Black Diamond Capital Management, through an affiliate called BD Palisades Holdings LLC, was the sole bidder at a foreclosure auction in Manhattan and paid $175 million for the 2.2 million square foot mall. Black Diamond wasn't new to this deal. The firm had already bought the mall's underlying debt at a steep discount in October 2025, then stepped into the plaintiff's role in a foreclosure case that Wilmington Trust had filed back in 2023 after the mall's former owner, Eklecco NewCo LLC, defaulted on a $418.5 million loan taken out in 2016, back when the property was valued at $881 million.
Spinoso Real Estate Group, which took over day-to-day management from Pyramid in September 2024, is staying on to run the property. Clarkstown Supervisor George Hoehmann told reporters he was glad to see that continuity. But continuity in management doesn't mean continuity in the mall's tax value, and that value has been sliding for years.
During the certiorari fight that preceded the sale, Eklecco argued the mall's real market value was around $155 million. The town countered that it was worth $578 million. The $175 million sale price lands almost exactly where Eklecco said it should, which tells you a lot about who was closer to right.
Where the Last $18 Million Already Landed
This isn't the mall's first tax fight, and it isn't the first time Clarkstown taxpayers felt the aftershock. In 2024, the town settled four years of certiorari claims covering 2020 through 2023. The deal returned $27.5 million to the mall's owner, split across three governments. The town of Clarkstown covered $7.8 million. Rockland County covered $1.7 million. The rest, $18.15 million, or about two thirds of the total, came out of the Clarkstown Central School District, according to the district's own fiscal management page. That single settlement forced the district and the town to borrow roughly $8.7 million just to cover the immediate cost, a bond that residents in that district are still paying interest on.
"Local municipalities are subject to equalization rates that compile a number of factors and apply these to geographic regions," Hoehmann said in a statement announcing the settlement.
That sentence is dry, but the mechanism behind it is not abstract. Property tax in New York is raised and spent locally, and roughly 60 percent of a typical bill funds schools. When a single commercial parcel worth hundreds of millions of dollars gets its assessment cut, the school district doesn't quietly absorb the difference. It either cuts spending, raises the rate on everyone else in the district, or both.
Nanuet's mall, the Shops at Nanuet, went through its own version of this fight at the same time. Its settlement cost the Nanuet school district an estimated $2 million, according to a town official's figure reported at the time. That's roughly a tenth of what Clarkstown Central absorbed for a mall that, at 2.2 million square feet, is larger and was assessed at a far higher figure to begin with.
The Clock Nobody's Watching
Here's the detail that matters if you're comparing New City to Nanuet on a spreadsheet right now. The 2024 settlement locked the Palisades Center's assessed value at $300 million and barred new certiorari challenges for at least three years, a freeze that runs to roughly mid-2027.
The mall just sold for $175 million.
That's a $125 million gap between what the property is assessed at for tax purposes and what an experienced distressed-asset buyer actually paid for it in a competitive process. Black Diamond describes itself as a firm that specializes in high-yield credit, restructurings, and turnarounds, not mall operations. When the certiorari freeze lifts, there is little reason to expect the new owner to leave a $300 million assessment standing on a $175 million asset. Whatever happens in that next challenge, the same 66 percent split that hit Clarkstown Central in 2024 is the most likely template for who pays it.
New City and West Nyack, the hamlet where the mall itself sits, both fall inside Clarkstown Central School District. Nanuet does not. That's the whole difference in exposure, and it has nothing to do with square footage, lot size, or curb appeal.
| Clarkstown Central School District | Nanuet School District | |
|---|---|---|
| Hamlets primarily covered | New City, West Nyack | Nanuet |
| Mall in its tax base | Palisades Center (2.2M sq ft) | Nanuet Town Center, formerly Shops at Nanuet |
| Share of the 2024 refund | $18.15 million (66%) | Roughly $2 million (estimated) |
| Direction of that mall's redevelopment | Uncertain; new owner is a distressed-debt specialist | Multi-family housing planned on part of the site |
Nanuet's Different Bet
The Shops at Nanuet has a new name now, Nanuet Town Center, and a different trajectory. Its owner has drawn plans for multi-family housing on the site currently occupied by the Sears Auto Center building. If that gets built, it doesn't just diversify the property. It adds new taxable housing units to a district that already took the smaller hit in 2024, which works in the opposite direction from what Clarkstown Central is facing.
There's a second irony worth sitting with. Nanuet has an actual commuter rail station, on NJ Transit's Pascack Valley Line, with service to Hoboken Terminal and a transfer at Secaucus Junction toward Penn Station. New City has no rail station inside its boundaries. Despite that, New City has consistently traded at a premium. In March 2026, New City's median resale price was $745,000, up 1.4 percent from the year before. Nanuet's median in September 2025, the most recent month with a reasonably sized sample, was $523,000, built on just 12 recorded sales, small enough that the number swings hard from month to month.
Those figures wobble because Nanuet simply doesn't turn over that many homes in a given month. The school district line doesn't wobble. That's the more durable signal if you're actually comparing what ownership costs over five or ten years, not just what a listing costs today.
Before You Write an Offer in Clarkstown
If you're weighing hamlets against each other, the mall's fate is a data point you can actually check before you're under contract, not after.
- Confirm which school district the specific parcel sits in. Clarkstown's boundaries don't follow hamlet names cleanly, and a New City address doesn't guarantee Clarkstown Central any more than a West Nyack address does.
- Ask your agent or the town assessor's office for the parcel's assessed value trend over the last three to five years, not just the current number.
- If you're closing near New York's annual grievance date in late May, understand that this is also when local school and town assessments get contested, which is exactly the mechanism driving this story.
- Weigh a large commercial anchor's health as a real input to your total cost of ownership comparison across hamlets, the same way you'd weigh a homeowners association fee or a flood zone designation.
None of this shows up on a portal listing. It shows up in town board minutes, school district budget documents, and county court filings, which is precisely why it's worth someone walking you through it before you sign anything.
FAQ
Does this affect other hamlets besides New City? West Nyack, where the mall itself sits, is also inside Clarkstown Central School District and carries the same exposure. If you're looking at a different hamlet, confirm the district before assuming it matches its neighbors.
Will my tax bill go up immediately because of the February 2026 sale? Not immediately. The mall's assessed value is locked at $300 million under the 2024 settlement until roughly mid-2027. The sale itself doesn't change the current bill, but it strengthens the case for a lower assessment once that freeze lifts.
Is Pearl River affected by any of this? Pearl River sits primarily in the Town of Orangetown, not Clarkstown, and has its own separate tax and school district structure unrelated to the Palisades Center's assessment history.
Comparing Clarkstown hamlets on price per square foot alone will tell you what a house costs today. It won't tell you which school district is sitting on a tax cliff that hasn't dropped yet. If you're weighing New City against Nanuet, or trying to figure out what a specific parcel's district exposure actually looks like, The Ramundo Team can walk the assessment history with you before you write an offer, not after.
