By DAN BILEFSKY / Published: May 10, 2011

Deirdre Ruiz, left, and Sherry Davis ralled against the city's assessments of co-op buildings.

But last week, amid fears that the assessed value of her co-op in Douglaston, Queens, could more than double, she took to the streets near City Hall in Manhattan as part of a boroughwide tax revolt that has combined Queens-style gumption with the antitax indignation of the Tea Party movement.

“How it is possible that the values of our properties can go up by more than 100 percent during one of the biggest real estate declines in a generation?” asked Ms. Davis, 63, a sales representative for a Korean brush maker, during a public hearing last week on the issue at Queens Borough Hall. “This is the last affordable part of New York City — this isn’t Chelsea or the Upper East Side for goodness’ sake — and we risk being priced out of our own neighborhood.”

The visceral anger of the rebels — many of them silver-haired school teachers, taxi drivers and retired nurses — was first fanned in January, when it began to emerge that the city’s Finance Department appeared to have made a mistake in assessing some properties in Queens and had accidentally inflated market values on some co-ops by as much as 147 percent, clearing the way for an increase in the owners’ property taxes


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