{"id":326955,"date":"2026-08-21T21:06:14","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T21:06:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/326955\/"},"modified":"2026-08-21T21:06:14","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T21:06:14","slug":"mamdanis-messy-pied-a-terre-tax-rollout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/326955\/","title":{"rendered":"Mamdani’s Messy Pied-\u00e0-Terre Tax Rollout"},"content":{"rendered":"

By the time New York City\u2019s Local Law 97 went into effect in 2024, the legislation<\/a>, passed in 2019 and establishing carbon-emissions caps for buildings larger than 25,000 square feet, had undergone five years of implementation work. This included 363 meetings of a city-appointed Climate Advisory Board and working groups, multiple public hearings, and a comprehensive advisory-board report. That onerous process had a simple goal: maximizing compliance.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is something we lobbied for,\u201d Charles Diamond, a former attorney for the New York City Comptroller\u2019s Office and Mayor\u2019s Office, told me this week. \u201cWe think this is right, and therefore we\u2019re going to work with those who are impacted to get as close to 100 percent compliance as fast as we can.\u201d<\/p>\n

Finally, a reason to check your email.<\/p>\n

Sign up for our free newsletter today.<\/p>\n

This all stands in sharp contrast with the pell-mell rollout of Mayor Zohran Mamdani\u2019s new pied-\u00e0-terre tax. Whatever the administration\u2019s other goals, ensuring compliance seems less important than using the tax as a cudgel against the rich.<\/p>\n

That was certainly the impression I got from a city council hearing on Tuesday about the surcharge\u2019s implementation, which critics call \u201ccoercive,\u201d \u201cauthoritative,\u201d and \u201coutrageous.\u201d Even a woman dressed in an \u201cEat the Rich\u201d T-shirt and speaking in favor of the levy agreed: \u201cclearly, it\u2019s been a mess.\u201d\u2002\u2002\u2002\u2002\u2002<\/p>\n

Tuesday\u2019s hearing wasn\u2019t intended as a referendum on the tax itself, which was marketed as applying only to a small subset of \u201cglobal elites\u201d\u2014non-New York City residents who own second homes in the city valued at $5 million or more. Its purpose was to air concerns about implementation. Witnesses and political leaders spent hours highlighting a rollout that some saw as punitive and rushed by design. The city council wanted to pose questions directly to Department of Finance Commissioner Richard Lee, but he didn\u2019t attend, issuing a statement instead that cited ongoing litigation between the city and a group of New York City homeowners challenging the surcharge\u2019s rollout as the reason for his absence.<\/p>\n

That explanation rang false to Diamond, who said he felt compelled to testify at Tuesday\u2019s hearing after learning that administration officials would not attend. \u201cWe\u2019re under a consent decree about homeless services,\u201d Diamond told me. \u201cThat\u2019s active litigation. . . . Are we now going to say that we don\u2019t have to show up to oversight over homeless services?\u201d<\/p>\n

In response to my request, City Hall spokesman Matt Rauschenbach said the administration had made a \u201cgood faith effort\u201d to work with the council to reschedule the hearing for the near future because it was \u201cexplicitly focused on the same issues at the heart of the litigation.\u201d The city council declined, he added. \u201cThe administration\u2019s focus remains on ensuring this surcharge can do what it\u2019s intended to do: generate the revenue our city needs to serve New Yorkers across the five boroughs,\u201d Rauschenbach said.<\/p>\n

Whatever one\u2019s view of the levy itself, it\u2019s worth asking: Why was a tax of such complexity so hastily assembled and deployed? \u201cI don\u2019t know why it\u2019s so hard for the administration to say, \u2018You know what, you\u2019re right. There have been mistakes made, and it\u2019s up to us to fix them.\u2019 But the posture they\u2019ve taken is quite to the contrary,\u201d Jason Haber, co-founder of the American Real Estate Association, told me.<\/p>\n

The timeline was extraordinarily compressed. Governor Kathy Hochul introduced<\/a> the pied-\u00e0-terre tax proposal on April 15. The surcharge was presented as a way to help close the city\u2019s budget gap without affecting New York City residents.<\/p>\n

With her announcement, Hochul gave Mamdani a green light to pursue enforcing the tax on \u201cthe ultra-wealthy and global elites.\u201d The mayor relished this newfound power, as evidenced by his self-congratulatory video<\/a> filmed in front of a building where Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, whom he called out by name, owns a $238 million apartment. In May, the state legislature approved the measure by including it in the budget, and Hochul signed the budget into law. On June 5, the city\u2019s Department of Finance published proposed rules<\/a> detailing how the surcharge would be implemented.<\/p>\n

The tax took effect on July 1. On July 9, the city held a public hearing to help finalize rules. The next day, Mamdani and Finance Commissioner Richard Lee approved<\/a> them, invoking a \u201csubstantial need\u201d for the law to take immediate effect \u201cin order for DOF to ensure a fair and efficient process.\u201d<\/p>\n

On July 25, the city, citing<\/a> two provisions in the Administrative Code, published<\/a> a \u201csupplemental roll\u201d of \u201ccovered properties\u201d (those possibly subject to the tax) in the \u201csame manner used to administer and enforce real property taxes.\u201d Though both Mamdani and Lee acknowledged that the city was relying on outdated records<\/a>, the DOF published<\/a> on its website an easily searchable list of 960,000 properties<\/a>. Under the rules, the burden fell on the homeowners to prove they qualified for an exemption.<\/p>\n

One of the properties included on the list was the home of Representative Gale Brewer. \u201cBut I\u2019ve been in that damn home for 365 days a year since 1994,\u201d Brewer said at Tuesday\u2019s hearing.<\/p>\n

Despite the administration\u2019s insistence that the information was already public record, critics like Haber said that this was the first time the city had made such a roll so easily downloadable and searchable. \u201cThere is a difference between public and published,\u201d Haber said during his testimony on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

Haber also testified that he was able to create an app in two hours using the DOF spreadsheet. He kept it on his computer, fearing that someone could use such an app \u201cwith malintent.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m not even a computer programmer,\u201d he said. \u201cImagine what someone could do who wanted to do harm to New Yorkers. It\u2019s just that easy, and it\u2019s just wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

The city mailed letters to 17,000 property owners<\/a> on July 23 notifying them that they may be subject to the new surcharge. This step was punctuated by more hectoring from Mamdani. \u201cIf you have a second home in New York City worth more than $5M, check your mailbox when you\u2019re back in the five boroughs\u2014because you\u2019ve got mail,\u201d the mayor posted<\/a> on X.<\/p>\n

Litigation soon followed. A group of homeowners, represented by former Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro, sued the city<\/a> over its rollout, prompting a Staten Island judge to halt the levy temporarily. An appellate judge eventually allowed<\/a> the rollout to continue. Meantime, the city extended the deadline<\/a> for homeowners to apply for exemptions by one month.<\/p>\n

As of August 18, the city had received 9,884 exemption applications and had completed 5,001. In total, 2,318 applications for exemption have been approved, a City Hall official told City Journal. The pied-\u00e0-terre surcharge will have just five months\u2014from its April 15 inception to the new September 18 deadline\u2014to evaluate exemptions.<\/p>\n

Ryan Foley, a senior real-estate litigator at Starr Associates, told me that the surcharge\u2019s inclusion in the state budget allowed it to bypass a legislative process that should have included committee hearings and floor debates. Its practicality was never fully debated, making problems with implementation and enforcement far more likely. \u201cThe tax that New Yorkers were sold is not the tax that is being delivered,\u201d Foley said.<\/p>\n

The tax has its defenders. Some spoke in its favor at Tuesday\u2019s hearing, while dismissing the critics. \u201cI think the wealthy homeowners here doth protest a little too much,\u201d said David Packer, a schoolteacher and co-op owner.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf this tax is blocked or significantly delayed because of the minutiae of the rollout, which perhaps does have problems, New Yorkers will see these hurdles exactly for what they are: ideologically motivated and meant to protect private wealth,\u201d said a Ph.D. student and researcher at University of California, Berkeley who lives in Washington Heights. So far, anyway, the tax\u2019s troubled rollout does not appear to have cost Mamdani any support with his political base.<\/p>\n

But the reality remains, as Diamond observes, that \u201cthere was a political decision here to create a brand-new tax that\u2019s never been levied before.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt appears to have a goal of punishment,\u201d Diamond added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By the time New York City\u2019s Local Law 97 went into effect in 2024, the legislation, passed in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":326956,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[9,24,63,134,136,135],"class_list":["post-326955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-staten-island","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-staten-island","tag-staten-island-headlines","tag-staten-island-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=326955"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326955\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/326956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=326955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=326955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=326955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}