Mamdani stands by pied-à-terre tax rollout despite backlash

Mayor Zohran Mamdani defended the rollout of a new tax on highly valued second homes in New York City, saying only property owners who receive a letter from city officials will be impacted by the levy.

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Last week, the city’s Department of Finance posted an assessment roll online that “includes, but is not limited to, those properties that may be subject to the surcharge.” The document included the estimated market values of nearly 1 million residential properties, including hundreds of thousands that appeared to fall short of the threshold for the second-home levy.

The list quickly drew an enormous backlash from a range of New Yorkers, including homeowners who said the list included their longtime primary residences and City Council members who said they’d been caught off guard by its publication.

Mamdani fielded multiple questions Wednesday about whether he’d botched the implementation of the new tax, which confused tax attorneys, real estate lawyers and property owners. He indicated that publication of the list was part of a multistep process.

“The tax property roll that was posted last week is a reflection of all properties across New York City, not a reflection of those, specifically, that the pied-à-terre tax will be levied upon,” Mamdani said Wednesday. 

“The misconception that it is a targeted specific list of those impacted by the non-primary resident surcharge is false,” New York City Department of Finance Commissioner Richard Lee said at the news conference. 

People who are likely to be affected by the new tax are receiving letters from the Department of Finance informing them that they may be subject to the surcharge, Mamdani said. The number of letters sent out “is a very small fraction” of the properties on the published list, he said.

The city mailed out 17,000 notices to property owners notifying them that they may be liable to pay the tax, according to Mamdani spokesperson Monica Klein. 

The Department of Finance said it began sending the letters on July 23, the same day Mamdani warned wealthy second-home owners to “check your mailbox” for their tax notices. But the mayor seemed to soften his tone on Wednesday, insisting that the city was doing all it could to guide property owners through the process of appealing if they felt the tax was improperly applied.

The tax, signed into law in May by Governor Kathy Hochul, targets single-family homes worth $5 million or more and apartments worth $1 million or more. The Department of Finance said last month it would publish a preliminary list of properties that may be affected by the tax by July 25, and develop a final roll before the end of the year.

Confused homeowners

The initial list published on Friday was far larger than the 10,000 to 13,000 properties that city and state officials estimated would qualify for the new tax. The more than 959,000 properties that were included represent more than 86% of New York’s roughly 1.1 million owner-occupied units.

Among the thousands of owners whose properties made the list were high-profile nonresidents including Ken Griffin and Joe Tsai, as well as famous New York denizens including Anna Wintour, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee. It also included the homes of New York City Council members, who must have their primary residence in the city to hold their offices. 

“I’m still confused,” said Councilwoman Gale Brewer, who represents the Upper West Side and who said the home she had lived in since 1994 was on the list. Constituents worried they’ll be required to pay the tax despite living in the city have been calling up Brewer, she said.  

“It’s really upsetting people,” she said. “I don’t think this is the way to go about it.”

The City Council wasn’t involved in planning the list’s publication, a spokesperson for City Council Speaker Julie Menin said.

Lee, the Finance Commissioner, said the agency was operating with information that it had in hand and that some of the issues that the tax had raised were taking time to sort out. 

Among the thornier elements of the new tax is the way it will be applied to coop apartments, which are taxed as entire buildings instead of as individual units. “It is a little bit of a new territory for us, because of the way the surcharge is designed,” Lee said.

Swift implementation

New York is implementing the tax more quickly than places with similar policies. Montana passed a second-home property tax in May 2025 but waited seven months before implementing it. Rhode Island passed a tax on high-priced second homes in June 2025 that didn’t go into effect until this month.

Kamillah Hanks, a council member from Staten Island, said New Yorkers deserved transparency regarding how potential subjects of the tax were being determined and called the handling of it so far as “incompetent.”

“This is disastrous,” she said. “It’s a little shocking to some people.”

Gwendolyn Robinson, a 65-year-old Staten Island resident who works for the Board of Elections, said she couldn’t afford the tax. Her house was on the list despite being valued at $576,000, well under the pied-à-terre’s threshold.

“I’m very angry,” she said. “My daughter was reading me some of the names on the list, and it’s just like there was just no thought that went into this.”

Robinson said she wished the city had explained the process behind the list’s creation. The experience, she said, has made her lose trust in Mamdani’s administration.