Mamdani Hits Back at Pied-à-Terre Tax Do-Over Ruling
Mayor Zohran Mamdani is fighting to keep his second home surcharge rollout on track, even after extending a key deadline for a third time.
After a Staten Island judge ordered the Mamdani administration last month to scrap its initial implementation of the pied-à-terre tax and start from square one, the city’s lawyers acted quickly to appeal the ruling and got the appellate court to impose a stay, allowing the rollout to move ahead.
Then last week, the city’s Department of Finance issued a last-minute extension, giving homeowners another new deadline to submit applications to exempt them from the surcharge, which is set to finally expire Tuesday.
The mayor’s camp has now fine-tuned its legal arguments to try to get Justice Wayne Ozzi’s unfavorable ruling overturned and undermine the entire case brought on behalf of primary resident homeowners by ex-Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro in Richmond County Supreme Court.
The underlying case focuses on the broad supplemental tax roll the DOF published, featuring more than 900,000 properties, along with more than 17,000 letters sent to homeowners notifying them they may be subject to the surcharge, which Mastro dubbed “nasty-grams.”
The second home surcharge applies to one-, two- and three-family homes valued at more than $5 million, as well as condos and co-op units with assessed values of $1 million or more.
Since none of the homeowners who brought the suit were ultimately deemed eligible by the DOF, the appeal argues they suffered no harm to justify the underlying legal claims. The property list and letters also weren’t final agency determinations, meaning the suit also lacked standing to challenge them in the first place, according to the Mamdani administration.
“Despite acknowledging that the data included in the supplemental roll already appeared on public property tax assessment rolls, Supreme Court held that ‘public fanfare’ about the supplemental roll ‘increased [petitioners’] exposure to harassment and other unwanted intrusions’—though no such harassment or intrusion had been alleged,” the Mamdani administration said in the appeal brief. “As the Court of Appeals has recognized, assessment rolls have legal effect and invalidating them could cause ‘fiscal chaos.’”
Ozzi’s demand that the DOF republish a roll that only includes properties actually subject to the surcharge would wrongly deny homeowners the right to push back on that determination, while canceling the previously issued notices would have harmful consequences on thousands of homeowners who already responded to seek exemptions, the administration argued.
“The decision below serves as a cautionary tale about the perils of judicial overreach and the dangers of ignoring the deference due to an expert agency’s reasonable judgments in implementing a highly technical statute,” the administration said in its appeal.
That’s not the only pied-à-terre legal hurdle. The state is also staring down two separate suits challenging the surcharge on constitutional grounds. One case featuring developer Steve Wynn and former Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross as plaintiffs is angling for a change of venue from Suffolk County to New York County, where the second homes potentially subject to the tax are located.
What we’re thinking about: As Gov. Kathy Hochul gears up for a reelection vote next month, do you think her role backing the pied-à-terre tax will impact her favorability with the real estate industry? Let me know at ben.miller@therealdeal.com.
A thing we’ve learned: New York City’s first public aquarium opened its doors 130 years ago in Battery Park, but became another casualty of Robert Moses reshaping the cityscape to make way for the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel in 1941, relocating to Coney Island, where it still operates today.
Elsewhere…
— Oscar Belgal, who was shot last week by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Marble Hill, was being held in solitary confinement at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Sunset Park with a bullet still lodged in his neck as of Monday, Gothamist reported. Doctors said he was in need of urgent surgery, a procedure that was too dangerous to perform last week without a specialized surgeon present.
— Mayor Mamdani pledged to maximize density and bring thousands of affordable housing units to the site of the shuttered Aqueduct Racetrack in South Ozone Park at an “accountability assembly” at Queens College on Sunday, NY1 reported.
— The former site of a Century 21 department store in Bay Ridge will feature a Trader Joe’s as part of the Century Marketplace redevelopment. The property was sold for $47.5 million in 2025 to MCB Real Estate and Osiris Ventures, who plan to transform the site into a 95,000-square-foot retail development, the Brooklyn Paper reported.
