Judge Blocks Second-Home Tax For Now; City Appeals

Siding with a group of Staten Island homeowners, State Supreme Court Wayne M. Ozzi issued a temporary restraining order Monday pausing the roll-out of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s tax on second homes in the city.
The tax, as surcharge on one’s annual property tax bill, would apply to condos and coöps that are used as second homes (also called pieds-à-terre) with a market value (as determined by the city’s Finance Department) of one million dollars or more; and to one-, two-, and three-family houses with a market value of more than five million dollars.
The lawsuit was brought by New York City homeowners. Two are the wife and father of Frank Morano, Republican City Council member from the borough’s South Shore, and live in Staten Island. The third plaintiff lives in Manhattan. The lawsuit did not question the legality of the tax, only its rollout; specifically two actions of the city’s. The publication of a data set on the Finance Department’s website that lists nearly one million properties that “may be subject to the charge” as well as their owner’s names and addresses; and letters sent to roughly 17,000 homeowners the city had specifically determined as being subject to it, which some full-time city residents have reported receiving in error. The city reports that roughly 4,300 people have written in to say they were on the website’s list in error. The plaintiff’s argued that city officials did not do enough to ensure the accuracy of their data before publication and the dispatching of letters.
The city appealed on Tuesday, in practice preventing the implementation of the order; which was contested by a lawyer for the plaintiffs.
The president, a former New Yorker who still owns property in the city, weighed in on social media Tuesday, teasing that he would see in the federal government had any right to intervene.
Bruce Blakeman, Nassau County Executive and Republican candidate for governor, also weighed in.
"The court order pausing the Hochul-Mamdani tax hike is a victory, but a temporary pause isn’t enough. Hochul and Mamdani’s rush to slap New Yorkers with another massive tax has already resulted in a chaotic rollout that will ultimately hurt the middle class, kill local jobs and drive our tax base out of New York. As Governor, I will repeal this unfair tax once and for all and make New York more affordable,” he said in a statement.
The tax was unveiled by Governor Kathy Hochul in the spring and eagerly taken up by Mamdani and his supporters, who found in it a fulfilment of his promise to tax the rich to increase the city’s budget; it currently faces a gap that could be filled by the projected five hundred million dollars the second-home tax would bring it.
When the proposal became law in May, the city had to follow a strict timeline. Rules on the implementation were finalized in mid-July and state law requires property owners to be told if it would apply to their homes by August thirtieth. Ozzi said that “sending out notices to 17,000 homeowners who might be subject to a surcharge doesn’t satisfy the intent of the legislation.”