NEW YORK (AP) — Across the U.S., calls to “tax the rich” have become potent political slogans. But even in Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s New York, getting the wealthy to pay more isn’t playing out as smoothly as supporters hoped.What seemed at first like an easy idea — slapping a new tax on people who own luxury second homes in the Big Apple but live elsewhere most of the year — has instead created a lot of confusion in the city’s notoriously convoluted world of real estate arrangements.“It seems very simple but the more you dig into it, the more nuances you look at, the more complicated it gets,” said Gary Bingel, a state and local tax expert and partner at EisnerAmper, an accounting firm. It has also prompted pushback from both the city’s very wealthy and the merely moderately wealthy.President Donald Trump, whose gilded Manhattan penthouse could be subject to the tax since his primary residence is now in Florida, said he was looking into whether federal intervention could “avert this disaster, before it is too late.”
A group of homeowners sued over the city’s rollout of the tax, arguing that officials had not done enough to figure out who would have to pay the tax and instead made it property owners’ responsibility. A judge temporarily paused the process this week, but the city moved to appeal, allowing the tax effort to continue until it’s sorted out in court.Securing a new tax on multimillion-dollar second homes, known as pied-à-terres, was an early win for Mamdani in his quest to raise taxes on the city’s highest earners to pay for his ambitious liberal agenda.
