New York City homeowners slammed Mayor Zohran Mamdani's rollout of the new pied-à-terre tax at a three-hour City Council oversight hearing, and the administration didn't bother to show up.
Roughly 30 homeowners and real estate industry members testified Tuesday before City Council members about a tax rollout that has sent erroneous bills to longtime residents, published the addresses of 900,000 property owners, and forced co-op boards to absorb surcharges meant for individual unit holders. The Department of Finance sent 17,000 notices to homeowners warning they could owe tens of thousands of dollars a year unless they filed for an exemption, effectively treating every recipient as a non-resident until they proved otherwise.
The Mamdani administration cited an ongoing lawsuit as its reason for skipping the hearing, leaving DOF Director Richard Lee to submit written testimony instead of answering questions in person. That left Council members without a single administration official to press on the errors, the process, or the timeline, and left homeowners to direct their frustration at an empty chair.
Robert Bertagna, an Upper East Side retiree who has lived in his home for three decades, told the Council he received a DOF notice informing him he would owe $52,000 a year under the surcharge. He votes in New York. His driver's license is from New York. His tax records are in New York.
"This is my primary residence. I pay taxes in New York. I vote in New York. My driver's license in New York. There's plenty of records to establish the fact that I'm a resident of New York."
He filed for the exemption. But that wasn't his complaint. His complaint was the presumption behind the notice itself.
"I filed an exemption, but that's not the point. The point is the government is assuming that I'm guilty unless I can prove myself to be innocent."
Bertagna called the surcharge notice "a clear intrusion by our government, intimidation by our government and, frankly, a direct attack and a target on private wealth." Whether one agrees with that characterization or not, the underlying fact is straightforward: a man who has lived in the same home for 30 years received a bill for $52,000 because the city's default assumption was that he didn't live there.
The pied-à-terre tax, approved by state lawmakers and Governor Kathy Hochul in the spring, applies to one- to three-family homes valued at $5 million or more and to co-ops and condominiums worth at least $1 million when those properties are not used as a primary residence. The intent, taxing wealthy non-residents who own luxury second homes in the city, is not inherently unreasonable. The execution has been a different matter.
Kenneth Fishel, another longtime Upper East Side resident, told the Council he never received his DOF notice at all. The city sent it to a neighbor who lives nearly 30 stories below him in the same building. The notice listed Fishel's apartment number, stated he did not live there, and said he owed $58,000 for the non-primary-residence surcharge.
Fishel only found out because he ran into that neighbor in the elevator.
"If I hadn't run into him in the elevator, I never would have known, and I would have been billed for the full tax."
Fishel has since joined a lawsuit filed by homeowners challenging the rollout. The administration's decision to skip the hearing meant no city official was available to explain how a notice with Fishel's apartment number ended up 30 floors away, or how many other notices went astray.
Mamdani's tenure has been marked by a pattern of confrontation with New York's business community and institutional establishment. Earlier this year, the mayor purged business leaders from a city nonprofit advisory board in a move critics called unprecedented. The pied-à-terre tax rollout now adds property owners to the list of New Yorkers who feel targeted by City Hall.
Mary Ann Rothman, executive director of the Council of New York Cooperatives and Condominiums, warned the Council that the DOF's billing structure threatens the financial stability of small co-op buildings across the city. Under the current process, the DOF sends surcharge bills to co-op boards or corporations, not to the individual shareholders whose units triggered the tax.
That means a co-op board in a small building could be stuck paying a surcharge generated by one or two non-resident unit owners, spreading the cost across every shareholder in the building.
Rothman put it plainly:
"The smaller the building, the larger the portion of the non-residents' tax that each resident shareholder will have to find a way to pay."
"Where is the justice and jeopardizing the financial stability of a cooperative in this way?"
Governor Hochul's office has argued that the law includes tools for the city to enforce collections directly from individual co-op unit owners. But the administration that would need to use those tools was not at the hearing to explain whether or how it plans to do so.
The friction between Mamdani and New Yorkers extends well beyond tax policy. The mayor was booed off stage at an NYPD celebration on Staten Island earlier in his term, an episode that underscored the depth of public frustration with his leadership.
Beyond the billing errors, the administration drew sharp criticism for publishing a tax roll of 900,000 properties that could fall under the levy. Jason Haber, president of the New York Residential Agent Continuum, rallied nearly 20 real estate agents on the City Hall steps before the hearing. Some held signs reading "Guilty until proven resident" and "Dox you very much."
Haber told the crowd the mass publication amounted to handing personal information to criminals.
"Today we're here to say we are in the dox days of August."
"That is a gift to every scammer, fraudster, or person with bad intent out there."
DOF Director Lee, in his written testimony, defended the publication, stating the city publishes tax rolls each year and that the law required it. He also wrote that property owners "who believe their property should not be subject to the surcharge have an opportunity to submit proof the property is used as a primary residence." That framing, the city presumes you owe the tax, and you must prove otherwise, is precisely what homeowners objected to.
Real estate developer Charles Kushner recently announced he was leaving New York City altogether, blaming Mamdani and the first lady for fostering an environment of antisemitism. Whether the pied-à-terre tax accelerates that kind of departure from the city's tax base remains an open question, but the signals are not encouraging for a city that depends on high-income residents to fund its budget.
Not every critic at the hearing opposed the concept of taxing wealthy non-residents. Kyle Bragg, a former president of the building-service workers' union 32BJ SEIU, told the Council he supported holding the wealthy accountable.
"I want to be clear that any legislation that's proposed to hold the wealthy accountable to their fair share is a good thing."
But Bragg described a friend who bought a brownstone in the city 40 years ago, raised a family there, and retired south. The friend kept the brownstone to stay connected to his children and grandchildren. That property, Bragg said, is likely now worth more than the law's $5 million threshold.
"He's concerned now because he kept his brownstone here so that he can keep in touch with his kids and his grandkids, whether or not he'll be subject to the pied-à-terre."
The scenario Bragg described, a retired working New Yorker who held onto a family home and now faces a luxury-property surcharge, illustrates the gap between the law's stated target and its actual reach. The tax was pitched as a levy on the ultra-wealthy who treat Manhattan apartments as occasional crash pads. In practice, it sweeps in retirees, longtime residents with paperwork errors, and co-op boards that had nothing to do with the non-resident units in their buildings.
Governor Hochul, who signed the law, spent last week putting distance between Albany and City Hall. She told reporters the state was not responsible for the rollout.
"We're not responsible for the rollout. We just were their, we are the facilitators."
Her spokesperson, Jennifer Goodman, declined to say whether City Hall should pause the rollout and referred reporters to the governor's prior comments. Albany approved the tax. The city botched the implementation. And neither level of government wants to own the result.
The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, the political organization that helped launch Mamdani's career, took a different approach. The NYC DSA posted on X, mocking the homeowners who testified and comparing the exemption paperwork to the burden working-class New Yorkers face when applying for unemployment insurance or food stamps.
"But, as anyone who has ever received unemployment insurance or SNAP benefits would know, working class New Yorkers have to do a lot more than prove residency in order to receive basic public benefits. So why all this fuss over uploading a PDF?"
The DSA went further, calling the complainants members of an "oligarch class" who "doesn't feel any obligation to the city that they play in." The post pledged to keep fighting for "more taxes on the rich to fund a dignified life for all."
That framing, that a 30-year resident facing a $52,000 bill he doesn't owe is an oligarch who needs to stop complaining, captures the ideological gap at the center of this fight. The DSA and its allies in the Mamdani administration see the tax as a tool of redistribution. The homeowners who testified see a government that assumed they were guilty, sent bills to the wrong addresses, published their information for anyone to find, and then refused to show up and answer for it.
Mamdani's broader record suggests the administration is comfortable with that kind of confrontation. The mayor's political controversies have generated real-world consequences before, and the pattern of picking fights without accepting accountability is becoming a defining feature of his time in office.
A government that can't deliver a tax notice to the right floor of the right building has no business lecturing anyone about civic obligation.
