Mamdani tax thing hits our neighborhood
A couple neighbors have written in about that Mamdani tax thing, in which NYC published a list of approximately 960k properties containing “at least one unit [which] may be subject” to a new tax on expensive pied-à-terres, a fancy French word for secondary homes, in the city. The purpose of the list is to “tax the rich,” and if you look at a bar chart of the properties on the list, you might notice that our neighborhood (“Chelsea / W. Village” on the graph) is rather…represented.
In conjunction with the list, Mamdani sent out about 17k notifications in the mail to property owners essentially stating that NYC has reason to believe that their property exceeds $1m in value and is a pied-à-terre—and asking the owner to submit proof to the contrary so that they are not subject to the tax.
This is a tricky issue but, let’s wade into it. I’ll try to speak for as broad of a coalition as possible:
Mamdani is the city’s democratically elected chief executive who ran on a platform of wealth redistribution. Good on him for carrying out the will of the people and actually doing what he said he was going to do when running for office.
We’ve got a rather inescapable wealth inequality problem in this country, city, and even neighborhood—and while this lowly block association doesn’t even pretend to have the answers to that problem, a tax system that (i) taxes your paycheck quite a lot, but (ii) taxes property like houses and stock not so much (even as they seriously appreciate in value) turns out to be rather regressive.
Mamdani kind of botched the roll-out here. The list of 960k properties is just a list of all the units in NYC where the owners pay a property tax for the unit (which is true for essentially every unit that is owned and not rented out long-term). In other words, the list excludes renter-occupied apartments (which is why apartments in 507 West Chelsea, Ava High Line, Abington House won’t be on the list)—but virtually every other unit in NYC will be on the list. So the list itself does not by any stretch contain only the lavish pied-à-terres, and publishing it with a message that it contains properties which “may be subject” to the new tax is rather confusing by Mamdani.
We understand that some neighbors have received notices wrongly indicating that their home is a pied-à-terre. I’m sure that is a bit unnerving and as far as I can tell, the city hasn’t been a model of clarity in disclosing how it identified the 17k alleged pied-à-terres that received notices (which is less than 2% of the total 960k property tax roll). It seems to be a function of the value of the property and whether you’ve declared the property your “primary residence” on property tax forms.
The list itself is an absolute mess if you know anything about property values in New York. I won’t say too much about this in light of #3 above, but the city is using some seriously antiquated methodology in appraising the “fair market value”—which forms the basis for the new tax—of the properties on this list. Suffice to say that penthouse apartments in some of the swankiest buildings in our neighborhood are worth far, far more than low 7 digit-dollar values, and this list suggests otherwise over and over again. Odd.
Feel free of course to write in with a perspective.