New York's pied-a-terre tax rollout was blocked for a second time by a Staten Island judge who said the city improperly published property information and wrongly required homeowners to apply for exemptions.
New York State Supreme Court Justice Wayne Ozzi in Staten Island on Tuesday granted a request by the homeowners for an order requiring the city to take down a supplemental roll of more than 900,000 properties that could be subject to the tax and replace it with a more limited list.
Ozzi issued a similar ruling in August, but the city was able to quickly get an appeals court to put that order on hold. Matt Rauschenbach, a spokesman for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, said the city would similarly get Tuesday's order put on hold.
"Today's decision is wrong, and we will invoke a stay of the injunction," Rauschenbach said. "With a stay, we will continue implementing the surcharge fairly, efficiently and in full compliance with the law, as we have since day one."
The city filed a notice of appeal Tuesday night.
If it stands, the ruling would force the city back to square one on the implementation of the levy, a signature policy of Mamdani. The tax applies to single-family homes with market values of $5 million or more, and co-ops and condominiums worth at least $1 million.
"We're gratified that the court has recognized we were right all along," said Randy Mastro, a former deputy mayor in the Giuliani and Adams administrations, who filed the lawsuit. "Now the administration must go back and do what it should have done from the start: use all the information at its disposal to make an individualized 'initial determination' about who truly owes this surcharge before demanding that they pay it."
The suing homeowners said the city had caused "mass confusion" with its controversial identification of thousands of properties that it says are potentially subject to the tax on second homes. According to the suit, the city's request for wrongly identified homeowners to apply for exemptions illegally shifts its own responsibility to correctly identify taxable properties.
Homeowners were originally given an August deadline to apply for an exemption, but that was moved to Sept. 18 in the face of pushback over the rollout. The city subsequently extended the date to Oct. 6.
The city had argued the lawsuit was moot because the process of determining who will be responsible for paying the tax has not been completed and property owners will have the opportunity to challenge any finding that they are subject to the levy.
Ozzi — who himself had a home listed on the supplemental roll — said the city "unfairly shifted the burden to thousands of homeowners to prove their basic residency" by refusing to use all available tax data.
The case didn't challenge the legality of the tax itself, but Ozzi's decision came the same day that other homeowners, including former U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and casino tycoon Steve Wynn, challenged the constitutionality of the tax in a
The case is O'Brien v the City of New York, 85217/2026, New York State Supreme Court, Richmond County.
