Three New York City property owners are taking legal action in an effort to slow the rollout of the state’s hotly debated luxury second-home tax, arguing that Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration mishandled how the new surcharge is being implemented.
In a lawsuit filed Friday in Staten Island Supreme Court, the homeowners contend that City Hall has wrongly shifted the responsibility onto them to prove they live in New York full time — and therefore should not be subject to the so-called pied-à-terre tax.
The city Department of Finance “has arbitrarily and capriciously foisted onto New York City residents the burden of proving they are not subject to the Surcharge,” the court filing says.
The complaint takes particular aim at the Finance Department’s decision to post a tax roll listing nearly 1 million properties that could potentially fall under the new levy, as well as the roughly 17,000 notices sent to homeowners cautioning that they could face bills in the five-figure range if they failed to seek an exemption.
According to the lawsuit, the city failed to meet its legal duty to properly investigate first, rather than using its “vast resources” to carefully identify which properties are actually covered by the surcharge.
The legal challenge does not seek to overturn the pied-à-terre tax itself. Instead, the plaintiffs are asking a judge to rule that the city’s rollout was unlawful and to order the Department of Finance to remove the roughly 900,000-property list from its website.
The suit also seeks an emergency injunction that would cancel the 17,000 mailed notices and free affected homeowners from any obligation to respond. The Mamdani administration recently pushed back the exemption application deadline from the end of August to Sept. 18.
The homeowners are being represented by attorney Randy Mastro, who previously served as first deputy mayor under Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams.
