Hooray for Judge Wayne Ozzi for derailing Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax.
Hooray for Judge Wayne Ozzi for derailing Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax.
Or at least the most outrageous part of the rollout, at least for now: In advance of an Aug. 31 hearing, the city has to take down its list of hundreds of thousands of names of homeowners who “might” have to pay the class-war tax.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks at a press conference about cooling subway platforms at the Chambers Street Subway Station in New York City on Monday, August 10, 2026. (Copyright Notice: Copyright (c) 2026 Splash News. No use without permission.) Michael Brochstein/ZUMA / SplashNews.com
Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul sold the levy as hitting only to non-residents who own ultra-expensive luxury homes that are usually empty — Russian oligarchs who park tens of millions of dollars on Billionaire’s Row, or capitalists like Zoh’s favorite target Ken Griffin.
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Yet the actual “prove your innocence” letters went to thousands of baffled full-time New Yorkers whose modest homes are worth nowhere near the “$5 million” threshold that Mamdani keeps repeating, because Hochul’s crack crew decided it should hit coops and condos starting at $1 million.
You not only got told you had to figure out if you qualified for the tax, you had to file for an exemption post-haste if they wanted to avoid falling afoul of the Department of Finance.
Worse: After DoF got it down to 17,000 possible targets, Mamdani’s minions put out a database, publicly, of hundreds of thousands — with no possible good reason for issuing a hit list the city knew to be 95% incorrect.
This mass doxxing can only be understood as Mao-style anti-landlord rabble-rousing, aiming to shame and scare the radicals’ class enemies.
It was a warning: The Movement — including Tracy Rosenthal, the trust-fund baby who now leads an “abolish rent” campaign — has you in its sights, whether or not you qualify for this tax.
Judge Ozzi’s giving city lawyers a chance to explain otherwise, but it sure looks like all that “equity” noise doesn’t mean just some dubious route to racial justice: They’re also talking about your home equity, and they can’t wait to get their hands on it.