Bad administration, not a tax on wealthy nonresidents, is the immediate threat to ordinary New York homeowners. In the Fox News op-ed MARK PENN: Socialist Mamdani sold a tax on billionaires. Regular homeowners could pay the price, Mark Penn argues that Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pied-à-terre surcharge is a disguised attack on middle-class homeowners. He says a tax sold as a levy on no more than 31,000 wealthy property owners could spread through bad notices, forced paperwork, falling property values, and lost savings.
I’ll concede the mess first. The Department of Finance sent notices to 960,000 property entries. Primary residents were then told to prove that they lived in their own homes. Some faced requests for federal tax returns. That is an unacceptable burden, and anyone who’s dealt with city paperwork knows it’s not a hypothetical. The city got the rollout wrong.
But that is a records problem, not a tax problem. The surcharge applies to non-primary residences that meet the stated valuation rules. Co-ops and condos can be pulled in when the city identifies an assessed value above $1 million. The surcharge can reach 5% or more of market value annually. A primary residence is supposed to be exempt. If the city sends a notice to the wrong person, that is a records problem. It is not the tax spreading.
I keep being told the pied-à-terre tax threatens homeowners. I’d be more moved if the Danes hadn’t been taxing second homes for decades without collapsing their housing market. The Danes manage this by making the exemption automatic when the city already has proof of primary residence. Walk me through it slowly. Start with why New York can’t do the same.
Penn turns a bad mailing list into a theory of economic collapse. He says affected owners will sell, sell, sell, and that local property values will fall. He says nonresident owners already pay taxes while using fewer city services — no schools to fund, less traffic, reduced sanitation demand. He argues they deserve a lower bill, not a higher one. But that argument has a small evidence problem: it does not show that ordinary homeowners will be forced out of their homes. It shows that a city agency needs to clean up its records. That is a real problem. It is not the same as proving the tax targets everyone.
The real danger is not that a tax secretly reaches every homeowner. It is that a city agency sends the wrong letter to the wrong person, leaves opponents to describe the confusion as confiscation, and the columnist writes nine paragraphs about the end of homeownership without ever mentioning that the city could fix the problem in an afternoon.
Build a system that sends the right letter to the right person. Make the exemption automatic. Clean the records. Start there. The tax isn’t the problem. The city’s failure to implement it competently is. And Penn’s column is the kind of piece that turns a mailing-list error into a manifesto — which is a very different thing from making a case that the tax itself is wrong.