New York City homeowners spent three hours telling the City Council how Mayor Zohran Mamdani's pied-à-terre tax rollout upended their lives, and the administration that launched it refused to show up and listen.
Roughly 30 homeowners and real estate industry members packed a City Council oversight hearing Tuesday to challenge the city's new surcharge on non-primary residences, describing botched notices, privacy violations, and a process that treats longtime residents as guilty until they prove otherwise. The Mamdani administration sent no representative to face them, the New York Post reported, opting instead to submit written testimony and cite an ongoing lawsuit as justification for the no-show.
The hearing laid bare the distance between the mayor's "tax the rich" ambition and the administrative reality hitting ordinary New Yorkers. The pied-à-terre tax, signed into law by Gov. Kathy Hochul this spring, targets one- to three-family homes worth at least $5 million and co-ops and condominiums valued at $1 million or more, but only when those properties are unoccupied, non-primary residences. In practice, the Department of Finance cast a far wider net, publishing a tax roll of 900,000 properties and mailing roughly 17,000 individual surcharge notices to homeowners across the five boroughs.
Robert Bertagna, an Upper East Side retiree who has lived in his home for three decades, told the Council he received a notice informing him he would owe $52,000 a year unless he applied for an exemption. He pays taxes in New York. He votes in New York. His driver's license is issued in New York.
None of that mattered. The city still demanded he prove his primary residence.
Bertagna told lawmakers the burden should never have fallen on him:
"I filed an exemption, but that's not the point. The point is the government is assuming that I'm guilty unless I can prove myself to be innocent."
He went further, calling the notices "a clear intrusion by our government, intimidation by our government and, frankly, a direct attack and a target on private wealth."
Kenneth Fishel, another longtime Upper East Side resident, described an even more alarming breakdown. His DOF notice, listing his apartment number and a $58,000 annual surcharge, was delivered not to him but to a neighbor who lives nearly 30 stories below him in the same building. Fishel only learned about it by chance, running into the neighbor in an elevator.
"If I hadn't run into him in the elevator, I never would have known, and I would have been billed for the full tax."
Fishel has since joined a lawsuit by homeowners seeking to halt the rollout. A Staten Island judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking the tax while the case is pending, ordering the Department of Finance to take down the list covering roughly 960,000 properties. The city has vowed to appeal, with a hearing set for August 31.
The tax's structural design drew some of the sharpest criticism. Mary Ann Rothman, executive director of the Council of New York Cooperatives and Condominiums, warned that the DOF sends surcharge bills to cooperative boards or corporations, not to the individual shareholders who actually own the units in question. That means entire buildings absorb the cost when a single non-resident owner fails to pay or contests the charge.
"The smaller the building, the larger the portion of the non-residents' tax that each resident shareholder will have to find a way to pay. Where is the justice and jeopardizing the financial stability of a cooperative in this way?"
The Real Estate Board of New York called the rollout "plagued by confusion, errors, and unanswered questions" and urged the administration to pause implementation until it could demonstrate readiness to administer the tax "fairly, accurately, and transparently."
Even supporters of the tax's stated goal acknowledged the rollout was a mess. Kyle Bragg, former president of the 32BJ SEIU building workers' union, told the Council he backed the principle of holding the wealthy accountable but said the process was "unclear." He described a friend who retired down south roughly 40 years after buying a New York City brownstone, a home now likely worth more than the $5 million threshold, and who fears he may be swept into the surcharge simply for keeping a place near his children and grandchildren.
It is not the profile of a luxury-pied-à-terre owner dodging civic obligations. It is the profile of a retiree who kept a family home. The tax makes no distinction.
DOF Director Richard Lee submitted written testimony in place of appearing before the Council. His statement defended the rollout and framed the 17,000 notices as routine: "Property owners who believe their property should not be subject to the surcharge have an opportunity to submit proof the property is used as a primary residence." He added that the city publishes tax rolls each year and was required under the law to do so.
That explanation did not satisfy the Council. The administration's refusal to appear drew sharp criticism from panelists on Fox News, who argued the mayor was dodging direct accountability from constituents demanding answers about a policy his office designed and launched. The pattern is not new for Mamdani, who was booed off a stage at an NYPD event on Staten Island earlier this month.
The circular logic of the administration's excuse deserves plain statement: the Mamdani administration launched a tax rollout so flawed that homeowners sued to stop it, and then cited that lawsuit as its reason for refusing to answer questions about the rollout.
Gov. Hochul, who signed the law, offered no rescue. "We're not responsible for the rollout," she said last week. "We just were their, we are the facilitators." Her spokesperson, Jennifer Goodman, declined to say whether City Hall should pause implementation and referred reporters to the governor's prior comments. Hochul's representatives did argue the law includes tools for the city to enforce collections directly from co-op unit owners, a claim that, if accurate, would undercut the DOF's current practice of billing cooperative boards instead.
Outside City Hall, roughly 20 real estate agents rallied on the steps ahead of the hearing. Jason Haber, president of the New York Residential Agent Continuum, called the administration's decision to publish the tax roll of 900,000 properties a form of "mass doxxing." He said the city had handed a gift "to every scammer, fraudster, or person with bad intent out there."
The published list included names, addresses, and property values, AP News reported, inflaming tensions with homeowners who said the disclosure put them at risk. Tax experts quoted by the AP acknowledged the policy's surface simplicity but warned of deep complications. "It seems very simple but the more you dig into it, the more nuances you look at, the more complicated it gets," said Gary Bingel, a tax expert at EisnerAmper.
A real estate law professor at Cardozo School of Law told the AP the legal battles are far from over: "This is going to be a subject of litigation for quite a while."
Mamdani's administration has faced a string of credibility questions beyond the tax fight. His office claimed credit for a $104 million delivery-tip boost tied to a law that passed before he took office, and City Hall spent taxpayer money on a tenant-organizing film starring an official who called to "seize private property." Each episode reinforces the same gap: grand ideological ambition, thin operational follow-through.
Not everyone at City Hall opposed the rollout. The NYC chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America posted on X in support of the tax, dismissing homeowner objections as overblown. The DSA argued that working-class New Yorkers endure far more invasive paperwork to receive unemployment insurance or SNAP benefits.
"So why all this fuss over uploading a PDF? It's because the oligarch class doesn't feel any obligation to the city that they play in, even though it's working New Yorkers' city to live in."
The comparison collapses under the facts presented at the hearing. The homeowners who testified were not oligarchs resisting paperwork. They were retirees who received five-figure surcharge notices for homes they have lived in for decades, sent to wrong addresses, billing the wrong people, with an appeals process that punishes their neighbors. The DSA's framing treated a bureaucratic failure as a moral test, and decided the victims were the villains.
Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist who has accused his own party of serving donors over working-class voters, built his mayoralty on the promise that government would hold the powerful accountable. Three hours of testimony from the people his government actually reached suggest the accountability is flowing in the wrong direction.
When a city can't deliver a tax notice to the right floor of the right building, it has no business lecturing anyone about civic obligation.