A Staten Island judge ordered Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s City Hall to cancel thousands of second-home tax notices after a botched rollout wrongly targeted innocent owners, and the mayor’s team immediately appealed to keep the surcharge moving.
Fox News reported that Mamdani’s administration filed the appeal on Tuesday, hours after Judge Wayne Ozzi canceled the previously mailed notices for the city’s pied-à-terre surcharge.
City officials said the appeal triggered an automatic stay. That pause, they argued, lets implementation continue while the lower court’s order sits on hold.
Ozzi did not kill the tax on the merits. He found the city failed required procedures before the notices went out, calling the process arbitrary and capricious, affected by errors of law, and a violation of recipients’ due process rights.
The ruling lands as another accountability test for a mayor who sold the levy as fairness for working New Yorkers while his finance shop rushed a list so broad it sowed panic among people who never owed a dime.
The New York Post reported that Ozzi required the city to scrap all roughly 17,000 pied-à-terre tax notices and restart the process after the rollout wrongly targeted more than 1,000 New Yorkers who were not subject to the tax.
Homeowners who got those bogus notices were substantially harmed and penalized needlessly. They carried the burden of proving exemptions to city officials.
Reuters reported that Ozzi ordered officials to remove a supplemental roll of over 900,000 properties, cancel the 17,000 tax-owing letters, and issue new individualized notices.
The judge found the Department of Finance’s rush to fill budget gaps caused confusion and dismay. It unfairly shifted the burden onto homeowners to prove primary residence.
Ozzi wrote that no crime is involved here, but homeowners are being substantially harmed and penalized needlessly.
That pattern of process failure fits a wider record of City Hall ducking hard questions, including when the Mamdani administration refused to face the City Council over the same tax mess.
An unnamed city official told reporters the auto stay allows the city to continue, as it has been, with the implementation of the pied-a-terre surcharge and puts the lower court’s order on pause.
Spokesperson Matt Rauschenbach said today’s decision is wrong, and the city will invoke a stay of the injunction. With a stay, he said, officials will continue implementing the surcharge fairly, efficiently and in full compliance with the law, as they have since day one.
Rauschenbach framed the fight as basic fairness. If you can afford a luxury second home in New York City, he said, you can afford to pay your fair share for the schools, streets and parks that make this city work.
"Our administration is fighting every day to deliver for working New Yorkers. The ultra-wealthy are fighting in court to avoid paying their fair share. They have filed lawsuit after lawsuit to protect their privilege, and we will not back down."
That line landed after Ozzi had already documented how City Hall’s own list and notice machine hurt ordinary owners who never belonged on it.
Mamdani announced the second-home tax back in April. In its original form it hit one- to three-family homes, condominiums, and co-ops above high value thresholds when the owner also held additional property outside New York City.
Just The News reported the surcharge as 4 percent on one- to three-family second homes over $5 million and on co-ops and condos over $1 million, potentially affecting about 17,000 owners and pitched to raise about $500 million a year.
The Washington Examiner reported that Mamdani worked with Gov. Kathy Hochul to enact the tax after taking office, and that City Hall published a list of over 960,000 homeowners who could face the non-primary-residence levy.
In an April press release, Mamdani thanked Hochul and cast the policy as a step toward balancing the budget by taxing the ultra-wealthy and global elites, the first of its kind in the state, while claiming the budget would reflect a commitment to working New Yorkers being priced out of the city.
Public pressure on Mamdani has come from multiple directions this year, including when Netanyahu called out the mayor by name at the UN over antisemitism concerns.
Breitbart reported that Ozzi found the rollout sloppy and in violation of due process because of outdated lists and burden-shifting onto homeowners.
The Department of Finance must take down the Supplemental Roll listing over 900,000 properties, 98 to 99 percent of them not subject to the tax, cancel all notices, and issue new accurate ones only to those actually subject to the surcharge.
The ruling said the refusal to use tax data that was sufficiently available to the Department of Finance unfairly shifted the burden to thousands of homeowners to prove basic residency.
That shifted burden is not hyperbolic. Many property owners, perhaps unsophisticated, may need to consult legal or accounting professionals merely to prove residency, despite such information being readily available to the city.
Ozzi left a path open. The city can remove the current taxed-properties list from its website, post a corrected list after following proper procedures, and then mail new compliant notices.
Separate lawsuits from high-profile owners have also challenged the tax’s constitutionality, adding pressure beyond the notice fight.
The notice ruling sits beside other pushback Mamdani faces on a rent freeze plan, a state-sponsored grocery store plan challenged by the National Supermarket Association over unfair competition, and specialized high school admissions changes.
Those fights feed a broader debate about competence and priorities, the same climate that produced bipartisan anger after Mamdani and AOC were caught grinning during a 9/11 reading of the names.
House Republicans have also demanded federal scrutiny of the administration, including a DOJ probe push over a proposed meeting with Iran’s ambassador.
Mamdani is approaching nearly a year since voters elected him mayor. The pied-à-terre tax was a signature “tax the rich” plank. The judge’s order shows the difference between a campaign slogan and a lawful rollout that respects due process.
City Hall can still try to collect after it fixes the list and the notices. Until then, thousands of owners were told to prove they did not owe a tax the city itself could not accurately target.
Working New Yorkers were promised fairness. What they got first was a mass mailing built on a bloated roll, a rushed process, and a courtroom rebuke that forced a do-over.
Tax policy that hits the wrong people first is not fairness. It is government cutting corners and making citizens clean up the mess.