A state judge halted New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's new surcharge on luxury second homes, finding the administration caused irreparable harm by publishing nearly a million homeowners' personal data without first checking who actually owed the tax.
Staten Island Supreme Court Justice Wayne Ozzi issued a temporary restraining order Monday blocking the city from enforcing its pied-à-terre tax, a surcharge on non-primary residences worth more than $5 million for houses or $1 million for condominiums and co-ops. The order bars City Hall from acting on roughly 17,000 notices already mailed to property owners warning of potential five-figure tax bills. It also forces the city to pull down a publicly posted database listing more than 900,000 homeowners whose properties the administration flagged as potentially subject to the levy.
The ruling landed days after a group of homeowners filed suit against Mamdani and the city's finance director, arguing the administration skipped legally required steps before tagging their properties. Their complaint alleged the city "arbitrarily and capriciously foisted onto New York City residents the burden of proving they are not subject to the surcharge", meaning homeowners had to scramble to prove they lived in their own homes rather than the city proving they didn't.
The core of the judge's decision, Fox News reported, was that the Mamdani administration never made individualized determinations of eligibility before sending out notices or publishing the massive property list. Instead, the city cast a wide net, flagging hundreds of thousands of properties without verifying whether they were primary residences, vacation homes, or investment properties. The court found the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits, a significant threshold that signals the administration's implementation process has serious legal problems.
Randy Mastro, the attorney representing the suing homeowners, did not mince words outside the courthouse.
"The city screwed this up... got it wrong... stop the train and make them do it over. The city is to bear the burden. They didn't do their homework."
Mastro added that the decision "vindicated the rights of hundreds of thousands of New York City homeowners who were subjected to a process they never should have been a part of in the first place," the New York Post reported.
That process caused widespread confusion. The city published names, addresses, and property values of more than 900,000 New York City homeowners on a public website, the vast majority of whom appeared to own properties well outside the tax's scope. Homeowners who had lived in the same house for decades suddenly found their personal financial information posted online, paired with the implication that they might owe a new surcharge they had never heard of.
The publication of that list drew immediate backlash, including from some of the mayor's own political allies whose properties appeared on it.
Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul announced the pied-à-terre tax in April, billing it as a way to make wealthy second-home owners "contribute their fair share" to the city. Officials projected the surcharge would generate roughly $500 million in annual revenue. The tax rates range from 0.8 percent to 6.5 percent depending on property value, the Washington Examiner reported.
But the rollout turned the policy's ambitions into a liability. Rather than targeting a narrow class of ultra-wealthy absentee owners, the city's dragnet approach swept up ordinary homeowners, people whose properties serve as their primary residences and who never had any connection to the tax's stated purpose.
Mamdani spokesman Matt Rauschenbach pushed back on the ruling in a statement to the Guardian.
"We disagree with today's ruling, but we are confident in both the pied-à-terre surcharge and the City's ability to implement it fairly and effectively. This surcharge asks those who own second homes valued at $5 million or more to contribute their fair share to the city they benefit from. The Law Department will appeal the ruling immediately which will stay the order, and the City will continue with the pied-a-terre's implementation."
Rauschenbach's framing, that the tax targets only "second homes valued at $5 million or more", omits the lower $1 million threshold that applies to condominiums and cooperative units, a detail spelled out in the law itself and confirmed across multiple reports. That gap between the administration's public messaging and the actual scope of the tax is part of what fueled homeowner confusion in the first place.
New York City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov offered a sharper critique of the tax's underlying philosophy.
"This is Marxism in practice: consistently promising to better the lives of the middle class by punishing the wealthy."
Vernikov's point cuts at a pattern that extends beyond this single policy. Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, has faced a string of public and legal rebukes since taking office. An immigrant business coalition voted to sue the city over his $70 million taxpayer-funded grocery store initiative. His public appearances have not fared much better, a Staten Island crowd booed him off stage at an NYPD celebration in under a minute.
The temporary restraining order holds at least until an August 31 court hearing, Breitbart reported. The Mamdani administration has filed its appeal, but whether that appeal automatically stays Judge Ozzi's order, as Rauschenbach claimed, remains to be tested. The city's Law Department says it does. The homeowners' lawyers have not conceded the point.
Meanwhile, the public database that Just The News noted improperly exposed the names, addresses, and property values of more than 900,000 New Yorkers is supposed to come down. Whether the damage from that exposure, to privacy, to public trust, to homeowners who spent weeks wondering if they owed a tax they never should have been flagged for, can be undone is another question entirely.
Courts have been increasingly willing to check New York's policy overreach, and this ruling fits the pattern. Judge Ozzi, himself a Democrat, did not reject the concept of a pied-à-terre tax. He rejected the way this administration carried it out, without the basic homework of figuring out who actually owed it before publishing their personal information for the world to see.
The numbers tell the story plainly enough. The city flagged roughly 960,000 property owners as potentially subject to a tax designed to hit wealthy absentee owners of luxury second homes. It mailed notices to 17,000 of them. Plaintiffs in the lawsuit say their own primary residences were incorrectly swept into the dragnet. And the judge found the city never bothered to make the individual determinations the law required before any of it happened.
That is not a policy disagreement. It is an implementation failure, one that treated nearly a million New Yorkers as guilty until proven innocent, then published their personal data on a government website for good measure.
When a government can't tell the difference between a billionaire's vacant penthouse and a family's only home, the problem isn't the tax code. It's the people running the tax office.
