Luxury Property Owners Take Up the Legal Battle Over Mamdani’s Pied-à-Terre Tax as Mayor Vows To Press On

The billionaire developer behind Las Vegas landmarks including The Mirage and the Bellagio has joined forces with a former Trump administration official to challenge the pied-à-terre tax, as Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration continues barreling ahead with its signature surcharge on the rich. Wynn Resorts founder Steve Wynn joined the legal fray with the former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross and his wife with a lawsuit in Suffolk County, home of the posh Hamptons towns to whence billionaires can escape the city in under an hour as the crow, or private helicopter, flies. Both Mr. Wynn and the Rosses reside in Florida, according to their suit. The City of New York will join both that suit and a second one filed Tuesday to defend the state law behind the surcharge, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Wednesday. The city will also press on with tax as it appeals a Staten Island judge’s order to redo the rollout.“We are going to intervene in those lawsuits. We will be standing with our partners in Albany to defend this surcharge, and while the process moves forward we will continue administering this surcharge fairly, efficiently and in full compliance with the law as we have been thus far,” the mayor told reporters Wednesday.Judge Wayne Ozzi directed the city to redo its rollout of the surcharge in a decision Tuesday. He held that the city doxxed homeowners by publishing their property information and unfairly saddled them with the responsibility to prove their residency or potentially face additional property tax starting at $40,000. The city has appealed that decision, a move its attorneys say blocks the decision from taking effect. The city’s Department of Finance has currently set a deadline of October 6 for anyone who has received a surcharge notice to appeal. To escape the charge, owners must show that their properties are rented out or occupied by the owner or close family members. Both Mr. Wynn and the Rosses own co-op units valued at more than $1 million under the city’s arcane property assessment metrics. Based on those valuations, Mr. Wynn is on the hook for just north of $183,000, while the former Commerce Department chief expects to receive a bill for a little over $83,000, according to their complaint.Mr. Wynn’s Manhattan property is a two-story penthouse in the Ritz Carlton currently on the market for $70 million. Mr. Wynn has been trying to offload the duplex at 50 Central Park South since 2022, when he initially listed it for $90 million. The Rosses’ apartment is located within River House on 52nd Street, a famously exclusive co-op that sparked a lawsuit when it turned away Gloria Vanderbilt. The couple purchased their unit on the East River after selling their penthouse at the Briarcliff, across the street from Carnegie Hall in 2018.Absentee owners such as these “already pay significant sums to the City in property taxes,” their suit argues, though “as a matter of fact and logic, those who are not full-time residents use fewer municipal services than full-time residents do.” The high net-worth property owners swept up in the surcharge also “make major contributions to the City’s charitable and cultural institutions, for the benefit of all New Yorkers.”Despite their value to New York, lawmakers “made no secret that singling out nonresidents for disparate treatment was precisely the point” of the pied-à-terre tax, their suit argues. They are calling for a Suffolk County court to vacate the state law that created the surcharge, saying the discrimination against non-New York residents violates several clauses of both the U.S. Constitution and the New York State Constitution.“When Steve Wynn and Wilbur Ross cast themselves as sympathetic figures over paying their fair share on multimillion-dollar second, third, fourth or fifth homes, they make the case for the pied-à-terre tax better than we ever could,” Governor Kathy Hochul said in an X post Tuesday.A second Suffolk County suit filed by Randy Mastro, the same attorney behind the Staten Island suit to block the surcharge rollout assembled a group of private citizens who are liable for the surcharge, but appear to be collateral damage of a law they say was “conceived in discrimination, enacted in haste, and rolled out in chaos.”The lead plaintiff, Robert Friedman, keeps his Park Avenue apartment in a trust and stays there to visit his son in the city after retiring to Long Island. Another set of plaintiffs, Lisa Mann and John Timinsky, bought their Upper East Side digs at a foreclosure auction, according to the complaint, and are renovating the two damaged apartments while maintaining their primary residence in Miami. The pair were previously involved in a lawsuit there in 2016 when they refused to vacate their unit in the historic Bay Harbor Islands building ahead of its redevelopment. Their pied-à-terre tax bill is estimated to be just under $90,000, more than four times the property tax they paid last year, according to the suit.The complaint says a second couple, Kent and June Barwick, fell into the pied-à-terre trap simply because the apartment they rent out in Little Italy was between tenants in January 5. Plaintiff Bradley Fishel, who purchased his future family home from the estate of a deceased person earlier this year, presented another complicated case. The estate still owned the Park Avenue apartment in January, and because “a person who was deceased definitionally could not have used the property as a primary residence on January 5, 2026, the property was subject to the PAT tax, even though Mr. Fishel is a New York City resident,” according to the complaint.The 35 East 75th Street Corporation, an Upper East Side co-op board also joined Mr. Mastro’s team. Because of the way they are structured, co-op boards are ultimately responsible for the full property taxes of a building, now including pied-à-terre surcharges billed to former unit owners who have sold their second homes since January 5, and may not be inclined to pay up.“The people caught in the crossfire are not the ‘billionaires’ who Mayor Mamdani seeks to vilify in social media for the apparent ‘crime’ of purchasing New York City real estate,” their lawsuit states. “They are hardworking people who have contributed and continue to contribute plenty to the City.”The judge in Mr. Wynn and the Rosses’ suit has scheduled a hearing for November 30.

Luxury Property Owners Take Up the Legal Battle Over Mamdani’s Pied-à-Terre Tax as Mayor Vows To Press On

Luxury Property Owners Take Up the Legal Battle Over Mamdani’s Pied-à-Terre Tax as Mayor Vows To Press On

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