Mayor Zohran Mamdani vowed to defend New York’s pied-à-terre tax after a Staten Island judge ordered the city to restart its luxury second-home notices and new lawsuits piled up.
At a Brooklyn press conference Wednesday, the mayor brushed aside a fresh Staten Island Supreme Court setback and said City Hall will keep fighting for the surcharge on high-end second homes. He cast the fight as a constitutional defense shared with Albany partners, even as property owners, high-profile plaintiffs, and outside lawyers pressed the other way.
The New York Post reported that Justice Wayne Ozzi ruled the city must restart the process of notifying owners of luxury second homes that they face the levy, after finding the initial rollout both “arbitrary” and “capricious.” The mayor answered that the law holds up and that the city is moving to intervene in the suits.
“I fully believe that this law is constitutional, and we are moving to intervene in these suits because of that belief, and our commitment to standing alongside our partners in Albany to defend the surcharge,” Mamdani said.
The charge targets homes valued over $5 million and co-ops valued over $1 million. City Hall had set an Oct. 6 deadline for homeowners hit with notices to appeal. If Ozzi’s order stands, that clock gets pushed back. City lawyers said they already filed a notice of appeal and claimed that step created a temporary pause so the surcharge can keep moving.
Attorney Andrew Laufer rejected the city’s reading of the appeal notice. He said a notice of appeal does not freeze a ruling on its own and that the city would have to ask the court for that relief.
“Filing a notice of appeal does not automatically stay anything,” Laufer said. “They would have to ask for something like that... they would have to file a motion with the court.”
Randy Mastro, who worked in the administration of former Mayor Eric Adams, brought the Staten Island case for several local residents seeking to stop the policy. Separately, casino mogul Steve Wynn and former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross filed their own suit earlier this week in Suffolk County court. The legal pressure is no longer a single borough fight.
That courtroom clash sits alongside wider fallout already documented when the tax list exposed nearly a million New Yorkers by name and address, an episode the judge later ordered scrubbed from the web.
Before the ruling, the city blasted out about 17,000 letters telling homeowners they would have to pay. Roughly 1,200 of those notices later went to owners found to be exempt. More than 6,700 others had already filed for exemptions. The Department of Finance, which oversees the rollout, hired 24 extra staff right after the tax was unveiled.
Ozzi did not stop at a redo of the notices. He ordered the city to disclose the records used to decide who owed the charge. He also ordered removed from the web a public database that had published the names and addresses of 900,000 city homeowners. A revenue push became a process fight and a privacy fight at the same time.
Property tax attorney Benjamin Williams of Rosenberg and Estis told clients not to treat the ruling as a free pass. Until the court or the city gives clear direction, he said, owners still need to protect their rights and meet the filing deadline.
“Owners should not assume the ruling gives them more time or that the tax is going away. Until there is clear direction from the court or the city, the best course is to protect your rights and meet the filing deadline,” Williams said.
Administration resistance to hard questions is not new terrain for this office, including when the Mamdani team ducked a City Council hearing on the same contested rollout.
Paul Kremer, a partner at Benesch Law, said he was not surprised the judge seized on what looked like thin research into the targeted properties. In his view, basic front-end work would have spared the city a public loss, and handed critics a ready example.
“A little bit more legwork on the front end would have helped them avoid this embarrassing loss,” Kremer said. “Now the people who would seek to challenge other aspects of the Mayor’s agenda have an example of the Administration moving too fast and getting things wrong as a result.”
That is the pattern homeowners are left to live with: a big new surcharge, mass notices that swept in exempt owners, a database that put hundreds of thousands of addresses online, a judge who called the rollout arbitrary and capricious, and a mayor who still pledges to push ahead with Albany at his side.
Federal interest in the same tax fight has already been part of the larger story, including coverage of how Trump weighed a federal challenge after a judge halted the rollout.
Mamdani took the lawsuit questions at Nostrand Houses in Sheepshead Bay during an otherwise unrelated Wednesday appearance. By then, city lawyers said the notice of appeal was already on file. The mayor’s public line stayed fixed: the surcharge is lawful, the city will intervene, and the partnership with Albany will hold.
What remains unsettled is practical and immediate. Homeowners still face an Oct. 6 appeal-notice deadline unless the ruling sticks and moves that date. The city still claims its appeal notice paused Ozzi’s order; outside counsel says that claim is empty without a separate motion. Records the court ordered disclosed have not been publicly detailed in full. And the Wynn-Ross Suffolk County case adds another venue where the same policy will be tested.
Even against that legal weather, City Hall’s message is continuity. The same mayor who has kept high-level political contact in the news cycle, including when Trump invited Mamdani to the White House after a Gracie Mansion meeting, is treating the pied-à-terre surcharge as a fight worth continuing, not a program to rewind.
For owners of second homes and co-ops above the value thresholds, the choice Williams described is still the live one: file, register, and protect the record until a court or the city says otherwise. For everyone else watching City Hall chase revenue through a messy first pass, the judge’s words and the exemption numbers are already on the page.
Rushed tax schemes that cannot survive basic notice rules do not become fair policy because a mayor calls them constitutional. New Yorkers are left paying for the cleanup either way.