cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/42743
New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani has announced a historic new tax on owners of luxury second homes which are worth $5m or more, in a bid to raise $500m for the city.
The ‘pied-à-terre tax’ will apply to people who do not live full time in the city but reap the rewards of investing in the New York real estate market.
Mamdani called the new tax “specifically designed for the richest of the rich” and said it was aimed at tackling a “fundamentally unfair system that hurts working New Yorkers”, in a video post on social media.
The new tax was formally proposed by NY state governor Kathy Hochul, who added on X: “New Yorkers show up for this city every day. Some of the wealthiest property owners and foreign oligarchs don’t. It’s time they start contributing like everyone else.”
According to the New York Times, Hochul has been resistant to taxing large corporations and the city’s wealthiest residents. However, she was more open to taxing luxury second-homeowners who do not pay state or city income taxes because their primary residences are outside New York.
The tax will contribute towards combatting New York City’s fiscal deficit, which is estimated to stand at $5.4bn through the next fiscal year.
Previous attempts to introduce a second-homes tax were quashed by powerful real estate developers, including as recently as 2019.
Sophia Sheera is a journalist in Novara Media’s social media team.
From Novara Media via This RSS Feed.
The Democratic Party is going to hate him so much, because anyone can just point at him when they claim they can do nothing.
Damn, it only took a Democratic Socialist to pull off what a capitalist without their head up their ass would do
Maybe he’s not the Cyborg Stalin that we need right now, but I’m so starved of good news that I’m officially a stan for Mamdani now
Sure it’s not socialism, but it does provide some better material conditions right now, and most importantly, I’m sure it wakes a lot of people up about the fact that socialism is their desired system and not the “1 quadrillion kids starving in an underground prison with torture machines” system they were conditioned to believe
The tax will contribute towards combatting New York City’s fiscal deficit, which is estimated to stand at $5.4bn through the next fiscal year.
If they get the full $500m they want from this, the deficit will still stand at $4.9bn. The NYPD’s budget stands at $6.7bn. It’s good that they’ve finally “broken the ice” on the idea of taxes targeting the wealthy, but I submit that it is impossible to get NYC “in the black” without massive cuts to one of the most bloated, corrupt, destructive, and ineffective police departments in the country.
NYC’s police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, appointed by Eric Adams about 15 months ago, is a billionaire. Virtually all mayors choose their own police commissioner and Mamdani carried over Tisch, so she may hold leverage/be difficult to get rid of before the NYPD budget can be significantly cut.
NYC’s police commissioner is a billionaire
That’s too on-the-nose, the readers will never buy it.
Are you really a billionaire without a connection to Epstein?
And why not just tax ALL second homes?
Who the fuck owns two houses?!
I know a lot of well-to-do old people will own retirement homes in hot states and their old homes in their home states and they’ll bounce between them during summer-winter.
Snowbirds they’re colloquially known as.
Yeah this is definitely a big part of it. The person I bought my home from was doing this for decades and I learned the hard way they were neglecting both their houses for half the year. Fuck snowbirds, they should be taxed to death too.
my guess is we want some kind of nominal carve out for people who have had some kind of death inheritance scenario where a non luxury person suddenly gets a second house from a dead family member (who died with nothing but the equity in their house, and maybe the place is kinda far from OK to sell), or someone is trying to move from one house to another and has a period of overlap while the first house sits on the market and/or has repair work done to it to make it sellable.
im with you that two homes is one home too many, and probably the $5 mil cutoff should be lower… but i also get that jacking it up that high makes anyone attacking it instantly ludicrous.
personally, i like the cuban system of 1 house ownership per human being (no corporations/trusts, and no foreign nationals owning residences). and if you sell a house for more than you paid for it, the government takes 33% of the gain. government will grant 0% interest construction loans to build/renovate a house. it seems to work and completely discourage any bubble/speculation activity but doesn’t discourage people from taking the time and effort to make homes nice. if you have a spouse and live in one house, you can even rent out the other but there are restrictions on its standards for energy efficiency and accomodations, i believe. and the tax man takes a third of the rental income. china apparently does something similar.
like yeah, you wanna fix up some beat up house to flip it? ok, well you can only do it one at a time, and tax man eats a third of your gain. you wanna rent out the place your sibling left you to long stay tourists and guest/seasonal workers? fine, but the gov is up your ass on the quality and takes a third. but nobody can hoard anything, so homeownership rates and prices are so much more reasonable since no one person or family can hoover up dozens of residences, continually adding as they grow.
i think taxes like this should become exponential for each additional home, just to really target the absolute worst of the worst and make them squeal/shed assets.
My family has a cottage, but it’s smaller than my apartment and they got it in the 60s. 8 people handle the bills and upkeep as well, so it’s not particularly expensive. Its a place in the woods with beds and a fridge that isnt even insulated.
Who the fuck owns two houses?!
probably none, it is either 0 or 10s or even 100s
Dacha owners now class traitors and must be liquidated.
Dachas are sheds but where they exist they tend to have other problems like being really, really, valuable land (to the public) that is beholden to some sort of fucked up inheritance money scheme that rides on getting subsidized to no end on the flimsy excuse that people grow produce there for their own needs, which they don’t
Tankie
Communism is when you pay more to take away homes from those in need :huff:
Pure Stalinism, Maoism, a dark day for NYC smh 😔
Mamdani really shows just how much the dems hate their voter base and love losing
I am so curious how many of these properties defined by the city as worth 5m or more exist because for tax purposes properties are valued by the state way, waaaay below their market value
The Mamdaniist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive tax reform in the end of history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of tenements among the peasantry
ok im officially libbing out for him now
will levy an annual surcharge on one to three family homes, condominiums and co-ops valued above $5 million when owners have a separate primary residence outside of New York City.
Wow this has so many exceptions. Apparently you can own as many homes as you want as long as you live in NYC. Owning a whole apartment complex? That’s fine too.
I also couldn’t find info on just how much the tax is anywhere.
(This is still of course better than nothing.)
Ken Griffin is starting to throw bedposts again if he is not busy lying under oath
How’s your GME doing? lol
Fuck Ken Griffin though
really good :)
yeah fuck Kenneth Cordele Griffin from Citadel
