On Tax Day, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a new annual tax targeting high-value properties owned by part-time city residents, positioning the measure as part of his broader agenda to increase taxes on wealthy New Yorkers and large corporations. The announcement builds on repeated calls Mamdani has made since his mayoral campaign for greater tax contributions from the city’s most affluent residents and profitable businesses.
Mamdani announced on Wednesday:
When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich. Well, today, we’re taxing the rich. I’m thrilled to announce we’ve secured a pied-à-terre tax, the first in New York’s history. This is an annual fee on luxury properties worth more than $5 million whose owners do not live full time in the city, like for this penthouse, which hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin bought for $238 million.This pied-à-terre tax is specifically designed for the richest of the rich, those who store their wealth in New York City real estate, but who don’t actually live here. But even so, they’re able to reap the huge financial rewards owning property in, dare I say, the greatest city in the world.
Most of the time these units are sitting empty since, again, they don’t actually live here. This is a fundamentally unfair system that hurts working New Yorkers. Now it’s coming to an end. This tax will raise at least $500 million directly for the city. It will help fund things like free child care, cleaner streets, and safer neighborhoods. As mayor, I believe everyone has a role to play in contributing to our city, and some a little bit more than others. Happy Tax Day, New York.
Mamdani has framed his tax agenda around both affordability and racial equity, arguing that the city’s cost-of-living crisis falls disproportionately on Black and Brown residents. He has pointed to a stark wealth gap between median white and Black households in the city — over $200,000 versus under $20,000, respectively — as justification for centering equity in his administration’s fiscal approach. He has expressed no reluctance in asking the city’s wealthiest to contribute more to fund public services and stem middle-class flight from New York.
On the budget front, Mamdani presented a $127 billion preliminary budget for fiscal year 2027 in February, having reduced a $12 billion gap to $5.4 billion through a combination of savings, revised revenue projections, and state aid. He has urged the state legislature in Albany to raise income taxes by two percent on the roughly 33,000 New Yorkers earning over $1 million annually and to increase taxes on profitable corporations, arguing this represents the fairest alternative to a broad property-tax hike that would affect millions of residential and commercial properties.
A central piece of his property-tax vision involves shifting the burden away from outer-borough homeowners toward higher-value properties in wealthier neighborhoods, which his campaign argued benefit from artificially suppressed assessments due to capped appraisal levels. When challenged at a White House visit over whether this amounted to race-based taxation, Mamdani clarified that references to “whiter neighborhoods” described geographic and demographic realities rather than any racial intent, and that his ultimate goal was a fairer property-tax system that makes New York affordable for all residents.
