00:00The rollout of New York City's Zoran Mamdani's, New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani's new pied-a-terre tax
00:04was temporarily blocked by a state court judge on Staten Island.
00:09Bloomberg senior reporter Laura Namias has been reporting on that story, and she joins us for more.
00:14Thanks for joining us, Laura.
00:15Thank you for having me.
00:16So just give us the latest.
00:17So the pied-a-terre tax temporarily blocked by a judge.
00:21Yes, by a judge.
00:23Pending both sides meeting in court on August 31st.
00:28Lovely Labor Day weekend for everyone involved.
00:30But the city has filed a counter motion arguing that they want to try to keep implementing the tax until
00:37that date when the judge makes another decision.
00:39But this is a roadblock for a tax that is on a very tight timeline to be implemented.
00:45The city wants to collect all of the money this year and in the next couple of months.
00:49So every day of delay is another difficulty.
00:52This has been something that Zoran Mamdani has really been driving home.
00:56I mean, I've even seen videos of him talking about this tax on social media.
01:00How much of this is kind of a loss for him or at least a step back for what he's
01:06trying to do?
01:06I think he's gotten a lot of unintentional blowback or a blowback that he didn't anticipate in response to the
01:13way that this tax was rolled out.
01:14He pitched it as a tax on the wealthiest of the wealthy, on foreign people who have second homes in
01:21New York.
01:21And instead, the city published a list of 900,000 different properties and sent out letters to 17,000 different
01:29property owners, many of whom we and other news outlets have heard from, saying,
01:33this is my only residence, this is my primary residence, I've lived here for 40 years, or I don't think
01:39that my property is worth that much money.
01:41And they're confused, befuddled.
01:42Some of these people supported the mayor.
01:44They don't think that they should be targeted by this tax.
01:47And in fact, thousands of people have now filed appeals to the city of New York saying they don't deserve
01:52to be taxed this way.
01:53Okay, so what are you watching for next?
01:56Could potentially the amount of people that are going to be taxed shrink now?
02:00Definitely.
02:01And the city has conceded in its filings in the last couple of days that they actually really don't have
02:07a sense of where all of the second homes are,
02:10and that some of this sending out of letters is a phishing expedition.
02:13And they're sending letters to addresses of LLCs and trusts where they don't know who the primary owner is.
02:20They're looking for more information.
02:21We should expect to see the numbers of properties that are actually subject to the tax shrink significantly down to
02:27what initial estimates were of like 10,000 to maybe 13,000 properties total.
02:33All right.
Comments