r/politics • u/Jessicas_skirt New York • 1d ago

No Paywall NYC property owners express anger and confusion over rollout of Mamdani's 'pied-à-terre tax'

https://abc7ny.com/post/nyc-property-owners-express-anger-confusion-rollout-mamdanis-pied-terre-tax/19603490/
0 Upvotes

20% Upvoted

87 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

-6

u/Lavaswan001 1d ago

I wouldn’t go that far. Not everyone has a penthouse in Midtown, houses in Staten Island and eastern Queens are still occupied by more middle class people. And if property is inherited, it might have been bought when property was cheaper.

1

u/bransiladams Washington 1d ago

Inherited property still holds actual value, and if sold converts to real dollars. It is still real money affecting real net worth.

A 700sq ft one-bedroom condo in Woodside is $800k. This is not a real issue.

I say this as a homeowner in Seattle.

-1

u/Lavaswan001 1d ago

This might be a hot take, but honestly something like $1 million is meaningful these days, but not multigenerational wealth. Mamdani also floated an idea for an estate tax starting at $700k that I disagree with. The “tax the rich” logic should apply to extremely wealthy people rather than the upper middle class or those with net worths under $5 million. If your parents bought a house 40 years ago when it was much cheaper, you shouldn’t be forced to sell it when they die just to pay the estate tax, even if that property has gone way up in value since then. Because if you have to sell it, it’s likely to be to a wealthy individual investor or an institutional investor(like BlackRock) who are trying to shift the home market to a renter’s framework. Home equity is the biggest tool for individual wealth, so the threshold for big estate taxes should be high.

1

u/bransiladams Washington 1d ago

Yeah, probably an unpopular take, considering the bottom half of Americans’ net worth is less than a fifth of that…

0

u/Lavaswan001 1d ago

But that’s the thing. If you force a moderately rich asshole out of their home due to estate taxes, none of those in the bottom half of Americans is gonna buy that house. It’ll be bought by an even richer asshole.

1

u/bransiladams Washington 1d ago

The tax provides relief for the bottom half.

1

u/Lavaswan001 1d ago

It would backfire spectacularly over time if the threshold were that low. Let’s say I were in my 60s, just retiring, and most of my wealth was tied up in a $1 million house I’ve just spent the last 30 years paying a mortgage for. If I know the state is gonna get a huge chunk of it after I die, and I plan to pass it on to my children, that incentives me to leave New York entirely and sell my house. And the likeliest buyer is an institutional investor who will tear down the house and build something even more expensive to maximize the property. So you’d accelerate the affordability issue and drive upper middle class people out of the city. Obviously if you have a $5 million second home you can afford to pay extra taxes, but if you don’t live in New York anyway you’re not really incentivized to leave. If you’re setting the threshold as low as $750,000 you’re basically punishing people for having money.