Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax was designed to hit the wealthy, but it’s sending most New Yorkers to their estate lawyers

New York City’s pied-à-terre tax was designed to extract money from second-home owners wealthy enough not to live in the city full-time. A side effect no one planned for: it’s pushing middle-class and working homeowners, people who already live in their houses, into estate-planning conversations they’ve never had before, at hourly rates they’ve never had to pay, for advice the wealthy have had access to for generations.

The rush of publicity accompanying the mayor’s office highlighting a list of over 680,000 New York properties that could theoretically be subject to a new tax has inadvertently advertised how public most property data is. And it’s advertised the benefits of seeking some totally legal privacy, or risk inadvertent doxxing, courtesy of Gracie Mansion.

“The wealthy and the ultra-high-net-worth have been in this game for a long time,” said Myles Fischer, a partner who co-leads the Trusts and Estates practice group at Harris Beach Murtha. “The rest are sort of catching up.” And that isn’t cheap. Many middle-class and blue-collar homeowners are “being forced into a situation where they have to sit down with lawyers” to get planning advice that families with means secured years ago. After all, he added, “it’s not that you have to be a rich person to have something worth protecting. We see it from across the board.”

The trigger, in this case, was a public records disclosure. When the DOF released its supplemental pied-à-terre assessment file, the coverage focused on the penthouses and the LLCs holding them. But the unfiltered file swept in far more than luxury properties—it included modest homes in Bayside, single-family houses in Staten Island, properties whose owners may have had no idea their name, address, and assessed value were sitting in a publicly searchable dataset. Many still don’t.

Fischer wasn’t surprised by the reaction. “Anonymity is desirable when it can be achieved,” he said, “but anonymity is also typically only one piece of the pie, so to speak. It’s part of the tax plan, part of the estate plan, part of the asset protection, limitation-on-liability sort of pie.” Privacy, in other words, is the door. The estate planning is what’s behind it.

The trip-and-fall scenario

For Fischer, the most fundamental reason to move real estate into an LLC or trust has nothing to do with taxes or public records. It’s liability—the kind that applies to a million-dollar house in Staten Island as directly as it does to a Central Park South penthouse. (The........

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