Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration was dealt a blow Tuesday as a judge ruled the city must scrap its bungled rollout of the new pied-à-terre tax and start anew.
Page A3From§Eachthe supper edition — 29 September 2026
Casino magnate Steve Wynn joins New Yorkers 'battling' a millionaire's home tax, wins
As it ran on the front
A Staten Island courtroom settled the matter Tuesday: the pied-à-terre tax, Mayor Mamdani's plan to charge an annual fee on second homes worth millions, does not survive contact with the people who own them. Justice Wayne Ozzi of the state Supreme Court sided with a group of homeowners who sued the city, and ordered New York to scrap the rollout and start the whole process over. That is the ruling. The interesting part is who was standing in the courtroom when it came down.
Among the plaintiffs: Steve Wynn, the casino magnate, founder of Wynn Resorts, a man whose business is built on getting other people to hand over money they can't really spare. He owns a second home in the city. He did not want to pay an annual tax on it. He sued, and on Tuesday a judge told the city to try again.…
…(cont) The New York Post ran the story under the headline "New Yorkers battling Mamdani's pied-a-terre tax snag big legal win — as casino mogul Steve Wynn joins fight." Read it twice. The casino mogul does not lead the sentence. He joins the fight already in progress, one more member of a coalition the headline calls, simply, New Yorkers. That is the whole trick of the pied-à-terre tax fight in one dash: a man who can buy a Las Vegas Strip and still afford a Manhattan pied-à-terre gets filed under the same noun as everybody else who happens to hold a New York address.
The city now has to redraft the rollout from the beginning. No new date has been set for when a redone version reaches a second apartment in this city. That is not a delay with a villain's timetable attached — it is just a delay, and delays are where a tax like this tends to go quiet.
Procedure is real; so is standing. The people with the resources to find the flaw in a rollout, hire the lawyers who can prove it in court, and be first in line when the city has to start over are, as a rule, the people who already have the most reason to make sure a tax on wealth never quite finishes being written. Steve Wynn found a flaw. The tax goes back to the drafting table. Everyone else on the plaintiff list gets called a New Yorker for it.
“A billionaire casino owner sues a city and the headline calls him one of "the New Yorkers." That's the con in six words — stack enough zeros in the courtroom and suddenly you're just a regular guy from Staten Island fighting city hall. The tax goes back to square one, no new date on the calendar, and the guy who can afford the lawyers to make that happen is exactly the guy the tax was written for.”
“Look, this is a process story, not a wealth story — the judge didn't rule on whether rich people should pay more, he ruled the paperwork was bungled, full stop. And Wynn's not special here, he's one plaintiff among a "group of homeowners," same as anybody else who — okay, he owns casinos, that's fair, but the point is procedure. Did I say bungled? That's the Post's word, not mine. It's a clean legal win, is all I'm saying.”
The receipts
A Staten Island judge sided with a group of homeowners who had sued the city over its introduction of the tax, dealing a blow to Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
A Staten Island judge blocked New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s effort to institute a new tax on high-end second homes, telling him to start the effort over. Justice Wayne Ozzi of the state Supreme Court on Staten Island ruled in favor of homeowners who sued the city over the pied-à-terre tax scheme, an annual […]
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.