Cross your fingers a state judge’s slapdown this week of the pied-à-terre-tax’s rollout marks the beginning of the end of the whole misbegotten tax.
Page F3From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 2 October 2026
Mamdani's pied-à-terre list, warned to end like Stalin's kulaks, ends with casino mogul Steve Wynn.
As it ran on the front
On September 5, a Washington Examiner op-ed ran New York City's new pied-à-terre tax through a different ledger: Stalin's list of kulaks, the list of targeted property owners that preceded the Holodomor famine. The op-ed held one line of the argument constant — a list starts small — and solved for how that kind of list ends.
By September 29, the city had produced a result, though not the one the op-ed had in mind. A Staten Island judge, Wayne Ozzi, a Democrat on the state Supreme Court, ruled that Mamdani's Department of Finance violated the plaintiffs' rights in how it rolled out the tax, and ordered the city to start the process over. The ruling turned on procedure — how the Department of Finance calculated and notified who owed what — not on whether the tax itself can stand. Listed among the plaintiffs who brought the case: Steve Wynn, the casino mogul.…
…(cont) The tax applies to owners of high-end second homes, assessed annually under the scheme the city began rolling out this year. The September 29 ruling does not strike the tax down; it sends the Department of Finance back to redo the rollout procedure that triggered the lawsuit.
On October 2, the New York Post's editorial board filed the next entry in the ledger. Legal trouble for the tax "is just beginning," the board wrote, calling the whole effort "misbegotten" and predicting that this week's procedural loss marks the start of killing the tax outright.
Reconciled, the ledger reads like this: a tax built to apply to owners of homes they do not live in has drawn, as the plaintiff contesting it, an owner of a home he does not live in. The September 5 op-ed predicted a list of the persecuted. The September 29 docket produced a casino mogul. Measured against each other, that is the gap this week closes, hon — the space between the kulak the op-ed feared and the man who actually showed up to fight the bill.
The rollout restarts under the judge's order. Whether it restarts with the same forms, the same list, and the same plaintiff is the only entry still open in this ledger.
“They scared you with a dead Russian peasant so you'd miss the live Las Vegas one standing in the complaint. A tax built for owners of empty second homes finally found one who could afford lawyers, and that's the whole story — not a coincidence, a business model. Check whose name shows up first when they warn you about a list; this time it's a casino mogul's, not a peasant's.”
“Look, this is a due-process story, full stop — the city botched the paperwork, the judge said so, that's not a political ruling. And sure, the plaintiff happens to run casinos, but the law doesn't check your net worth before it protects your rights... unless that's exactly the problem, in which case, forget I said rights, I meant paperwork.”
The receipts
· New Yorkers battling Mamdani’s pied-a-terre tax snag big legal win — as casino mogul Steve Wynn joins fight from the morgue, 29 Sep 2026
· Staten Island judge rules against Mamdani, NYC on taxing second homes from the morgue, 29 Sep 2026
· Judge blocks Mamdani’s second-home tax rollout, tells city to start over from the morgue, 29 Sep 2026
· Mamdani’s list starts small. History proves where it ends from the morgue, 5 Sep 2026
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.