Whatever you think of New York’s so-called pied-à-terre tax — a plan to plug a $500 million city budget hole with property taxes on those who own a valuable dwelling in the city but don’t make it their primary residence — there is no question that the administration of Mayor Zohran Mamdani bungled its rollout.

And, in so doing, they tapped into one of the biggest and most reasonable fears people have of democratic socialist administrations.

Their imperiousness.

Instead of doing the hard job of figuring out precisely who owed this new tax, or “surcharge” as the mayor’s office prefers to call it, the city government actually put the onus on the owners of the impacted properties, or possibly impacted properties, to prove the negative, so to speak.

Some 17,000 New Yorkers got a letter from the city and then had to offer evidence that their home was their permanent home. And do so fast. The suggested proof was to submit a copy of the most recently filed Internal Revenue Service return to prove residency bona fides, not a task that can be done in five minutes for most people.

Simply put, the city government chose to send demand letters to a far broader universe than actually is liable for the tax, including many with no other residence (so not “pied-à-terre” owners at all), people whose property was worth less than the threshold applicable to the tax and others in a whole variety of circumstances who are not liable. In many cases, the property record was outdated.

The project has exposed a number of fissures, including the disparity between assessed values and the actual worth of a property (something with which we are very familiar in Chicago) and the difficulty of figuring out the true value of a condo, which really can only be expressed in terms of what someone is willing to pay at a given moment and may be entirely different say three months later (ditto).

New York also has co-op buildings, which adds a whole other level of complexity to this tax grab.

But what has upset so many New Yorkers the most is the demand to prove the government has made a mistake on pain of paying up. Some folks have started to worry about where this approach to property rights in New York eventually may be going.

Naturally, this was especially hard on some seniors, likely quietly going about their lives. But it was a recipe for anxiety for multiple generations. And, of course, an opportunity was born for fear-mongering and deception, including shady parties offering to prove exemption for a fee.

Anything involving a massive swath of property like this taxing initiative is bound to make some errors. That’s not our point here. Our point is that it was incumbent on the Mamdani administration to know far more precisely who it’s taxing and be as sure as reasonably possible that they are liable for such a tax. That is not the choice that was made here. Instead, a wide net was cast to capture as much new revenue as possible.

Over time, wiser local governments have figured out that asking people to prove what they know to be true and has long been true is an unfair burden with the likely consequence of angering a voter.

Had we a permanent home in New York City that Mamdani thought was a “pied-à-terre,” we’d be hacked off, too.

Mamdani has announced a four-week extension to the onerous initial deadline for submitting “exemption applications.” When questioned by reporters on Monday about the upset, he declined to apologize.

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