A comedians joke pied--terre tax workaround could actually go legit after struggling New Yorkers and homeowners flooded inbox

A stand-up comedian’s satirical stab at Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new luxury home tax has snowballed into something she never expected to actually build.Madison Walser, who splits time between New York and Los Angeles, launched a website called Aura Investments back in May as pure internet bait.The pitch was simple and absurd: struggling artists move into vacant apartments owned by wealthy second-home owners, and in exchange those owners dodge the city’s pied-à-terre tax.

The site’s copy leans into the joke hard.“You own a home in New York.

You cannot always be there.Why should you be taxed for being successful?” it reads, before offering itself up as “your solution to the vacancy tax.”Except a lot of people didn’t get that it was a joke.Since going live, Walser told Curbed in an interview she has fielded outreach from people who say they actually own second homes in Manhattan and Brooklyn, on top of a flood of interest from artists hoping to snag free rent.

“I think we’re close to 4,000 submissions,” Walser told the outlet of artist applicants alone.On the property owner side, the haul was smaller but still real.

“For properties, we had 25, and after I checked, we had eight or nine that were legitimate,” she said.The origin story traces back to a smaller joke that got out of hand.Walser had spent roughly a year bouncing between cities as a professional pet sitter before coding the site herself.

“When the pied-à-terre tax thing came out, I made a joke on Threads that, because I have such a big heart, I’m willing to sign a lease and live in the property of someone who’s avoiding the tax so they don’t have to pay it,” she told Curbed.“My background is in software development, and I’ve been playing around with AI coding tools, so I was like, ‘Let me just code something real quick.’” A friend asked to repost it.

“I was like, ‘Sure, why not?’ And it just blew up.”Now Walser is doing the unglamorous work of tryi...