NYCs pied--terre tax horror stories: Blatantly unfair

When Scott Golden and his wife Stephanie Cohen sold their Upper West Side condo in July, they thought they were done with New York’s sky-high taxes.Instead, they were slapped with an additional $48,949 bill on the way out — roughly 25 times their regular property tax bill.The Miami-based couple, who run an insurance brokerage firm, are among the thousands who were retroactively slammed by the state’s controversial new pied-à-terre tax on luxury second homes.And now they’re teaming up with other homeowners and a New York City co-op in the latest lawsuit contesting the legality of a new state-imposed tax that was initially pitched by Gov.

Kathy Hochul and socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani as targeting billionaires — but also hits owners of less expensive second homes.“I think it’s blatantly unfair that they are targeting and discriminating against out-of-staters,” the 63-year-old Golden told The Post.“And there was no ability to plan in advance.If we had known, we would have sold earlier,” added Golden, who got $6.55 million for the Riverside Boulevard property.The suit, filed Sept.

29 against the Hochul administration in state Supreme Court, alleges the second-home tax violates the US and state constitutions by unlawfully discriminating against nonresidents, imposing unfair burdens on homeowners and cooperative buildings and applying retroactively to Jan.5.That’s nearly five months before it was enacted on May 28 by Democratic-controlled state Legislature and Hochul at the behest of Mamdani to raise $500 million for the city budget.Others who’ve joined the litigation include Kent Barwick, a New York City civic legend who previously headed the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission and the Municipal Arts Society, and his wife, June.Barwick purchased his co-op apartment on Mott Street in Little Italy in 1972 and lived there full-time until he and his wife moved upstate to Cherry Hill a few years ago.

They kept the co-op, which the city valu...