A broke city gets a new tax, a pesky deed thief is back in custody, and Tampa Bay gets another $1 billion request for a stadium. From the wild and wooly world of real estate, here are our Hits and Misses for the week of May 25-29.
Miss: Ignoring the Root of the Problem. This week, the New York State legislature approved Gov. Kathy Hochul’s proposal to enact a new tax on second homes in New York City valued at $5 million or more. The so-called “pied-à-terre tax” will go into effect on July 1, and Hochul claimed it could generate as much as $500 million per year for the cash-strapped city, which is operating on a $5.4 billion deficit. Hochul estimated that 10,000 homes belonging to non-residents of the city would be subject to the tax, although it is up to the city’s Department of Finance to determine if the property is a second home before calculating its market value. This falls into the Democratic Socialist strategy advocated by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to blame successful and affluent people for many of the city’s problems, ignoring a bloated and inefficient bureaucracy that exists on deficit spending. Instead of soaking the rich, maybe Hochul and Mamdani should try streamlining the government?
Miss: Some People Never Learn. Do you remember Dawn Mangum? She made headlines two years ago when she filed a false deed on a North Carolina mansion and then tried to list it at $4 million. That case sparked a new awareness of how prevalent deed theft has become. Mangum failed to show up for a court appearance in March 2025 and eluded authorities until her capture this week. The News & Observer reports she’s being held on more than a half-million-dollar bond and is charged with failure to appear in addition to the original charges of attempting to obtain property under false pretenses and forgery of deeds or wills. Her next court date is scheduled for June.
Miss: A Billion Here, a Billion There. While the Tampa Bay Rays attempt to secure $1 billion in public funding to build a new stadium, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers joined the fun by making inquiries for $1 billion in public funding to renovate their home field Raymond James Stadium. The football team is reportedly willing to cover one-third of the renovation costs, with taxpayers financing the other two-thirds of the project. The renovations would include the installation of a sunshade at the open-air venue. “I think most of us have talked to the Buccaneers at this point, and we’re going to be writing a very large check in the very near future for Raymond James Stadium,” said Tony Muniz, a board member at the Tampa Sports Authority, adding, “I think that we need to take care of Raymond James before we go out and try to convince the Rays to stay in Tampa Bay.” Seriously, do Tampa Bay residents think their tax money is being well spent on stadiums for teams that are more than capable of paying for their own venue upgrades?
Hit: Is the Process Working? The Federal Reserve’s Office of the Inspector General announced this week that it will begin a new study on how the central bank’s Board of Governors reappoints the regional Fed presidents and their deputies to respective five-year terms. According to a Reuters report, the Inspector General’s office said this new study will determine if “the quality and completeness of executive performance evaluations and other potentially relevant information necessary to assess the merits of a reappointment.” The study follows criticism that the process lacks transparency and mostly ignores public input. To a casual observer it feels like a rubber stamp exercise – all 11 officials up for reappointment were approved by the Fed’s board late last year, along with the Atlanta Fed’s First Vice President Cheryl Venable, who is serving as acting president. Let’s see what the results of this study will find.
Miss: Who Writes This Stuff? A big thumbs down goes to Nick Lichtenberg, business editor at Fortune, for his article “The Pig in the Python: Baby Boomers are Strangling the Economy They Built by Refusing to Move or Retire.” This bizarre piece berates older homeowners because they are not freely giving up their residences, with the author complaining that “empty-nest boomers sit on a disproportionate share of the family-size homes that millennial parents need but cannot find or afford.” He adds that “most boomers either aren’t moving—or they’re moving into what used to be considered starter homes and are now ideal homes for downsizing grandparents to move close to their offspring.” Uh, does Lichtenberg have any idea why boomers aren’t eager to move? He also faults boomers for continuing to hang on to their jobs for as long as they can. The author seems oblivious to the onerous economic conditions that make it impossible for older Americans to successfully retire. The article is a masterwork of ignorance and is only recommended for a quick laugh.
Hit: The Next Tech Wave. Second Century Ventures, the strategic investment arm of the National Association of Realtors, announced the six companies selected for the 2026 NAR REACH program. The six companies – Ai.realestate, Association Online, BrokerBot, LotRoll, MaxHome.ai, and StackWrap – provide solutions for such issues as data fragmentation, manual compliance, administrative and operational clutter, lack of transparency, affordability challenges, and supply constraints. According to Dave Garland, managing partner at Second Century Ventures, “We don’t just wait for the future of housing to arrive—we have been dedicating ourselves to building it for years.” Congrats to the companies in this year’s cohort.
Phil Hall is editor of Weekly Real Estate News. He can be reached at [email protected].
Cover photo courtesy of Nick Santa Maria
0 Comments