Pied‑à‑Terre Tax Misdiagnoses Revenue

A tax on high‑value second homes (threshold here: >$5M) is being proposed as a revenue fix, but it risks reducing investment, encouraging valuation gaming, and destroying incidental economic activity from wealthy nonresident owners while producing only modest revenue (official estimate: $500M/year). The policy treats wealth visibility as a tax base without fixing the underlying property‑tax structure or spending mismatches. — Shows how politically attractive, narrowly targeted wealth taxes can have counterproductive economic and administrative effects and distract from deeper reforms to municipal finance and housing supply.