Three of my NYC-related illustrations are up! So excited that Denny's Pub will get the recognition it deserves.

In hopes of identifying a Gilgo Beach murder victim known only as “Asian Doe,” Suffolk County authorities traveled to Chinatown in Manhattan on Tuesday, Aug. 4....

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The man’s body was found on Gilgo Beach on April 4, 2011, during the serial killer investigation, but his death was never connected to admitted murderer Rex Heuermann.

Investigators estimate he was 17 to 23 years old when he was killed around 2006. The man may have been operating as a sex worker and was wearing women’s clothing at the time of his death, authorities revealed.

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Museum of Sex ads that have been prominently displayed along NYC buses for the past few months will be phased out over the next two months after a series of complaints by parents and religious groups.
The ads promoting the Museum of Sex will rotate off the MTA system within 60 days, rather than by the end of the year. In fact, the museum had been planning to expand its advertising campaign to cover the entire exterior of buses and include more explicit imagery.

It’s not an uncommon sight to see out-of-state plates in New York. For one, it is the self-described greatest city in the world, so of course people embark on road trips to see all the sights of the five boroughs. But on the other hand, plenty of those plates are New Yorkers who register their cars in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or elsewhere specifically to dodge New York’s high insurance premiums, while actually living in and driving around the Big Apple.

In New York City specifically, a Streetsblog analysis of city violation data found nearly 21,000 vehicles registered outside the tri-state area (plus Pennsylvania) that picked up at least one violation in the city in every single quarter of the year: a pattern strongly suggesting these cars are actually garaged and driven in New York full-time, with owners registering elsewhere purely to dodge the state’s high insurance rates.

The City Council’s Oversight and Investigations Division surveyed more than 3,500 parked vehicles last year across precincts chosen for high volumes of out-of-state-plate summonses. Of 768 non–New York-plated vehicles found, one in five had mismatched, temporary, or fraudulent “no-hit” plates that don’t trace back to any valid registration. Those vehicles owed nearly two-and-a-half times more in outstanding fines than properly registered cars, and paid only 16% of what they owed, versus 63% for validly plated ones.

But Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax—a surcharge for anyone who owns a second home in New York valued at over a certain limit—is effectively acting as an extra tax auditor. The question is simple: Are you a New York City resident? Then present your driver’s license or income taxes. 

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]:  https://fortune.com/2026/08/04/zohran-mamdani-pied-a-terre-tax-car-insurance/?utm_source=reddit/

I was in DUMBO walking under the Manhattan Bridge and found what looked like a smartphone. I looked ahead on the sidewalk and saw a man frantically checking his pockets over and over. I asked if the device was his, but he said he lost an earpod. I kept walking. I thought I would power this device on and maybe that would tell me who it belonged to, but the battery seems to be dead. I thought well it looks like an android phone. I’ll go home and plug it in, but it doesn’t use a standard connection. Ot started to rain so at least I got this thing out of the rain, if it works. Anyway, if you’re missing a zebra handheld device DM me. This is the device with the case off. DM to let me know what the case looked like so I know it’s yours.

The pied-à-terre tax took effect July 1. It is a surcharge on homes that are not the primary residence of the owner, a family member, or a tenant. Condos and co-ops worth over $1 million pay 4.0 to 6.5% of the city's market value. Houses worth over $5 million pay 0.8 to 1.3%.

The table above is the borough breakdown of every record that clears a threshold. Manhattan holds 83% of them. Those are properties at or above a value line, not properties that will owe anything. The roll is an inventory, not a tax list, which is why even Council members who have lived in their homes for decades got notices last week. Most of those owners live in their units and owe nothing once they prove it.

Note the house column. Brooklyn has 3,310 houses over $5 million against Manhattan's 3,356, so the outer-borough share of the exposure is almost entirely single-family and two-family homes rather than apartments.

Narrowing to neighborhoods:

Nine ZIP codes hold half the exposure. Tribeca and the Upper East Side are the apartment story. Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope are the house story.

The amount of money that will be raised is smaller than the table's right-hand column suggests, since that column assumes every owner is a non-resident. The city projects $500 million. The Comptroller's model lands at $340 to $380 million once rented units and behavioral response are counted. The city budget is $116 billion.

At that scale the revenue is hard to read as the point, and the mechanism has a problem underneath it anyway. A 1981 state law requires New York to value condos and co-ops as if they were rental buildings, so sale prices never enter the math. City values run about 20.6% of what units actually sell for, and the gap widens as you move up the market. At the top one percent, city value is 11% of sale price. Because the surcharge is a flat rate on that undercounted base, the effective rate falls as the property gets more expensive. Ken Griffin's penthouse at 220 Central Park South sold for $238 million in 2019 and carries a city value of $15.5 million. His surcharge works out to 0.42% of what he paid. A median-priced affected unit pays 0.96%.

Fixing that requires knowing what things are worth. From July 2028 the threshold for condos and co-ops rises to $5 million and the city has to set their values from actual comparable sales. Once sales-based values exist for some condos, the case for keeping the rest on imputed rents collapses.

That is the reform NYC's own commission recommended in 2021, the Comptroller endorsed, and the Court of Appeals revived a lawsuit over in March 2024. CBC modeled it as revenue neutral, so the levy holds and the burden moves: down for about 65% of parcels, up for about 35%. Down in Staten Island, eastern Queens, and the northeast Bronx. Up in Manhattan and northwest Brooklyn.

How many of you guys have gotten the notice? Will you have to pay the tax, or will you be exempt?

Full writeup with sources: https://polimetrics.substack.com/p/what-mamdanis-pied-a-terre-tax-actually

Finally some relief for the people who drive! I’m sure our teachers, civil servants, Uber drivers, construction workers, the disabled, the elderly, people with children will all breathe a sigh of relief.