A push to tax multimillion-dollar second homes in New York City has been billed by Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani as a civic mandate for the ultrawealthy to contribute more to society.

But as leaders in the State Capitol seek to incorporate the tax proposal into the state budget, the lofty rhetoric has been undermined by confusing information flowing from Ms. Hochul’s office about how such a tax would work.

The problems start with the numbers and the math.

To raise $500 million for the city, Ms. Hochul initially said the so-called pied-à-terre tax would apply to 13,000 homes, a number that her staff pulled from a 2023 report by the city comptroller. Now, aides to Ms. Hochul are saying that the 13,000 figure was an early estimate requiring more analysis and was subject to change.

The governor’s team had first said the tax would be based on second homes with an assessed value of $5 million or more. But there is very little correlation between a property’s assessed value — a specific and complex measure calculated as part of the property valuation process — and actual market value.

The city does not use sales comparisons or recent listings to value condos and co-ops. Under a state law passed in the 1980s, the city is required to compare the units to rentals of similar size and age, assessed on the potential income that rental might bring in. There are not great rental comparisons for the highest-end condos and co-ops, dragging down their assessments; in some cases, these condo buildings are even compared to rental buildings with rent-regulated units.

An analysis of city records conducted by Marketproof, a real estate data analysis firm, found just three residential properties in New York City with assessed values of $5 million or more.

One of the three was the notoriously expensive penthouse bought in 2019 by the billionaire financier Kenneth Griffin for $238 million.Its assessed value, according to city records, is just under $7 million. Another condo, on the 57th floor of another Midtown luxury building, sold in December for more than $21 million, but it has an assessed value of around $1.3 million.

Jennifer Goodman, a spokeswoman for the governor, declined to offer specifics about the pied-à-terre tax proposal, saying this week that they were still being negotiated. The governor’s office said that they had wrongly described at first how the tax might work, and it is not going to be based solely on the assessed value of properties.

Instead, Ms. Goodman said, apartments subject to the tax would be determined by “a model that captures properties worth over $5 million through the use of various mechanisms such as comparable sales data where applicable.”

That raises another set of problems, as there is no official and consistent measure of how much properties in New York City may actually be worth on the market.

Building that kind of information is possible, but has not typically been done before by the city, said Kael Goodman, the president and chief executive of Marketproof.

“To get from doable on a technical basis, to doable on a practical basis — those two things are not the same,” Mr. Goodman said.

To demonstrate how such a tax could work, Marketproof created its own model analyzing more than 1.14 million tax parcels. Since there’s currently no official way to tell if a particular unit is a pied-à-terre, the company used a proxy: the subset of properties where the property tax bill was sent to a different address, indicating the owner didn’t live in the unit.

Then it looked at transactions recorded in city property records to find the units with market values over $5 million.

Marketproof estimates about 6,380 properties would be affected.

That analysis shows that certain well-known features of the city skyline, many clustered around Central Park — Central Park Tower, 432 Park Avenue, One57, 220 Central Park South, 15 Central Park West — would be potentially subject to the tax surcharge, representing huge sources of revenue for the city. The 280 units in just those five buildings might owe more than $100 million in taxes annually.

Still, it may be challenging to make this all work. Unlike many suburban cities and neighborhoods, where it is relatively easy to find the market value of single-family homes based on comparable sales on any given street, it’s difficult to compare values across condos and co-ops.

“That would be crossing a gap not previously crossed,” Mr. Goodman said. “That would be opening up a conversation among property owners that previous government officials have been unable to have a successful conversation about. They’ve just been unsuccessful in doing it because it’s way too complicated.”

It’s not clear whether the state or the city would have the capacity to come up with these valuations every year, and how public officials would deal with the expected legal challenges to any valuations.

A report about the tax released on Thursday by the New York City comptroller, Mark Levine, found that the city Finance Department would most likely have to audit property owners’ claims about who lives or doesn’t live in any apartment. The report noted that “lapses” in the auditing capacity and accuracy “would reduce revenues and multiply taxpayers’ appeals and lawsuits.”

The report also said that it might be difficult to categorize condos and co-ops that were owned by out-of-towners but were being rented out to city residents, or units that were owned by limited liability companies or trusts, among other potential pitfalls.

“Each of these decisions can shift collections by tens of millions of dollars,” the report said.

So far, those details remain murky, even with senior city administration officials meet daily with state leaders, according to City Hall.

A senior aide to the governor said that state officials were not overly concerned about the complexities of determining market values. Negotiations were continuing over how much of the specific methodology would be written into the legislation, or decided later by the city.

A bigger concern, the aide said, was how officials would determine whether any given property was being used as a second home.

The negotiations come as Mr. Mamdani and other elected officials clamor for Ms. Hochul to increase taxes to fund an expanded safety net and help the city close a multibillion-dollar deficit. A coalition of powerful unions, including several that endorsed the governor’s re-election campaign, has also signed on, sending a letter last week to her and legislative leaders pleading for tax hikes on the wealthy.

On Tuesday, Mr. Mamdani and his sometimes political adversary, Council Speaker Julie Menin, said they would delay announcing an update to the city budget so they could jointly push for the state to reduce a tax credit that primarily benefits wealthy business owners, which they said could end up raising a billion dollars in revenue for the city.

Both this plan and the second-home tax proposal would need to be included in the state budget, which is still be negotiated and is now a month overdue. Ms. Hochul remains committed to the tax on second homes, but appeared unlikely to support other new taxes.

“Hochul is running out of excuses to not tax the rich in her final budget,” said Grace Mausser, a co-chair of the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.

The D.S.A. is a close ally of Mr. Mamdani, who is a member, and both have aggressively called on the city’s wealthiest businesses and residents to shoulder a heavier burden. They have even named specific billionaires like Mr. Griffin, who they say are a drain on the city and its finances.

Mr. Griffin, who has spent close to $95 million on real estate purchases in the city since the beginning of 2025, pushed back on these assertions, saying his companies and activity creates tens of thousands of jobs for the city.

“You can win political points by making an example of Ken Griffin, and they seem to have done that. Kudos to them for winning some political points,” Mr. Goodman said. “But achieving the tax goals is a different thing.”

A 9-year-old boy died Friday morning after a school bus hit him while he was crossing the street in Brooklyn, the police said.

The child, who has not been identified pending notification of his family, was struck around 8:18 a.m. at the intersection of Lee Avenue and Lorimer Street in the Williamsburg neighborhood as the bus driver turned left, the police said.

The boy was “unconscious, unresponsive” and had injuries to his head and body when the police arrived, officials said. Paramedics responded and transported him to Woodhull Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

The police said the bus driver left the scene but returned; it was not immediately clear why.

In February, another child was killed by a school bus while crossing a street in Brooklyn, in the Bath Beach neighborhood. Amira Aminova, 11, had been waiting at the edge of an intersection when the pedestrian signal turned from a walk sign to a flashing red hand with a countdown timer, according to surveillance video. She started running across the crosswalk.

The bus driver appeared to have a green light, and began to make a right turn. Amira was halfway through the intersection by then, but the driver failed to yield and struck her.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani sent his condolences to the child’s family in a post on X on Friday, saying that he was “devastated” by the incident.

“Children should be safe walking around our city,” Mr. Mamdani wrote. “This horrific road death is a painful reminder that we must continue to use every tool available to make our streets safe for all New Yorkers.”

Lincoln Restler, a City Council member, said he was “heartbroken” about the accident that occurred in his district.

“This is one of the busiest intersections in Williamsburg, and I have requested that city agencies immediately make safety improvements,” Mr. Restler said in a statement.

Mr. Restler said he had asked the city’s Department of Transportation to expedite painting new markings at the intersection, which he said was recently under construction and lacked crosswalks and street markings. He also asked the department to analyze crosswalk signal timing for pedestrians and to make the signals longer to give people more time to walk.

“I have also asked the N.Y.P.D. to station a crossing guard here to help children cross safely,” Mr. Restler said.

When activists gathered last week outside a townhouse in Brooklyn, ready to block law enforcement officers from carrying out an eviction, they were there to fight back against something larger than just one case: the nefarious practice of deed theft, which appears to be on the rise in New York City.

The protest and the ensuing arrests of several people, including the local city councilman, underscored just how fraught the topic is, particularly in historically Black areas of the city that are now rapidly gentrifying. Mayor Zohran Mamdani last week created an office dedicated to fighting deed theft.

But while the episode, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, reflected concerns about a very real problem, the specifics of the case involving the townhouse are anything but clear.

The office of the attorney general, Letitia James, said the case was not an example of deed theft. (When asked about that determination, Ms. James herself said, “It emanated from deed theft”; a spokesman later clarified that she had been referring to the protest and not the case.)

The fact that a woman, Carmella Charrington, was living in the home, which her father had partly owned for decades, is not in dispute. Neither are the facts that an eviction case against Ms. Charrington began nearly two years ago and that she was recently jailed in connection with a separate civil case related to custody of her father, who is 84 and a ward of the State of Georgia.

Still, comments from a number of high-profile city leaders have been confusing and contradictory. The councilman who was arrested, Chi Ossé, has said deed theft took place. So have State Senator Jabari Brisport; Brad Lander, the congressional candidate and former comptroller; and a host of others.

What is the truth? Public records reveal a sad and complicated saga involving several court cases and law enforcement agencies, and spanning generations and at least two states.

What Is Deed Theft?

The term “deed theft” is used to describe fraudulent behavior that can result in longtime homeowners’ losing the rights to their homes. The New York State attorney general’s office received more than 500 complaints of deed theft in New York City last year, more than in the previous two years combined.

The practice can involve thieves misrepresenting themselves as brokers or lenders and tricking someone into signing documents that transfer ownership. Many thieves target older people, sowing confusion over complicated property records or exploiting their trust.

After taking control of the home, the new owner could look to sell it for a profit, rent it out at a high rate, or take out a loan against the property to buy something else.

A Jointly Owned Townhouse

The home at the center of the current debate, at 212 Jefferson Avenue, is a three-story brownstone that was built in 1909, according to Landmarks Preservation Commission records.

At some point in the 1980s, it was owned by two people, property records show: Allman Charrington, Ms. Charrington’s father, and Gertrude Keene, Ms. Charrington’s great-aunt.

Ms. Keene later transferred her share of the property to Clinton Morrison, her son, who in turn passed it to his children when he died.

As recently as 2024, the property was owned jointly by several Morrison children and Mr. Charrington, according to the records.

A Court-Appointed Guardian

In 2020, with Mr. Charrington’s health declining, two of his daughters, including Carmella, filed a petition in probate court in Fulton County, Ga., asking for a court-appointed guardian and conservator to manage his affairs “by reason of mental disability,” according to court records. (Mr. Charrington traveled frequently between New York City and Georgia, where some of his relatives lived.)

Ms. Charrington asserted in the filings that she wanted to be the conservator, saying that her father’s wife, Karen Charrington, was not looking after his best interests. Court records indicate that Mr. Charrington’s wife had signed his property into her name and transferred thousands of dollars out of his bank account. His wife insisted that she had not acted nefariously, but she agreed to return the money and restore the deed, the records show.

Ultimately, the court appointed a lawyer, Luanne Bonnie, in 2021 to be Mr. Charrington’s conservator and to help him manage his property. The court records say that the parties agreed to Ms. Bonnie’s appointment.

Conflict Brews Between Owners

Court records filed in Brooklyn show that in 2019, the Morrison family wanted to sell the Bedford-Stuyvesant home, putting them at odds with Mr. Charrington. Mr. Charrington fired back in court papers that he wanted to be reimbursed for money he had spent over the years on property taxes and maintenance. Both parties failed to show up at court dates and the case was never resolved.

But several years later, with Mr. Charrington under a conservatorship, the probate court in Georgia gave Ms. Bonnie permission to sell the property. In an October 2022 order, Judge Barbara J. Koll said that at least a dozen possible buyers had shied away in previous years because of “the legal difficulties surrounding the existing tenants of the property.” The property had been for sale since 2018, the judge said; it is unclear who listed it, given Mr. Charrington’s opposition.

Property records show that the home was sold in January 2024 to a limited liability company called 227 Group, about which not much is publicly known.

Ms. Charrington, 54, who grew up on the block — in the townhouse and another relative’s home across the street — called the sale fraudulent and unlawful.

She asserts that her father was taken advantage of, and says she brought him to New York in November 2023, without the permission of the state of Georgia, and put him into hiding. She also says that Ms. Bonnie was “unlawfully appointed” and had not followed the proper procedures before agreeing to the sale.

“I think that everything will be able to be peeled back and things will become more concrete,” Ms. Charrington said in an interview. “We want to expose them. I’ve been screaming out for two years that this is deed theft.”

But a lawyer for the Georgia Department of Human Services said in a March 2025 court filing that Ms. Charrington and other relatives had “essentially kidnapped” her father, and were “detaining him against his will.”

Ms. Charrington is still living in the townhouse. It remains unclear where Mr. Charrington is, but his daughter said he was staying with friends and relatives in the New York City area.

She recently posted a video of her father on social media, in which he says he is safe and wants to be left alone.

A Mysterious L.L.C.

According to records filed with the New York Secretary of State, 227 Group is associated with the investors Simon Blitz and Daniel Gazal. Property records list one of its leaders as Andrew Kastein, who is also associated with the investment group P11 Management.

One point of intrigue is that the property records appear to show that 227 Group shares an address with another limited liability company, Brooklyn Gates. That company is linked to a group of investors known to target properties in gentrifying, historically Black and Latino neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant.

An investigation by the news website The City found that while Brooklyn Gates’s practices were largely legal, the company had ended up displacing “dozens of longtime city residents.”

Property records indicate that Brooklyn Gates had moved to buy the townhouse at 212 Jefferson Avenue from the Morrison children in 2021. Video and photographs that Ms. Charrington provided to The New York Times show a man, who Ms. Charrington said is one of the owners of Brooklyn Gates, trying to gain entrance to the property, and then leaving when Ms. Charrington threatens to call the police. The contract was later canceled, and the sale did not go through.

Through a spokesman, 227 Group denied any association with Brooklyn Gates, saying it had been made aware that the property was for sale by a lawyer for the Morrisons and Ms. Bonnie.

The company said in a statement that it had never interacted directly with the Morrison family or with Ms. Bonnie. It also said it does not share an address with Brooklyn Gates, and that the fact that the property records show the same address for both entities stemmed from a filing error.

“We are weighing our legal options against those who are spreading the false and malicious ‘deed theft’ narrative,” the statement reads.

The company said Ms. Charrington had continued “to illegally occupy the property rent-free for over two years” and had prevented representatives of the company from gaining access to it.

A Neighborhood Watch, and a Protest

Before the protest, neighbors and activists had been keeping watch outside the home for months in case officers showed up to evict Ms. Charrington. But the conflict last week involving Mr. Ossé, who said he sustained a concussion after officers wrestled him to the ground for blocking the gate, put a public spotlight on her story.

The announcement of the city’s new office to fight deed theft — though it was already planned when the protest took place — also fueled interest in the case.

And Mr. Ossé has continued to publicly push Gov. Kathy Hochul to issue a moratorium on evictions in cases where deed theft is suspected.

“The community has come together in a way that shows that they are scared,” said William McFadden, Ms. Charrington’s son, who also lives at the Bedford-Stuyvesant house. “How did so much deed theft happen under our noses?”