A million dollars isn't even that much these days - it isn't dynastic wealth, it is owning your own home these days. It especially isn't much in New York City - a long notoriously expensive area. A million dollars today is only about 400K in say, 1991. The average Brownstone in Brooklyn in the 1990s was over that. Not an amount to sneeze at certainly but treating it like unimaginable wealth is a lot like treating your Starbucks Manager like a CEO.
People's brains have been utterly broken by envy and combining the 'M' word or the 'B' word as the magical milestone causes them to lose all sense of scale. One needs to be well-off to get in that situation without inheritance, but it is more 'doctor or lawyer' levels of money. Hardly a level reserved for an aristocratic elite.
For a second home? In NY City?
I think someone has to be fairly elite to have a secondary, or tertiary home, in NY City, worth over $1 million.
Regardless, the entire point of this discussion is that people who have a secondary home can probably afford to pay more in taxes than other people can. I don't call that envy.
That's just a frank discussion of tax policy.
If you think taxes should be lower, because some government programs should be reduced, that's a perfectly fine discussion to have.
If you think governments shouldn't have to worry about a balanced budget, and maybe they should default on their debt (which is an argument the current President has insanely floated), that's a fine discussion to have.
At present, we're talking about secondary homes with a value over $1 million, in New York City, having an additional 4% tax.
And I was lamenting that home valuations appear to be unbelievably low, which would dramatically reduce the tax income of this law, and I was trying to propose a fix, for those homes.
If you think the only reason to have that discussion is because of envy, then I think you're not being fair to other people's motivations.