A stand-up comedian’s satirical stab at Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new luxury home tax has snowballed into something she never expected to actually build.
Madison Walser, who splits time between New York and Los Angeles, launched a website called Aura Investments back in May as pure internet bait. The pitch was simple and absurd: struggling artists move into vacant apartments owned by wealthy second-home owners, and in exchange those owners dodge the city’s pied-à-terre tax.
The site’s copy leans into the joke hard. “You own a home in New York. You cannot always be there. Why should you be taxed for being successful?” it reads, before offering itself up as “your solution to the vacancy tax.”
Except a lot of people didn’t get that it was a joke.
Since going live, Walser told Curbed in an interview she has fielded outreach from people who say they actually own second homes in Manhattan and Brooklyn, on top of a flood of interest from artists hoping to snag free rent.
“I think we’re close to 4,000 submissions,” Walser told the outlet of artist applicants alone. On the property owner side, the haul was smaller but still real. “For properties, we had 25, and after I checked, we had eight or nine that were legitimate,” she said.
The origin story traces back to a smaller joke that got out of hand. Walser had spent roughly a year bouncing between cities as a professional pet sitter before coding the site herself.
“When the pied-à-terre tax thing came out, I made a joke on Threads that, because I have such a big heart, I’m willing to sign a lease and live in the property of someone who’s avoiding the tax so they don’t have to pay it,” she told Curbed. “My background is in software development, and I’ve been playing around with AI coding tools, so I was like, ‘Let me just code something real quick.’” A friend asked to repost it. “I was like, ‘Sure, why not?’ And it just blew up.”
Now Walser is doing the unglamorous work of trying to make the joke legally sound. She’s hunting for a lawyer and hoping to bring on a co-founder to help sort out logistics.
“The biggest things are legal and safety,” she said. “Both sides have to get a background check, and I have to make sure you’re not some sketchball. We have to verify that you actually own the property. Then I have to get a leasing agent who makes sure the artists have tenants’ rights. I’m not just throwing these people in there on, like, a vacation. There would need to be a lease in place so the owners could not use the unit unless that was specified in their contract.”
Two possible business models are on the table. In one, artists live rent-free while owners pay Aura a placement fee equal to 10% of what they’d otherwise owe in taxes, funding both operations and a redistribution pool for other artists. In the other, artists cover utilities themselves in exchange for the space.
Walser frames the arrangement as a mutual win dressed up in ego stroking for the ultra-wealthy.
“It’s a back scratch for both sides. If you frame it to the wealthy as ‘Hey, we’re actually doing you a favor,’ it stops making poor people look like they’re less than,” she said. “On the other hand, it actually puts people in units and frees up all the housing these artists live in.”
Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax, aimed at owners of second homes worth $5 million or more who maintain a primary residence elsewhere, was billed by the mayor’s office as a way to fund parks, schools and libraries by taxing the wealthy.
The city has already sent formal notification letters to affected owners and stood up a dedicated Department of Finance webpage to walk them through it.
But city officials have also warned that sham leases designed purely to skirt the surcharge won’t fly. Walser isn’t naive about the timing of that warning.
“The city recently released a warning that was like, ‘If we find out that you entered a lease agreement with the sole intention of avoiding the tax, that’s not valid,’” she told the outlet. “My narcissistic ass is like, They definitely saw the website.”
Asked whether that guidance effectively kills her idea, Walser didn’t rule out a Hail Mary.
“Unless I somehow got a meeting with the mayor himself and was like, ‘Okay, hear me out,’ which I’m not opposed to doing.”
Walser insists the concept has legs beyond just Manhattan’s luxury housing stock. She said interest has trickled in from outside the five boroughs entirely, including someone in France offering up a cottage for artists. She’s also eyeing California’s proposed commercial vacancy tax as another opening, floating the idea of matching small businesses with empty storefronts for short-term pop-ups.
The website even nods to the Medici family as inspiration, casting the whole venture as old-world art patronage repackaged for a modern tax code.
“Michelangelo, court artisans — all these things happened because someone was bankrolling them,” Walser said. “Nepo babies are in art because someone is bankrolling their lives so they have time to focus on something that is not guaranteed to provide you money back. I’m calling this art patronage of the 21st century.”22
For now, Walser said she’s not chasing scale. She just wants proof of concept.
“It was all a joke with the intention of, like, ‘Damn, this would be really cool if we could make this happen.’ My goal now is to match one person with one house. If I can do that, this is successful, in my opinion, and it can grow from there.”
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