These members of the 1 percent are bringing smiles to the state’s tax collectors.
New York’s “mansion tax” on homes selling for $1 million or more generated a record-busting $259 million in the 2012-2013 fiscal year.
Buyers pay a 1 percent tax on the selling price for those luxury homes.
The haul represents a jump of 22 percent from the previous fiscal year and is up 47 percent from recession-ravaged 2009-21010, when the tax produced $176 million.
While it covers the entire state, the tax hits hardest in Manhattan, where seven-figure prices are common even for modest-sized co-ops and condos.
Just ask apartment hunters scouring the revitalized blocks of Harlem, which long ago stopped being classified as affordable.
Currently listed at 2098 Frederick Douglass Blvd. is a 1,300-square-foot two-bedroom for $1.195 million, which would cost an additional luxury tax of $11,950.
A 682-square feet, one-bedroom condo on Sixth Avenue in Soho has an asking price of $1.578 million. The luxury tax on that property would be $15,780.
The added tax was first approved by in 1989 by then-Gov. Mario Cuomo and the Legislature to deal with a budget shortfall resulting from a severe recession.
But the threshold has stayed at the same $1 million level even as prices have skyrocketed.
Critics say the tax is now hitting the middle class, not just millionaires and Russian oligarchs.
“Hi, hope you have some suggestions in how to avoid paying the mansion tax,” pleaded one buyer on the Street Easy real estate Web site. “We are bidding on a unit that will likely close just over $1 million.”
A Manhattan lawmaker has introduced legislation to increase the threshold to $1.75 million.
“With the average price of an apartment in Manhattan now exceeding $1 million, what was meant as a tax on the rich has become a tax on the average home-buyer in our area,” Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh, who represents the East Side, said in a memo accompanying his bill.
“The runaway real estate values throughout New York City have caused this tax to be applied to one- or two-bedroom apartments that certainly cannot be classified as ‘mansions.’ ”