Zohran Mamdani’s tax on second homes is likely to drive the biggest contributors out of New York
New York City’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, posed on Manhattan’s Central Park South on Wednesday and gleefully announced his plan to tax pied-à-terres worth over $5 million.
In a slickly produced video, he bragged that he’s following through on his campaign promise to “tax the rich”—specifically, those who “store their wealth in New York City real estate but who don’t actually live here,” which “hurts working New Yorkers” in ways he failed to specify.
This naked class warfare—rolled out theatrically at the foot of some of the city’s most expensive apartment buildings—is of course a second tax imposed on people who already pay New York City’s exorbitant property taxes even as they take advantage of few city services. And the mayor, who has waved away scrutiny of his wife’s support for terrorism on social media, describing her as “a private citizen,” mockingly gestured skyward at the Manhattan home of an actual private citizen, Citadel CEO Ken Griffin.
“As mayor, I believe everyone has a role to play in contributing to our city,” he said. “And some a little bit more than others.” The implication, of course, is that the Florida-based Griffin and others like him aren’t contributing sufficiently to the city.
Nonsense. These wealthy nonresidents have made enormous—even historic—gifts to America’s largest city. In Griffin’s case, his joint $400 million donation to Memorial Sloan Kettering in 2023—made with California resident David Geffen—is the largest single donation the cancer center has ever received. (Mamdani’s friends spend their time caterwauling outside the hospital protesting for Gaza.) Then there’s Griffin’s $40 million to the Museum of Modern Art, $40 million to the Museum of Natural History, and $15 million to the poverty-fighting Robin Hood Foundation. Sources tell us his gifts to city institutions total around $600 million. It’s not a government-funded grocery store, but it’s a little something. That’s not to mention that Griffin, whose Citadel and Citadel Securities together employ approximately 5,000 people, is currently building Midtown’s tallest skyscraper right on Park Ave., something a mayor with any understanding of how to help working people would be welcoming and celebrating.
We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention that Mamdani also held a live event with Columbia economist Joseph Stiglitz to celebrate his class warfare plan. Seated in front of a banner that read “Tax the Rich,” Stiglitz, the man who was at one point raking in over $40,000 for every speaking engagement after writing The Price of Inequality and who unsuccessfully sued his own divorce attorney for $1 million, in part for her failure to protect his hundreds of thousands of dollars in Nobel Prize winnings from his ex-wife, bemoaned the fact that the United States has “more inequality than any other advanced country in so many dimensions.”
Griffin packed up and left high-tax, high-crime Chicago for his native Florida in 2022, citing the city’s left-wing governance, and he brought his company with him. There are only a few hundred Citadel workers left in Chicago. By contrast, Citadel still employs more than 2,000 people in New York. One has to wonder who told Mamdani that doxxing such a generous donor and employer—who already pays more than $800,000 a year in New York property taxes on his pied-à-terre and is one of the top taxpayers in New York due to apportionment of income—was a good idea.
Griffin and the rest of the ultra-wealthy are mobile and resilient, and their patience with far-left politicians has limits. There’s nothing stopping him and others from doing the same in New York City, leaving a hole in the budget and the chill of collectivism in the rearview mirror.