Mamdani’s tax hit list
At first Mamdani’s new property tax was only going to affect people whose primary residence was elsewhere than in New York, and who owned second or third properties in the city worth over five million dollars. That was considered to be a rarified group, nothing much to worry about for ordinary people. That’s the way it was sold to the public.
But funny thing, now it’s come to this:
Mayor Zohran Mamdani opened a new front in his ongoing battle with New York City’s wealthy after his administration published a searchable database identifying affluent property owners who could be subject to the city’s proposed pied-à-terre tax, a move critics say could expose them to harassment and public safety risks.
The database, released by the city’s Department of Finance, allows users to search properties and view the names and addresses of owners whose non-primary residences could be subject to the proposed tax. …
… A person familiar with the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the city has publicly released similar property tax rolls every year for many years in accordance with New York state law. …
However, critics argue the database goes well beyond traditional public records by compiling the names and addresses of affluent property owners into a single, easily searchable location, potentially creating new privacy and security risks. The debate carries added weight in America’s largest city, where public safety remains a persistent political issue and affluent residents have long cited crime as a top concern.
While property ownership records have long been public, opponents say the city’s decision to aggregate them into a dedicated database could make wealthy homeowners more vulnerable to harassment and potential violence.
Of course it makes them more vulnerable. Isn’t that the point? Mamdani got elected by appealing to the Luigi-worshipping crowd, and this will please them no end. It will also give important information to the bolder among them.
But that’s not all. Remember the five million dollar threshold?:
Meanwhile, the Real Estate Board of New York President James Whelan argued that the database also illustrates how broadly the proposed tax could reach beyond the ultra-wealthy residents its supporters have emphasized. Although Mamdani initially promoted the proposal as a tax on secondary homes worth more than $5 million and owned by the “ultra-wealthy and global elites,” the final rules use different Department of Finance valuation thresholds depending on the type of property. According to the New York Post, over 960,000 residences could be listed in the database, which makes it possible to search and download property owners’ information, including their names and addresses.
“What this database really demonstrates is that the second-home tax is far broader and more complicated than its supporters have suggested,” he continued. “Policymakers should take a hard look at the many homeowners who could be swept in despite not fitting the profile of the ultra-wealthy residents this tax was supposedly designed to target.”
For condos, the threshold is now one million dollars. That doesn’t get you all that much in NYC, especially in some parts of it. And although these are second homes, who thinks that’s where Mamdani and the DSA will choose to stop?
More:
“What this database really demonstrates is that the second-home tax is far broader and more complicated than its supporters have suggested,” he continued. “Policymakers should take a hard look at the many homeowners who could be swept in despite not fitting the profile of the ultra-wealthy residents this tax was supposedly designed to target.”
Kulaks never were especially rich, either. They were the topic of envy and resentment nonetheless. And that’s what Mamdani and the DSA trade on – envy and resentment.
More:
At the center of the debate is whether the city can ask more of its wealthiest residents without weakening the tax base that helps fund municipal government.
Ya think?? Thing is, New York City is – or used to be – a special place in which to live, and people were willing to pay a premium to do so. Mamdani and company are assuming it will continue to be attractive to enough rich people (and rich 2nd property owners) to continue to live there or own property there, despite the increased taxes.
The following is no surprise:
Fox News Digital reached out to Mamdani’s office asking why the administration chose to publish the searchable database rather than notify affected property owners privately and whether it conducted a legal or privacy review before making the information available online. The office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
“If you have a second home in New York City worth more than $5M, check your mailbox when you’re back in the five boroughs — because you’ve got mail,” he crooned last week before promising the initiative would yield “the best parks, libraries, and schools in the world.”
Sure thing. And the best government-run grocery stores.
The tax was originally estimated to affect between 11,200 and 31,000 properties. But guess what? It presently is due to affect 960,000.
Mamdani is malevolent, but he’s not alone. He is part of a movement, one that is growing, one that uses the ignorance and resentment of a large proportion of young people in order to seize power and make society over anew in the image they think best – or at least, the image that will give them the most power.
[NOTE: Speaking of city grocery stores, there’s a lawsuit brewing:
An immigrant-led business group is gearing up to sue New York City over Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s controversial plan to open five taxpayer-funded supermarkets — claiming the $70 million project will create unfair competition for nearby stores, The Post has learned.
As the far-left mayor announced new details of his plan this week — including a 30% discount on basic items like produce, meat, milk, cheese and bread – the Multicultural Business Coalition’s board voted to file a lawsuit in the coming weeks to block the pricey initiative, the group’s chairman Frank Garcia told The Post.
“The mayor doesn’t seem to want to sit down with us,” Garcia said, adding that Mamdani “won’t be able to bully these lawyers we are going to bring in.” …
MBC — formed earlier this year to create a unified front against Mamdani’s grocery policy — includes 50 chambers of commerce representing Asian, African, Caribbean, Hispanic, Middle Eastern and Jewish-owned businesses in New York.
Good luck.
I repeat – whether or not you care about New York City, this is a movement that has no plans to limit itself to NYC.]
neo:
I hope your extended family, if any are still in NYC, are able to escape the harms that Mamdami intends for the kulaks and wreckers, aka, the general public.
om:
Thanks. So far, yes. I haven’t discussed Mamdani with them either – I have avoided the topic to this point.
I miss the days when higher education didn’t mean smoking too much weed and coming up with alternatives to things that actually work. Look no further than publicly funded education that no sane public would fund knowing it for what it is, and you will find a massive societal vulnerability that needs prompt attention.
Commies, I hate these guys.
This is the ultimate of “this was foreseeable “. Plato’s quote was accurate as hell, paraphrased; “The cost of apathy is to be ruled by evil men.”
How many times have people checked out of participating when they didn’t get what they want? That’s really not an option. Sane New Yorkers are learning that not participating is not an option.
Failure to hold voters to any kind of standard leads to what is happening in various states and cities. The fact that the DSA is making progress tells us so much.
The violence is going to get worse.
Yes, these people are a threat to us outside of NYC. However, given the speed at which Mamdani et al are implementing their vision, the country may being for a reality check sooner rather than later as NYC collapses. As for NYC itself? They voted for it, so I have zero sympathy for what happens. Hard lessons hurt.
physicsguy:
Plenty of people in NY didn’t vote for it. Why no sympathy for them? Mamdani got 50.78% of the vote.
Maybe they’ll vote next time…if there is a “next time”….
Once more with feeling. State constitutions, appendices thereto, and statutory law should be quite precise in delineating the architecture of taxation. The discretion of elective conciliar bodies should not extend to architecture, but to rates (and, here and there, some rates should be capped).
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Ideally, the state constitution debars the state and the localities therein from accepting conditional financing from the federal government, disaster relief excepted. It debars conditional financing of any local government by the state government, disaster relief excepted. It debars conditional financing between local governments. Instead it provides for formulaic revenue sharing. The state legislature cuts two checks: one for county governments distributed according to a formula whereby a county’s portion is directly proportional to resident population and inversely proportional to per capita income and then cuts one to school districts for which the portion due each district is directly proportional to resident population and the ratio of school age children to other residents therein and inversely proportional to per capita income. County governments would cut a check for component municipalities per a formula where a municpality’s portion is directly proportional to resident population and inversely proportional to per capita income. Consortial school districts could be financed in part by a per resident assessment on member districts and by capitations on a given districts population of enrollees in special programs.
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In New York State, all property outside of public thoroughfares should be assessed. Town property should be assessed biennially according to the assessor’s estimate of resale value. Country properties should be partitioned, with some portions assessed according to the estimated resale value and some according to formulae which have crop and timber revenues, acreage of arable land, acreage of pasture, and acreage of woodland as arguments. Any government licensed and privileged to levy property taxes should, by default, impose a uniform rate on all real property in its jurisdiction. The qualification to the default rule should be in selected portions of the state’s metropolitan settlements. You have every ten years a delineation of abatement zones in each settlement (recalling that the metropolitan settlement around NYC also includes all or part of ten counties in New Jersey). In any such settlement, you rank order census block groups by per capita income, lowest to highest. Run down your rank ordering calculating a running balance of the resident population. When your running balance reaches 15% of the population of the settlement, you’ve identified the block groups of zone c. Add to your running balance until you you’ve reached 20% of the population, and those block groups constitute zone b. Any authority enfranchised to impose property taxes which is entirely outside metropolitan settlements or entirely within zone a of a metropolitan settlement must have a uniform levy rate on all property. Any which contains zone b or zone c territory must have multiple rates – x% on zone a properties, 0.5x% on zone b properties, and 0% on zone c properties.
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Every piece of property assessed should have a tax liability attached to it. The various local governments licensed to impose property taxes – municipalities, counties, school districts, and other special district authorities – will have mutual obligations to each other. Posit they net out their mutual obligations and one of any given pair pays the other the residue. Each will also owe money to itself on its public property (remarked with accounting entries). State governments would owe money to local authorities in re their property. The federal government’s obligation will be picked up by the state government. Government corporations would owe money to various authorities, which cost will be included in the rates they charge. Philanthropies would take out a line of credit to pay local property taxes, then apply for full re-imbursement from the state treasury. Ordinary businesses and households would satisfy their property tax bill with whatever resources they had to do it.
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Posit that the state government and county governments would be enfranchised to collect value-added taxes. Such a tax would apply to any transaction to which income, payroll, capital gains, and gift-and-inheritance taxes did not apply bar sales of donated, discarded, and salvaged property. Some special district authorities might be authorized to acquire their revenue this way. Municipalities, school districts, and special district authorities financed by property surtaxes would ordinarily be debarred from imposing such levies unless a portion of their property tax revenue was inaccessible due to the delineation of abatement zones. Municipalities, school districts &c conditionally authorized to impose a VAT would be limited to a capped rate which was a function of that share of total assessed valuation which was within the abatement zones.
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Governments at all levels might be authorized to charge tolls, fares, and fees. However, no such charge would be valid unless (1) the public authority was providing a service similar to one the subject might buy on the open market, or (2) the public authority was delineating a property right, or (3) the public authority was adjudicating a dispute. Excess revenue from such tolls would have to be directed to a dedicated fund or to a holding fund and not available as general revenue.
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Courts and agencies within the state might impose fines, forfeitures, and restitution requirements with a public authority as a beneficiary. The state might authorize local governments to do so. Ideally, the proceeds from such impositions go into a holding fund.
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As part of the social environmental policy of the government the state and localities (if authorized) might impose Pigou levies on productive activities, vice levies on certain commodities, and tradeable permit schemes on certain activities. It is prudent in that circumstance that the proceeds from same be directed to a holding fund.
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Governments might impose filing fees to relieve congestion. These are properly in the form of deposits which are due to be filer at a later date. If the filer does not collect them, they are properly directed to a holding fund (as should any abandoned property or proceeds from government sales of abandoned property).
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Any government which a balance in its holding fund should after the close of the fiscal year be required to distribute it to its residents on a per capita basis. Any state which imposes an income tax (and New York does) should have a ready dataset state and local treasuries can use to determine the value of the check to be sent to each household.
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Ideally, you have some other provisions in your state constitution: (1) every government and government corporation borrows on its own account and no government is permitted to satisfy the debts of any other government or provide them more than s/t credit to lubricate transactions between the governments in question; (2) any authority which cannot service its debts has one recourse – the federal bankruptcy courts. Haircuts are administered to a public authorities creditors, not to any other party;
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Also, ideally, you have a provision in the state constitution which requires that employee benefits for public-sector workers be financed via assessments on employees’ stated compensation and specified in employee pay stubs, the employers’ portion of Social Security, Medicare, unemployment compensation excepted and workman’s compensation excepted. You have another provision which requires employee compensation per worker for each government in the state be within a certain percentage of employee compensation per worker for private sector employees in a given region of the state and that this apply to government corporations whose deficits are financed by tax collections. Ideally, as well, retirement programs for public employees would be per constitutional provisions, defined contribution programs.
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Ideally, you also have a provision in the state constitution which requires the highest compensation package in any government or government corporation be a function of employee compensation per worker in said authority and the total (fte) employment of the authority in question averaged over the previous year. Any additional compensation provided a given employee would have to be approved for the employee by name in a resolution passed by the majority of elected members of the elected conciliar body of the authority after a public hearing. No such resolution could list the name of more than one employee nor could it apply for more than one year at a time.
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Ideally also, you have constitutional provision which mandate that no measure passed by a conciliar body is validly applicable to government officials or members of the public if it has not received the votes of the majority of elected members of the body in question, the yeas and nays recorded. Procedural matters might do with the majority of a quorum or a voice vote or a show of hands, but these would apply only to the body itself and its secretariat.
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And, ideally, constitutional provisions demand governments respect freedom of contract and association along with other specified rights and freedoms. Short of that, the constitution and statutory law might limit the regulatory authority of local government to specifying terms of use of common property (among them public thoroughfares), regulating land use, miscellaneous regulations meant to contain externalities and nuisances, and local elaborations on building and fire codes.
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A great deal of what Weaver and Mamdani want to do (and some standing provision in New York City’s codes) should not be within the powers of local governments generally. Regrettably, much of it is. In a sane world, whatever it is he wants to accomplish would require he persuade 26 city councillors to increase the levy rate on real property or on value added or on both. No exceptions.
Maybe the 900,000 property owners should raise an army, take the city by force and hang Mamdani and Weaver.
Chess Eagles — HEAR HEAR!!
BUT how much time will busy working folks spend in becoming the Armed Patriots we need?
Neo
The registered voters of NYC deserve no sympathy. Whatsoever. 43% of the 5+ million voters actually voted. Mamdani got 1,114,184 votes. 22% of the registered voters. Sucks to be them.
https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2026/07/28/nyc-begun-the-class-war-has-n4955518
All is going according to plan.
Are registered voter numbers true, real still living people who still reside in NY? Because all donkey controlled voter rolls are suspect.
Edit since the donkeys faked the census, how people are there really in NY?
The 57% of NYC voters who didn’t vote, essentially ‘voted’ for Mamdani, the worst of the three choices. As by not voting, they enabled Mamdani’s 22% to prevail.
That same rationale led to many of us voting for Trump in 2015. Not voting would only help Hillary win.
DeBlasio had how many terms, comfortably elected? I’m not feeling any pangs of sympathy. New Yorkers can be an obnoxious and ignorant lot, and they’re getting what they voted for, good and hard, soon to be gooder and harder. Let’s see what they vote for next time. It’s only 3½ years away. Not nearly enough time to do any lasting damage, amirite? The next term he’s elected to will be the one where he ramps up the Muslim themes, once he’s got everybody beaten down on accepting the financial rape. And by then, the Mamdani Mecca effect will have landed NYC with tens of thousands of brand new shiny, dependable Muslim voters to replace the fleeing, formerly wealthy people.
Watch it happen.
Los Angeles residents, at one time, elected Richard Riordan, a white male fairly moderate politician who did a decent job of it. He was replaced by Antonio Villigarosa I think, who was Socialist curious. Then a Socialist or two were elected to the City Council, now they are all Socialist or Communist. The next Mayor will be either a Socialist or Communist. I think voter turnout for the primary was under 40%. It starts slowly then bam, hello Comrade. Fortunately, the Orange Curtain is still somewhat effective but it’s slowly being demolished, amped up a little more since Newsom’s redistricting ploy.
No, I have no sympathy for NYC. It’s a Democrat blue city, overwhelmingly so. Those who didn’t vote for Mamdani but have in the past voted for liberal/left Democrats must be held to account for Mamdani’s putsch. All democrats and liberals enabled his rise to and seizure of power. He is a creature — a creation — of the Democrat Party.
NYC Democrats/liberals/leftists are like the German industrialists and military leaders in the early 1930s who said they could control Hitler. They plowed the ground and sowed the seeds of the Mamdami phenomenon. They have only themselves to blame for what’s happening. And they have no sympathy from me.
Prove me wrong.
IrishOtter; Aggie:
There are Republican areas of NYC; it has one House district that is Republican and has been for ages. In 2024, 30% of voters in NYC voted for Trump. No sympathy for them?
Geoffrey Britain:
Yes, it’s those who don’t vote in the primary who I can’t understand.
New York Post, unsurprisingly, has about a books’-worth of articles up in the last few days, all of them attacking the release of the list and its extension WAY past the “few ultra-wealthy non-resident elites” that Mamdani targeted in his sales pitches.
A few sound-bites from the diversity (the main text of all of them is pretty much the same as the one Neo linked, which is first). However, a lot of the posts did mention the danger of the doxxing, which went far beyond the “demands” of the law in releasing public records.
I’m going to break it up into a couple of comments to ameliorate the dread Great Wall of Text effect.
https://nypost.com/2026/07/27/opinion/mamdanis-vindictive-pied-a-terre-hitlist-reveals-his-true-colors/
https://nypost.com/2026/07/27/us-news/mamdani-names-all-nyc-property-owners-who-could-be-hit-with-new-pied-a-terre-tax/
This thread of comments to the above post could have been written up as a stand-alone article.
Property records are probably kept up as efficiently as voting records; oh hey, they use the same data: names and addresses! See some of the other comments below.
https://nypost.com/2026/07/28/opinion/michael-goodwin-mamdani-is-carving-out-a-historic-path-an-nyc-mayor-who-hates-the-city-its-people-and-is-trying-to-destroy-both/
**The Socialists are explicit in why they are doing this; but they miss the important part.
See the final post in the next comment below.
(continued)
https://nypost.com/2026/07/28/us-news/longtime-new-yorkers-fume-after-being-hit-with-massive-pied-a-terre-tax-bills-is-this-a-witch-hunt/
*Which is the point. The real agenda is moving the money into the pockets of the people collecting the taxes, as one commenter to the next post pointed out.
https://nypost.com/2026/07/24/opinion/mamdani-not-only-gloats-about-taxing-the-rich-he-lies-as-well/
This one was linked in the Legal Insurrection post that Neo referenced.
https://nypost.com/2026/07/27/opinion/mamdanis-enemies-of-the-people-pied-a-terre-tax-list-is-no-joke/
**The point the gloating socialists miss is that the “ultra-wealthy elites” are not identical to “the ruling class” of NYC: “We will win by making conditions so intolerable to the ruling class that they would rather give in to our demands than live with the disturbance we cause.”
The rich don’t have to give in, they can GET OUT.
The people who must remain are the permanent residents who are NOT city leaders and whose much-smaller bank accounts are being extorted.
The Mafia sharks only shake-down the hoi-polloi, not the barracudas of their own level.
(continued; of course I can’t find this source again)
A commenter on one post told about the difficulties she experienced in trying to apply for that exemption, which no one should have to do because they shouldn’t have been on the list in the first place, if anyone had checked on the information instead of just dumping it, as was pointed out several places.
Think about your own worst experience with bureaucrats demanding documentation of basic information that ought to already be in their own databases, some of it decades old.
To add more insult, the notice about her being subject to the tax was addressed to her deceased husband.
The city has tax rolls showing someone has been living in their house IOW a permanent residen: they have been paying taxes, responding to jury summonses, and voting (because you can only vote at your primary residence, but that may be something the Democrats KNOW is not proof of residence).
Which brings up the question: how does the city determine who is a “non-resident” owner of multiple homes, especially more than two? Do they have to fill out a form to get a city passport or something? (hah)
That may be the reason they threw out such a big list full of obviously exempt locations: the ones who don’t prove they actually live in their home are the ones who get taxed.
But as that commenter pointed out, she only had one month to get it done, and the agencies were not helping, to say the least.
Yeah, it’s evil.
There is one bright spot, only mentioned in the Fox post Neo linked:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/mamdani-sparks-fears-violence-after-doxing-wealthy-nyc-property-owners-dangerous
This over-reaching doxxing may make it more difficult to actually enact the tax, although Fox didn’t specify what is lacking to make it official.
A commenter at LI pointed out an actual legitimate use of taxes on non-primary residences, but it’s not the rationale being used by Mamdani, whose agenda is clearly just the envy and desire for destruction generally engaged in by the Left.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2026/07/mamdani-doxxes-nyc-property-owners-quietly-expands-reach-of-new-tax/#comment-1773567
However, this raises a problem noted by another commenter there:
I would not be surprised if this was done so squatters could take over these places.
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Not seeing the logic in that.
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While we’re at it, wherever you have rent control, any landlord is stuck with tenants he’d rather replace and lawfully cannot. (Richard Epstein has been making the case that rent control laws amount to an unconstitutional taking of property, “The physical entry is palpable, the compensation is wholly inadequate, and the justification is shopworn”.).
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The only prices which should be subject to regulation by local authorities are those on the the services of the government in question’s own agencies and corporations and on private natural monopolies whose service catchment does not transcend the boundaries of the government in question.
Okay, sympathy for the one Republican house district and the 30 percent who voted Republican. Everyone else: nope.
The thing is, it’s going to have to get _really_ bad in NYC for the people who put the Glorious Leader in office to reconsider their voting strategy, and even then, perhaps not. I feel bad for the good citizens of New York, such as there are any, but if this doesn’t fail spectacularly, instead of, say, failing gradually, it will spread, and spread fast.
I’ve been saying for years that the commies might have lost the Cold War, but they are definitely winning the culture war, and given that the U.S. is saddled with an education system even third-world countries would look down on, there are no signs of this trend slowing, unless and until lots and lots of people suffer a whole lot of unnecessary rack and ruin.
God bless the U.S., no one else will!
I’m giving them as much sympathy as they would give to me, as New Yorkers, if I was complaining about the heat in Texas. Which is none. They should choose better neighbors, and I suspect some of them will be doing just that. That might be unkind, but it isn’t untrue.
It beggars belief that New Yorkers can say they didn’t see this coming, and that’s why they didn’t vote. ‘Not voting’ in this stage of the American Experiment is tantamount to participating in its destruction.
“…given that the U.S. is saddled with an education system even third-world countries would look down on, there are no signs of this trend slowing,”
Which is why I keep saying that Bill Ayers may have lost the violent revolution he wanted, but he certainly won the quiet revolution. Pure genius on his part to lead the now complete transformation of American education from K-PhD. What he set in motion has now almost guaranteed we may lose this war.
The “building trades” and durable skills vs a credentialed degree and debt.
Even baristas can be replaced by a robot, a lawyer by AI?
A bomb-throwing Antifa brownshirt in black togs eliminated by a FPV drone?
My own experience with partisan Democrats in my family is that adverse events do not induce them to reconsider their choices for even a moment.
“The “building trades” and durable skills vs a credentialed degree and debt.”
True, the blue collar worker may be the salvation of the US, however even they go through K-12.