Faced with Gov. Kathy Hochul’s continued resistance to raising taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations, Mayor Zohran Mamdani will push for an increase in property taxes instead.
The mayor is expected to present this alternative during his preliminary budget address later Tuesday at City Hall, floating something that hasn’t been done since Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
“We do have a big gap to fill, and he’s put a pretty extreme option on the table, which is a combination of raising property taxes and taking money from reserves and relying on some pretty aggressive revenue projections to boot,” Comptroller Mark Levine said Tuesday morning, after he was briefed on the plans.
Gov. Hochul, though, told reporters at an unrelated event Tuesday that she did not “think a property tax increase is necessary.”
She has repeatedly said she would not raise taxes on the wealthy this year.
On Monday, she announced an increased $1.5 billion in state money to help fill that gap, including more than $500 million in recurring funding.
“This investment protects services and puts the city on stable financial footing,” she said in a statement.
Mamdani campaigned on reforming the city’s complex property tax system, which is more than 40 years old and favors single-family homes and owners of luxury condos while burdening multi-family buildings, which then pass on tax costs to tenants.
Homeowners in predominantly Black neighborhoods also pay property tax rates that can double homeowners in primarily white neighborhoods.
The disparity – and many stalled attempts to reform it – was highlighted by Mamdani in his inauguration speech.
“Because no matter what you eat, what language you speak, how you pray, or where you come from — the words that most define us are the two we all share: New Yorkers,” he said on Jan. 1. “And it will be New Yorkers who reform a long-broken property tax system.”
Last week, Mamdani’s budget director, Sherif Soliman, said the city planned to introduce a property tax reform legislation “in a matter of weeks.”
The city had been projected to face a $12 billion budget gap over two fiscal years, which the mayor blamed on former Mayor Eric Adams and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
During his appeal to state lawmakers in Albany last week, he said that gap had shrunk by $5 billion, thanks to Wall Street bonuses, some cuts and $1 billion from the city’s reserves.
In 2024, the state’s highest court voted to reinstate a lawsuit by a group called Tax Equity Now New York looking to overhaul it.
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