When Philda Barnes heard Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s threat to raise property taxes to plug a budget gap, she got angry. A hike, she said, could drive her out of the home in Jamaica, Queens, where she’s lived for more than two decades.

But the 67-year-old did agree with Mamdani on one thing: millionaires should pay more in taxes.

“This is my peace, my joy. And where am I going to go?” Barnes said, standing with several similarly situated neighbors outside a friend’s house in South Ozone Park.

She urged Gov. Kathy Hochul to heed Mamdani’s call for taxing the rich.“ Them one percenters who make astronomical money, please kick in,” she said.

Gothamist spoke with 10 Black homeowners in South Ozone Park and Jamaica, all seniors, who uniformly opposed his property tax hike proposal.

For some, it prompted renewed skepticism over the viability of the democratic socialist’s agenda. Mamdani’s victory came despite a lack of widespread support from Black voters that typically propel a mayoral win.

But in a sign that his tactics are not entirely unpopular, they overwhelmingly agreed with his call for Hochul to tax the rich.

Barnes said she choked on her coffee when she first heard the mayor was threatening to raise property taxes. She said her escrow went up by $600 last year, so another nearly 10% increase on her current tax rate could mean hundreds of dollars more. She said Hochul needed to step in on behalf of people like her.

“Mr. Mamdani, he has no clue. He really doesn’t,” said Barnes. “But Hochul, I don’t understand her.”

Hochul and Mamdani have aligned on the mayor’s campaign pledge to deliver free universal childcare. Hochul has steadfastly rejected another key platform of Mamdani’s campaign: taxing the rich. Hochul has said the move would result in wealthy people leaving the state.

Spokespeople for Mamdani and Hochul did not respond to requests for comment.

Mayor Mamdani’s preliminary budget proposal was criticized by some observers as a “false choice” between property taxes and taxing the rich.

Elizabeth Kim

Budget watchdogs criticized the mayor’s preliminary budget as a “false choice.” He said to close a $5.4 billion budget gap either the state needed to increase taxes on millionaires and corporations or the city would be forced to levy higher property taxes, calling it a “tool of last resort.”

City Councilmember Ty Hankerson, who previously served as former Council Speaker Adrienne Adams’s chief of staff and now represents her old Southeast Queens district, said his phone exploded with texts and calls as word got out about Mamdani’s dueling proposals.

“ When there are only two options, the last resort isn’t far off, right? So that is very frightening,” Hankerson said.

While he supports the increased taxes on the rich, he worries about what message Mamdani’s proposal sends to Black New Yorkers whose population has dropped by some 200,000 in the last census.

“I’m 31 years old and a lot of folks I went to school with have moved to Atlanta, Houston, Dallas and that doesn’t make me happy, but I understand why,” Hankerson said. “I don’t know how we can attract Black families back to New York with a proposal like this.”

He objected to his constituents being used as “political pawns on a political chess board.” Several of his constituents voiced added frustration that Speaker Adams, his Council predecessor, was now Hochul’s lieutenant governor running mate.

“Adrienne is right there. She’s from here,” Barnes said. “You know, be honest and talk about it because Adrienne lives in the neighborhood, too, so…”

One of the people who reached out to Hankerson was Aracelia Cook, the president of the 149th South Ozone Park Civic Association. Cook was frustrated about Mamdani’s tax hike proposal. She said he needed to think about how it was landing with “people of color, people who are struggling.” But then, as with many of her neighbors, her thoughts turned to the state.

“Maybe it was a scare tactic to make the governor realize that she has to do something because, really, in hindsight, he can’t,” Cook said. “The state has to step in. Gov. Hochul has to step in.”

“I think that she feels she’s in a safe place and she doesn’t have to make the hard decisions about the one percenters and she’s leaving him out there by himself,” Pat Burrell, 78, said, suggesting that Hochul might be taking votes from her community for granted since she no longer faces a Democratic primary.

Afi Phobe, 77, with Councilmember Ty Hankerson in the living room of the home she’s lived in since 1957.

Brigid Bergin

“ I think that we need to send a very strong message to her that it’s not a done deal that she’s going to be reelected, and she has to know that we count too,” she said. “It’s not just big business.”

Burrell’s family bought a home in the neighborhood in 1959. After she graduated and got a job, she moved to New Jersey and begged her mother to come and live with her.

“You couldn’t get her out of this neighborhood with a stick of dynamite,” Burrell said. After she died, Burrell said she came back to the neighborhood with plans to sell the house. But she never left. “Something about this neighborhood is so special,” she said. “I call it the ‘sweet spot.’”

Afi Phobe, 77, said her parents bought their four-bedroom Cape Cod in 1957. In the years that followed, the family watched as a neighborhood of Black middle and working-class families sprang up around them. Now that it’s her house, she shares it with a brood of rescue cats.

For her, the home is “everything.”

Phobe said she had no intention of leaving her home or the city. “I’m going to be here until it’s time to close my eyes, you know.” But she warned that a property tax increase would put many on the cusp of losing their homes after decades of investing in the community.

“She has to not be afraid to be a Robin Hood,” Phobe said of Hochul. “It will haunt her if it winds up being like this. The 9.5 is too high to begin with, much too high.”