New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, pushing for a new pied-à-terre tax, stood recently outside Ken Griffin’s Central Park South penthouse and used the multibillionaire founder of Citadel as red meat for his political base.
“This is an annual fee on luxury properties worth more than $5 million whose owners do not live full-time in the city,” Mamdani said of his proposal in his tax day-themed bit of propaganda. “Like for this penthouse, which hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin bought for $238 million.”
This was a rare misstep by the generally upbeat and politically savvy new mayor of New York, but a very serious one nonetheless.
As soon as we saw this attack on one of the wealthiest-ever former Chicagoans, we had a feeling there would be a swift counterattack. We’ve never known Griffin to sit quietly when left-leaning politicians come for him or his business. And history teaches us that he has a habit of following through on his threats.
On Thursday, the response arrived on the pages of The Wall Street Journal, rather friendlier to the likes of Griffin than Mamdani’s City Hall. Griffin’s chief operating officer, Gerald Beeson, suggested in no uncertain terms that the mayor had put at risk a planned Citadel redevelopment of 350 Park Ave. in Manhattan.
Beeson ostensibly was writing to Citadel employees (and of course the Journal’s readers), but this was a letter aimed directly at City Hall. Beeson noted that not going forward with the plan would torpedo “6,000 highly paid construction jobs and … the creation of more than 15,000 permanent jobs in mid-town New York.”
Citadel’s Park Avenue project is costing $6 billion. Hardly chump change, even in New York. And then there is the matter of, potentially, Griffin vacating his future New York philanthropy; we’ll note there that a palpable loss thereof already came true in our city.
Time will tell whether this threat was real, but who could blame Griffin for reconsidering?
Mamdani can’t have it both ways: demonizing a rich person by name for his own political ends and still expecting him to come through on both the job-creation and philanthropic fronts. And, whatever you think about our complicated titans of finance, Griffin is, frankly, unassailable on both of those counts. Moreover, Mamdani did not exactly grow up in poverty himself.
None of this is to say that a reasonable deluxe pied-à-terre tax is inherently a nonstarter; it’s true that many wealthy New Yorkers have primary residences elsewhere and, arguably, contribute less than those who live and work in New York all year, even though those pied-à-terres can be occupied for as many as 183 days a year. The owners thereof argue they spend plenty in the city while not burdening the school system or similar city services and, sure, they have a point. But whatever you might think about their contribution to a lack of affordability in the city, targeting Griffin on his own front stoop was as dumb a move as it gets.
On Thursday, The New York Times, no less, published the appalling transcript of a Times podcast conversation that involved discussion of the killing of United Healthcare executive Brian Thompson and featured Hasan Piker musing on the concept of “social murder,” a theory that seemed to us to walk right up to a justification of killing those in the way of what Piker deems a righteous Marxist cause. Just to be clear, this was found on The New York Times website.
We were most appalled by Mamdani’s stunt for the simple reason that he, like too many on the far left, has a blind spot when it comes to the dangers faced by prominent wealthy individuals.
Sure, the far right has similar blind spots.
The two do not cancel each other out. Actually, they feed each other.
So how about we agree to argue these issues of taxation and affordability without names, addresses or faces?
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