Six months after Gov. Kathy Hochul scolded New Yorkers for telling her to tax the rich, she joined New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to do just that.<\/p>\n
The two officials instituted a \u201cpied-\u00e0-terre tax\u201d on second homes worth over $5 million, a fee that would apply to the ultra-wealthy who \u201cstore their wealth in New York City real estate but who don\u2019t actually live here,\u201d Mamdani said in a video announcement of the new tax<\/a> set to music that sounds like the theme song to Succession.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re able to reap the huge financial rewards of owning property in, dare I say, the greatest city in the world,\u201d Mamdani said, and most of the time the units sit empty. \u201cThis is a fundamentally unfair system that hurts working New Yorkers.\u201d<\/p>\n More from Whitney Curry Wimbish<\/a><\/p>\n He gave examples of the types of homes he\u2019s talking about, including billionaire Ken Griffin\u2019s $238 million penthouse in Midtown, once the most expensive home in the country, and Russian auto dealer Alexander Varshavsky\u2019s $20.5 million property, which he bought in cash. Mamdani counted \u201cthousands more\u201d similarly opulent homes \u201cowned by foreign oligarchs and the global ultra-rich.\u201d<\/p>\n The new fee would bring in about $500 million annually, less than 10 percent of the city\u2019s projected budget deficit of $5.4 billion. Nonetheless, it\u2019s a crack in Hochul\u2019s stone wall against the idea of applying any new tax against the rich, which she\u2019s maintained for months. At a rally for the Mamdani mayoral campaign in October, New Yorkers chanted \u201cTax the rich\u201d at Hochul when she took the stage. Initially, she pretended that she thought the audience was yelling \u201cLet\u2019s go, Bills,\u201d in reference to the NFL team from Buffalo. Then she tried other ways to get out of the intensely popular demand, including<\/a> repeating the lie that taxes on the ultra-wealthy prompt them to leave, which has repeatedly been proven untrue, and saying that having to listen to a repeat request from the constituents she serves is akin to her having to \u201cput up with a lot of crap.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI hear you,\u201d Hochul said a month later when some in the audience at a political conference in Puerto Rico told her to tax the rich. \u201cBut I\u2019m the type of person, the more you push me, the more I\u2019m not going to do what you want. So little lesson to all of our friends out there.\u201d Later, she told reporters that Buffalo natives \u201cdon\u2019t put up with a lot of crap,\u201d adding, \u201cYou look at the history of people who\u2019ve run multimillion-dollar ad campaigns to try and get me to change my position. I don\u2019t change my position.\u201d<\/p>\n But that was 2025, and her constituents did not shut up. Not only did Mamdani continue to advocate for taxing the rich, but the massive volunteer network built during his campaign did as well. Volunteers knocked on doors to tell their neighbors that Hochul was standing in the way of Mamdani\u2019s project to tax the rich, plugging in with the new 501(c)(4) Our Time<\/a> to sign up for canvassing shifts. Unlike 501(c)(3) nonprofits, 501(c)(4) organizations can lobby.<\/p>\n Mamdani also threatened to institute unpopular measures to increase city revenue if taxing the rich wasn\u2019t possible. He proposed a citywide property tax increase across all four categories of buildings, including offices and hotels, which would have imposed an additional $700 cost on typical owners of family homes, according to the Citizens Budget Commission. He also proposed taking $980 million from the rainy day fund and another $229 million from the city\u2019s Retiree Health Benefits Trust. The blame for all those measures would have fallen at Hochul\u2019s feet.<\/p>\n New York\u2019s tax on international billionaires is a huge win, said Mamdani, who on Wednesday praised Hochul for getting it done.<\/p>\n \u201cThanks to the support of Governor Hochul, we are one step closer to balancing our budget by taxing the ultra-wealthy and global elites with a pied-\u00e0-terre tax\u2014the first of its kind in our state,\u201d he said in an announcement of the fee. \u201cAlongside the governor, our administration is fighting every day to make sure we address this fiscal deficit fairly, where the wealthy contribute what they owe and our budget reflects our commitment to the working New Yorkers being priced out of our city.\u201d<\/p>\n Efforts to make the rich pay their fair share are taking off after decades during which Democrats generally shied away from the issue. Yesterday, responding to New York\u2019s new tax, Democrats flooded social media with calls to tax the rich, from progressive candidates like James Talarico, their Senate nominee in Texas, and from the Democratic National Committee itself, which posted \u201cTAX THE RICH<\/a>\u201d on social media platforms multiple times after news of the new tax dropped.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Six months after Gov. Kathy Hochul scolded New Yorkers for telling her to tax the rich, she joined…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":199957,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[15095,4736,426,9,24,55,54,56,10114,1491,10115,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-199956","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-cities-communities","9":"tag-economic-policy","10":"tag-kathy-hochul","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-city","13":"tag-new-york-city-headlines","14":"tag-new-york-city-news","15":"tag-ny","16":"tag-poverty-wealth","17":"tag-real-estate","18":"tag-tax-policy","19":"tag-zohran-mamdani"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199956"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199956\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/199957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}