Socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is not shy about playing race and class cards in his campaign platform proposal to hike property taxes for “richer and whiter neighborhoods.”
Calling it a “soak-the-rich” proposal, the New York Post described the platform as an effort to fix the city’s “notoriously skewed property tax system,” where high-end brownstones are assessed at lower rates than homes and rentals in lower-income neighborhoods.
The race-based language is contained in Mamdani’s extensive “Stop the Squeeze on NYC Homeowners” campaign material.
It promises that a Mamdani administration will:
Shift the tax burden from overtaxed homeowners in the outer boroughs to more expensive homes in richer and whiter neighborhoods: The property tax system is unbalanced because assessment levels are artificially capped, so homeowners in expensive neighborhoods pay less than their fair share. The Mayor can fix this by pushing class assessment percentages down for everyone and adjusting rates up, effectively lowering tax payments for homeowners in neighborhoods like Jamaica and Brownsville while raising the amount paid in the most expensive Brooklyn brownstones.
The Post account acknowledged that “Democrats and many Republicans have long pushed to fix the out-of-whack system that ends up hitting poorer, often largely black and brown neighborhoods, with higher property taxes than their neighbors in swanky areas that tend to be majority Caucasian.”
But the candidate’s language drew fire from conservative critics.
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon threatened to investigate Zohran Mamdani over his proposal to tax ‘whiter neighborhoods’ if he becomes the mayor, calling race-based policies “illegal.”
One former northeast resident, now a Florida-based commentator, called the candidate a “racist” on X.
City Councilman David Carr (R-Staten Island), who is part of a bipartisan push to reform the property tax system, said the inflammatory language doesn’t help the cause.
The Republican councilman told the Post:
The objective of our reforms is to make our property tax system fairer and more transparent and to ensure that middle-and-working-class homeowners aren’t subsidizing lower taxes for wealthy property owners. It’s not about blaming people based on race or class or political affiliation, and if Zohran Mamdani wants to come on board, then he should drop the divisive rhetoric.
Mamdani, 33, is a two-term Queens assemblyman. He pulled off what many observers considered a stunning upset in Tuesday’s ranked-choice Democrat mayoral primary.
However, he did not garner the 50 percent of votes needed to win the primary outright.
Among the race’s losers was former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who was dealt a major blow to his attempted political comeback after resigning from the governorship over a sexual harassment scandal. But he reportedly has not withdrawn his name from the ballot for the general election.
Mamdani ran an unabashedly socialist campaign focused on making New York affordable. It featured clever and eye-catching clips on social media and demonstrated that Mamdani, his left-wing politics aside, clearly has political charisma.
“New York’s tangled property tax rules are the result of a 50-year-old court decision and state law that aims to prevent middle-class owners from being taxed out of their homes with a complicated set of overlapping rules,” The Post reported,
New Yorkers in affluent neighborhoods are already objecting to the Mamdani proposal.
Ron Centola, a 73-year old retiree who has rented on the Upper East Side for 30 years, told the Post he opposes redistributing wealth.
“Here’s the thing, I’m wealthy, I don’t want my wealth redistributed,” he said Friday. “I work for my money, why should I give it away?”
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the best-selling author of Below the Line and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
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