Socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani wants to hike property taxes for “richer and whiter neighborhoods” in an eyebrow-raising proposal that aims to ease the burden on homeowners in the outer boroughs.
The soak-the-rich proposal is buried in Mamdani’s campaign platform that calls to fix the city’s notoriously skewed property tax system, in which ritzy brownstones are hit at lower rates than homes and rentals in lower-income neighborhoods.
“Shift the tax burden from overtaxed homeowners in the outer boroughs to more expensive homes in richer and whiter neighborhoods,” the proposal reads.
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 Mamdani’s specific mention of “whiter,” wealthier neighborhoods drew outrage from some observers. Many right-wing commentators accused Mamdani, who would be the city’s first mayor of South Asian descent if elected, of targeting white New Yorkers, with one labeling him a “RACIST.”
City Councilman David Carr (R-Staten Island), who’s part of the bipartisan push to reform the property tax system, said Mamdani should tone down the “rhetoric” if he’s going to help tackle a very real imbalance.
“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,” Carr said.
“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, a two-term Queens assemblyman, pulled off a stunning upset in Tuesday’s ranked-choice Democratic mayoral primary, trouncing former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in first-pick votes after running an unabashedly socialist campaign focused on affordability.
The city’s tangled property tax rules are the result of a 50-year-old court decision, a subsequent state law setting assessment caps to prevent middle-class owners from being taxed out of their homes and a complicated set of overlapping rules.
The result is a system where “small homeowners in Brooklyn and Queens can pay a higher tax rate than owners of luxury co-ops on 5th Avenue in Manhattan,” the pro-reform group Tax Equity Now points out.
Tax Equity Now New York filed a still-ongoing lawsuit against the city in 2017 that argued the process unfairly taxes renters and homeowners in lower-income neighborhoods compared to wealthier areas.
Predominantly black neighborhoods such as Canarsie and East New York face higher effective tax rates than others that are largely white, a recent study by the Community Service Society found.
“There is no good reason why homeowners in Cambria Heights, a residential community that is 90% Black, should pay an effective tax rate that is double those paid by homeowners in Park Slope or East Village, which are 62% and 50% White, respectively,” the study states.
The meat of Mamdani’s proposal calls to remove artificial caps on assessments — a solution pushed by advocates and lawmakers across the political spectrum.
“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 proposal states.
Mamdani’s campaign didn’t respond to The Post’s requests for comment.
But many New Yorkers in affluent neighborhoods weren’t happy about their property taxes potentially going up.
Ron Centola, a 73-year old retiree, has rented on the Upper East Side for 30 years, but still opposes redistributing wealth.
“Here’s the thing, I’m wealthy, I don’t want my wealth redistributed,” he told The Post Friday.
“I work for my money, why should I give it away?”
Another Upper East Sider — Shanice Gilbert, 33, a college assistant — noted not everyone in her hifalutin neighborhood is rich.
“Not everybody here is wealthy, how is that going to work?” she said. “It’s a mixed environment, it’s a very diverse environment. How are you going to do that?”
Cam Macdonald, general counsel for the Empire Center, said as mayor, Mamdani could adjust the percentages, if he’s elected in November.
But Macdonald argued Mamdani’s campaign needs to show their math for how it will affect the city’s revenue — of which more than 30% is derived from property taxes.
The proposal, he noted, also “does nothing to fix the structural issues under state law that have led to the disparities.”
Other planks of Mamdani’s proposal — including “circuit breakers” to make sure low- and moderate-income homeowners aren’t burdened, and to stop treating co-ops and condos as if they were rentals — concede that the state legislature would need to make those changes, not the mayor.
Kenny Burgos, CEO of the New York Apartment Association representing rent-stabilized apartment owners, has been an outspoken critic of Mamdani’s promise to freeze rents on those dwellings.
But he said the issue of property taxes might be an area of common ground for his group and Mamdani.
“A reform of property taxes would be absolutely instrumental in saving this housing,” he said of rent-stabilized homes.
“On property taxes, I think he would have some strange bedfellows here. I think there are many many outer-borough elected officials who have this issue and have found not enough support to actually make meaningful change.”
One Park Slope woman, who lives in a $3 million brownstone, told The Post she agrees with Mamdani even if her “modest” $5,000-a-year taxes rise.
“Private homeowners have a real deal,” she said.
“I think people in co-ops and condos get hammered. I’m all for it. People got to share.”
— Additional reporting by Khristina Narizhnaya, Georgett Roberts and Mikella Schuettler