Victor Davis Hanson: New York’s Property Tax Crackdown Is Just the Beginning

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York, has just stirred up a lot of controversy. He said that he wanted to go after property owners who had homes worth more than $5 million, and they were likely to be second homes.  

In other words, they had a primary residence elsewhere, either in the state of New York, outside the state, or in a foreign country. 

And he wanted to tax them with a new surcharge in addition to property tax. But then, when the letters went out, they didn’t just go to the upper-middle class or the wealthy who owned $5 million properties. Mamdani went back on his word and sent almost 950,000 letters out to property owners who, on their register, had a home worth more than $1 million. 

Now, this is where it gets interesting. He’s under a lot of criticism for this because he was bragging and he kind of, as he always does in his cute socialist smile … Remember, he got in front of Ken Griffin’s second home and looked into the camera and said, “Ha ha, we’re coming for you,” type of thing. This email was supposed to be cute. 

Something’s coming in the mail.  

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But here’s the problem. A person can have a relatively modest house, and maybe they inherited it from their parents or they bought it 50 years ago for $50,000, and in crowded New York it’s worth $1 million. They’re hardly wealthy. 

But more importantly, in the United States, Mamdani isn’t familiar, apparently, with an age-old foundational principle that you’re innocent until proven guilty. In other words, you don’t word a letter to people that says, “I assume you are guilty of having a house which is not your principal residence. You have three weeks to prove to me that you’re not guilty, and then maybe I will adjudicate you’re innocent and not slap a surtax.” 

Can you imagine hundreds of thousands of people getting a letter in the mail that they owe $5,000, $10,000, $20,000, $50,000, or $80,000 on top of their property taxes and going into panic and then going to the New York City website with hundreds of thousands of other people trying to get in and say, “Look, I’ve been in this house. I’m not a second-property owner”? 

It was designed to cause confusion and anger and chaos and make Mamdani an object of fear. Don’t cross the mayor. He has a long memory. 

But here’s the other thing. Besides inverting the idea to “you are guilty until you prove yourself innocent,” what’s wrong with having a second house? It’s a free country. You have a right to have a house. 

So what was he doing by sending this letter and threatening you? Well, one of the things is he’s broke. He’s had all of these lavish welfare ideas that are not fundable because he’s driving out the upper-middle class and the wealthy, and they’re leaving in droves. 

Some estimates say maybe $11 billion already in real value and revenue. So, he needs money. 

And more importantly, by sending this surtax out in addition to property taxes, if you have a property that’s worth $1 million or $2 million and you’re paying $20,000, $30,000, or $40,000 in property tax, and this surtax comes in at another $10,000, $20,000, or $30,000, a lot of people are saying, “You know, I’m not getting that much rent,” if it is a second home. 

If it’s their primary home, they’re saying, “I already pay this huge property tax and I have maintenance costs.” If you’re renting, you have rental costs. You’re subject to oversight. There are rental subsidies for your renter. There’s rent control. 

And so what he’s trying to do is force people to sell. Either sell their second home, or he considers them affluent enough that they had their turn, and it’s time to sell because they will not be able to afford, especially retired people, a surcharge property tax on top of a property tax, on top of insurance. 

And if you have a lot of sales, the house price drops. If the house price drops, Mamdani can come in and either buy them for the city or subsidize the, quote, “repressed poor” to buy. It’s a huge redistribution plan. 

There’s a third, more sinister agenda behind Mamdani’s enemies list. If you send out the names of over 900,000 New Yorkers in various boroughs, and you say, “These people, I accuse these people, until they can prove me wrong, of having a second property or a vacant property that is worth over a million dollars.” 

And you give the name, as he did, and the address, as he did, then you’re going to have a lot of envious people saying, “Oh, Mr. Smith down the road, he’s on that list. Oh, Mr. Jones, I didn’t know that he wasn’t living in that house. Hmm.” 

And that’s the best interpretation. 

There’s two, I think, more accurate and maybe even more disturbing. 

We have an epidemic in this country of squatting. So if you are a potential squatter where the law protects you, once you get possession of an empty home it’s almost impossible to evict you unless you spend thousands of dollars. 

So all these would-be squatters are going to be looking at this list, and they’re going to say, “Well, the mayor of New York accuses this person at this address of having a vacant home. Let’s check it out. Maybe he’s wrong. Maybe we’ll go down the list, five, six, seven, 10 of them, but we will find a vacant house, and we’ll know he’s not going to come, and we’ll just crash and move in. And then the whole legal apparatus of the city protects us, and we can get two, three, four years of free rent.” 

An even worse scenario is there’s a lot of home burglary professionals in New York, especially in New York. And they are saying it’s much easier to break into a vacant home than one occupied. 

And these homes, well, they’re all worth a million and some are worth a lot more. But we’ll just give our team a scouting expedition and go and see, drive by these addresses, and see whether they’re actually occupied or not, and then we can come back and break into them. 

Do we think Mamdani didn’t know that? Of course he knew that. 

But what am I getting at? He is a redistributionist. He believes that people got money through malpractice, unethical activity, criminality, kind of like [Honore de] Balzac said, “Behind every great fortune is a crime,” with himself exempted and his socialist colleagues, of course, exempted from the consequences of their own ideology. 

But what he’s trying to do is put fear into people that he’s going to do something or else. And the “or else” is, “You better come and beg and beg and beg to me that this is your home and you’re occupying it, and you better do it in three weeks or else.” 

It reminds me, in conclusion, of a general truism that we should apply to all of these socialist candidates. 

Socialists run as moderates. They disguise their socialism. Maybe the socialist activists will be honest enough to say they want to abolish the Senate or abolish the Supreme Court or the presidency or get rid of the border or destroy the Pentagon, but elected officials don’t say that when they run as candidates. 

Once they’re in power, however, they’re not moderates. But they’re not even socialists. They rule as communists. 

So if you see a socialist, he will run and convince you that he is a moderate. When he gets into power, he will think socialism is a fuddy-duddy, moderate waste of time, and he will be a full-fledged Marxist. 

Trust me, it’ll happen.

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