Stuart Larkins

Welcome to Socialism Mayor Mamdani with fanfare released a list of 960,000 owners of real estate in New York City that have been determined they could owe the pied a terre tax because NYC computers have determined they own what was billed as a market value of $5 million or more. Now there are only about 1 million residential tax lots in New York City so the first question is how did virtually every owner get put on the list? The answer is that you are subject to the tax in the first two years if your property has a “DOF valuation” of over $1 million. And so the $5 million figure was a fake. The DOF system is obviously massively flawed as it has dragged in almost a million property owners that meet the threshold. Now, here is the interesting part — once you are on the list you have to prove you should not be taxed by showing you are a resident. Or by challenging the valuation. Good luck fighting the city bureaucrats on both of these counts. The individual litigation will be massive. It does not take more than a New York minute and Google Maps to see that many of these properties would never sell for $5 million. Pick a few. The whole housing sector will also be dragged down by the additional annual taxation. Add a tax of 4 to 6 per cent (yes condos are taxed that high now) a year of its DOF value to a condo or coop and that condo won’t be worth that much. And you can forget about out of town buyers. So this will destroy much of the home values that people have built up. People who have invested in New York. Many of these folks might have a mortgage and may in fact not have they much equity in the property. The tax-the-rich taxman does not care about that. An unexpected $50,000 annual bill for a condo with a DOF value of a million now has the cost of a second mortgage on top of all the expenses. The idea of the tax was basically to create massive taxation without representation. The people being taxed — non residents — by definition don’t vote and so the political genius was to create and discriminate against a class of people who do not vote. That by itself might be unconstitutional. And they also don’t use the schools, much garbage, much of any of the city’s services. So taxing them actually makes little sense as you drive away people who were contributing but not using the services. Now many will recall that persecutions frequently begin with a list — a list that can be used by the authorities and that is where Mamdani started — and he published it to boot. And smiled about it as though those high-value owners deserve what’s coming to them. But with a million people on his tax hit list, welcome to the lie of socialism - it starts with the idea that only “they” are going to get it — a small group of 30,000 homeowners — and before you know it you are on the list.