Mamdani angers New York billionaires by raising their taxes and freezing protected rents

In the Upper West Side apartment he has just closed a deal on, real‑estate agent Avi Levi‑Braha levels with his client. “In my 11 years working in New York, I’ve never seen anything like this. I know plenty of major landlords who want to get out. I understand this mayor means well, but his policies are going to end up hurting everyone,” he confides in a low voice, as if someone else were listening.

The mayor he’s referring to is Zohran Mamdani, the young Muslim socialist born in Kampala, Uganda, who surprised everyone by winning the election in the mecca of Western capitalism. After almost five months in office, Mamdani has blended pragmatism with a staunch defense of principles such as raising taxes on the very wealthy and freezing rents for the less privileged. These are two ideas that are easy to sell to his voters, but they have put him at odds with some of New York’s most powerful citizens.

One of the most direct clashes involved Ken Griffin, CEO of the investment fund Citadel. And it must be said that in this case, it was Mamdani who fired the first shot. “When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich. Well, today we’re taxing the rich. [...] I’m thrilled to announce we’ve secured a pied-a-tierre tax. The first in New York’s history. This is an annual fee on luxury properties worth more than $5 million, whose owners do not live full-time in the city. Like for this penthouse, which hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin bought for $238 million,” he said in a video on his Instagram account — his preferred form of communication.

As he said this, smiling broadly, he pointed to the financier’s lavish residence. Griffin was furious, accused the Democratic politician of endangering his life, and said he was already considering moving business to Miami. Financier Bill Ackman also urged the mayor to stop scaring off the ultra‑wealthy who, in his view, pay most of the city’s taxes and ensure that poorer New Yorkers live far better than they otherwise would.

Another billionaire who has pushed back against the proposal is U.S. President Donald Trump. Despite the surprisingly cordial relationship the two politicians have maintained in recent months, the Republican leader said this week of Mamdani: “I really like him, he’s a nice guy — but you can’t tax people out of New York. When you tax people out of New York, you never get them back. It’s a very dangerous thing."

Two million tenants

The impetuous young mayor — he’s only 34, making him the youngest New York has seen in more than a century — doesn’t just want to raise taxes on the wealthy. The flip side of his agenda is ensuring that the more than two million people living in rent‑stabilized apartments —roughly one in four New Yorkers — won’t have to pay a single extra dollar next year for their homes.

The rent freeze isn’t final yet, but it got a major boost last week when the board that must issue the proposal — whose members had been previously replaced by the new mayor — voted in favor. It’s not a revolutionary move; Mayor Bill de Blasio, who governed from 2014 to 2021, enacted it several times. But this time, too, it has set tempers alight.

The avalanche of criticism has come from affordable‑housing landlords, who warn that the situation is starting to resemble the dreaded 1970s, when the city went through a period of neglect, insecurity, and grime that remains etched in the collective memory. They also complain that the pressure on them has grown so intense that they can no longer cover costs. Some economists warn that such measures disincentivize much‑needed new construction. And media outlets — notably the New York Post, a frequent battering ram against the mayor — argue that this is the surest way to degrade housing for the least advantaged.

Reinventing tradition

Andrés Jaque, dean of Architecture at Columbia University, offers a nuanced assessment of Mamdani’s decisions. First, he notes that the mayor’s policies are reviving, “in an extraordinarily inventive way,” traditions that had lain dormant for decades. “Since the 19th century, New York has been a vast laboratory of social policy. But the drive for social inclusion weakened in recent decades, especially under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who promoted global‑capital attraction policies that transformed housing from a use‑value good into a financial product,” he explains over a video call.

While he praises the new mayor’s social push, the Spanish architect —who has lived in New York for more than 15 years— also warns of the risks: “His success will depend on his ability to reach broad agreements with landlords, insurers, and investors. The problem is that he built enormous social support by intensifying a highly critical discourse toward capital. And that may now make it harder to build the consensus he needs with the private sector. It will require a shift in language: showing he can also protect business interests, which are necessary players in the functioning of the city.”

That hard line against the world of money, which Mamdani displayed during the campaign, earned him support among voters who have watched the city become increasingly unlivable for middle‑ and low‑income residents. According to data from Realtor, at the end of last year, the median rent for an apartment in New York was $3,585, more than $1,000 higher than four years earlier, during the pandemic, when it briefly seemed fewer people would want to live in big cities. Time has shown that idea to be entirely unfounded.

Despite his criticism of Mamdani’s management, real‑estate agent Levi‑Braha admits that the market — especially rentals — has soared to unimaginable levels. Since the pandemic slump, rents have risen year after year. “Every time I get a new apartment and check what it used to be worth, the market has exploded. I have a client who bought a place expecting to rent it for $3,400. When he listed it, it was at $4,600. Two years later, it went back on the market, but this time for $5,800. It’s complete madness,” says the man whose job involves analyzing apartment prices on a daily basis.

In this context, experts across the ideological spectrum agree that New York needs to build more housing. For that reason, the mayor has just announced ideas to ease bureaucratic requirements that often suffocate developers. Last week, he unveiled the SPEED plan, aimed at accelerating the construction of affordable housing.

Gianluca Galetto, an economist who has worked on Wall Street and with previous city administrations, says freezing rents in protected housing may help directly affected tenants but won’t solve the housing crisis on its own. He points to other structural problems: outdated laws that need reform and units that never reach the market.

“Honestly, I don’t think anyone can solve all of this just from the local government. Increasing the supply, which is what’s really needed, takes a lot of time,” he reflects.

On that cooperation with other levels of government, Mamdani took an important step last week. The approval of a balanced budget, one that doesn’t generate further deficit, is a major achievement for a mayor who, in his early days, warned that the city was on the brink of a fiscal crisis of historic proportions. And this success is only possible thanks to collaboration with the state’s governor, Kathy Hochul — also a Democrat, but from a far more moderate faction than Mamdani.

Architect Jaque sums up Mamdani’s greatest achievement as sending a message with global resonance: placing kindness, solidarity, and the importance of people staying in their neighborhoods at the center of public policy. “That could end up being New York’s enormous contribution to the rest of the world,” he says.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition