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.
Hellbound and Down 