Chronicles – New York City mayor and Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani admonished his city’s property owners in a recent X post, saying owners of second homes worth $5 million or more will have to pay a new “pied-à-terre” tax.
“Check your mailbox when you’re back in the five boroughs—because you’ve got mail,” he wrote.
The “mail” to which Mamdani referred is an official letter from the city about the new tax that Mamdani says he needs to assess because of the city’s troubled budget.
Mamdani’s comment was not entirely accurate, however. The new pied-à-terre tax, which New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced in April, applies not only to $5 million “luxury properties,” but also to co-ops and condominiums worth just $1 million or more—which is not a high ceiling in New York’s inflated real estate market. In Manhattan, both average and median apartment prices in 2025 were estimated to be nearly twice that amount, according to the real estate firm Brown Harris Stevens. That means that virtually all nonresident owners of places larger than a small studio apartment will qualify for the new tax.
The Mamdani administration has gone far beyond punitive fiscal measures, which the mayor claimed would be confined to extremely rich individuals like hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin. (Mamdani famously taunted Griffin in an X video on April 15—tax day—about taxing the “richest of the rich.”) On July 27, New York’s Department of Finance published a searchable list available to the general public of city property owners who it says may qualify for the tax.
Initially, according to an April public announcement from Gov. Hochul, the tax was only meant to apply to only about 13,000 people, and there was no indication that their identities or addresses would be disclosed to the general public. The Finance Department’s list, however, contains more than 960,000 properties and the full names and addresses of their owners. According to an analysis by The New York Post, many individuals who appear on the list may not, in fact, be liable for the tax. Some appear to inhabit the listed properties as primary residences, while some listed properties are in neighborhoods where average values are under the $1 million tax threshold. Still other properties appear to be commercial real estate and thus not “residences” that might otherwise be liable for the new tax.
Regardless of their tax liabilities, residence statuses, and individual net worths, all of the people on Mamdani’s list have been “doxxed,” that is, publicly identified with private information in a government register indicating where they live.
While the imposition of the pied-à-terre tax may or may not ultimately force all of them to pay more for their city dwellings, the list’s mere existence suggests that the people on it are members of a suspect class of citizens—deserving of both higher taxes and public shaming. This categorization and doxxing recalls the Soviet Union’s treatment of “the possessing classes.” Then, as now, the point was to single them out for separate, and therefore discriminatory, treatment by their government.
This is in keeping with the left’s ongoing efforts to categorize people into classes of “oppressors” or “the oppressed” and claiming to champion the latter. The ideological point is to marginalize and ostracize disfavored social groups, much as DEI theorists today advocate discrimination on the basis of race to correct perceived past injustices. In practice, however, it places practically the entire population at risk of being subject to discriminatory treatment if a party hack or government bureaucrat decides to place an individual in the objectionable category. Many of the 960,000 property owners on Mamdani’s list are likely not what anyone would call “rich,” and many more—perhaps even all—are not engaged in the “oppression” of others, but city officials now, apparently, have the power to determine that for themselves.
What could happen to the people named, whose addresses and property values are now publicly listed? One might ask criminal defendant Luigi Mangione, who allegedly gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York in December 2024. According to diary entries and other written statements cited by the prosecution, Mangione acted out of alleged “hostility toward the health insurance industry and wealthy executives in particular.” CNN says he has a “cult-like” following and had by June 2025 received over $1 million in donations to his legal defense.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), an independent who caucuses with the Democrats and identifies as a socialist, has frequently said that “billionaires should not exist.” Shortly after winning New York’s Democratic mayoral nomination in 2025, Mamdani himself said, “I don’t think we should have billionaires,” announcing that he intended to transfer residential real estate from private owners to government-aligned institutions.
President Donald Trump, a billionaire who long resided in New York City, has been the target of at least three assassination attempts since July 2024. According to the Washington Post, leftist groups routinely use doxxing to identify, shame, humiliate, ostracize, and cause harm to those who disagree with them. Doxxings of conservative Supreme Court justices have led to multiple arrests amid suspected assassination plots.
Now New York City has doxxed nearly a million property owners that any angry leftist can now research, classify negatively, and take action against. The commissars of revolutionary Moscow would be proud.