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Mamdani Threatens 9.5% Property Tax Increase if Wealth Tax Is Not Passed
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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Why not both?
You use the carrot or the stick. Using both at the same time makes no sense.
Don’t use a carrot and stick.
Name anything that's not either one or the other... 🤷🏽♀️
Pizza riding a rat
I know you are trolling but let me get on the same pedantic level.
A pizza riding a rat could be either a stick or a carrot. It's a stick to those who hate rats and are lactose intolerant. It's a carrot to the plebs that think a pizza party is a bonus. Hell is coming with entertainment. It's riding a rat.
Try again.
These people have nothing, left reactionaries are just as clueless as the right.
Ya, i didn't notice the age of the account. Possably a bad faith actor but likely i just fed the troll. Live and learn.
Because a property tax hike only hurts the middle class
Are there middle class property owners in New York city?
I feel like middle class would all be renters there and upper class wealthy the only actual owners.
^ this. This is the NYC situation
Staten Island?
Remember, NYC is five boroughs and not just Manhattan.
Just like every other cost related to owning and maintaining a rental: property taxes get passed down to renters.
Wrong. Renters already pay what the market is able to bear.
Landlords aren't like "we'll leave money on the table just because our renters were suckers and didn't vote for people that will raise our taxes."
Do you suppose a wealth tax wouldn't also be passed on to renters? Should we just not tax the rich at all since they'll just pass the cost on to their tenants?
There is one way a wealth tax probably wouldn't be passed down to renters.
If everything over a certain point is taxed at 100%.
Including stocks and all that stuff that rich people typically store their money.
That way it doesn't matter if they increase the rent they still won't get more money out of it so there's no point in increasing it.
They may be incentivized to sell properties in that case to bring property values down and therefore rent.
I know a couple people here who own apartments. Median income here I think is like $115k. None of them are much more than that.
You have fallen for propaganda, this simply isn't true.
Please enlighten me how a property tax increase doesn’t hurt the middle and lower class disproportionately. I’d love to hear this.
It really sucks having so many useful idiots looking out for the people taking advantage of them.
You don’t understand basic economics. You are poor and blame everyone else and want others to needlessly suffer. There are several 100k homeowners in NYC that will have their mortgages raised by 9% and will be forced to sell their homes and displace their families. Rich people do not pay these taxes. They write them off under business expenses because all their homes are under LLC.
These types of taxes disproportionately hurt middle class. It’s doesn’t hurt lower class because y’all don’t own homes anyway but it increases the threshold for the buy-in so that some of yall can start building wealth with your first home but you ask for property tax increases so it keeps you poor. But ya blame the middle class some more.
Someone replied fifty minutes ago with an answer. You have no interest in learning why you're wrong, stop pretending to give a shit.
For everyone else, in NYC the middle class disproportionately rents. It is the wealthy who own.
Just like every other cost related to owning and maintaining a rental: property taxes get passed down to renters.
This tax hike disproportionately affects middle and lower class individuals.
If the landlords could charge more, they'd already be doing it.
Not if paired with a rent freeze. Obviously. But you knew that already. You're just here to agitate for the bourgeoise.
NYC renters have suffered enough. Why would you subject them to failed policies like rent control?
Rent control isn't rent freeze. But rent control is also a great thing, even if it, like many efforts to support the working class, is consistently derided by the capitalists.
You are bad at agitating. Find a new mark, pussy.
No, this is just what the landlords say, like how they say raising wages would impact jobs. It's just not true. Landlords already charge the maximum people are willing and able to pay, they can't really pass those costs on. Just like how in fact companies hire based on how many employees they need to fulfil their contracts, and it's only affected marginally by the wages.
When a cost goes up for all owners at once, this leads to everyone raising rent prices at the same time. There is no opportunity for a renter to jump ship to a cheaper property, they all went up. The maximum changed.
Yes, this will price out many people from being able to afford housing.
That would leave properties empty with high taxes, pretty bad financial decision for a landlord. Leaving properties empty to land bank works if they don't have to pay anything but it would be ruinous in this scenario. They will lower prices.
Welcome to New York City. This is already the case.
No, it's not. Currently taxes are not nearly high enough to impact the value proposition of doing that while you expect significant capital gains. Increased property taxes additionally lower property values and exactly counteract that. Those properties are not empty for funsies, their owners expect to make a profit doing that. With stagnating or falling prices and high taxes they will be quickly motivated to sell or rent, at a price a middle class or lower class person is actually able to pay.
Vast numbers of empty properties in NYC are the current reality. This conversation will not be able to continue if demonstrable facts are being denied.
You should try reading beyond the first sentence of a comment some time, it seems it's not your strong suit as you've given up after three words the last few times.
Property tax is based on property values. Rich people have more valuable properties. Of the taxes we actually have, it's one of the most progressive as it actually hits wealthy people more.
Like most taxes it's possible to do a progressive property tax, where the more your properties are collectively worth the higher rate of tax you pay. This doesn't sound like what is being proposed here, but it is very-much possible and hopefully it gets changed before it's passed.
Done right this will leave owner/occupiers in the same state they are in now, mildly reduce the profitability of small time landlords and make large scale landlords financial nonsense viable forcing them to sell.
The actual risk is that because it lowers house prices by artificially reducing the demand it won't encourage housebuilding which is the only real solution when more people want or need to live in a place than there is housing.
That said, I am optimistic this increases supply enough by forcing sales of under occupied properties to offset the reduction in built supply.
I'm pretty sure property taxes aren't progressive and I'm baffled as to why.
Make it so like the first 100k is taxed low, and then ramp up so people with millions of property pay through the nose.
What the fuck is a "middle class?" We don't have one of those anymore.
I'm increasingly of the belief that we never had a middle class, just a fiction of one
It depends who you ask, but I tend to hold that the middle class is somewhere between plumbers with a sole proprietorship and petit-bourgeois family businesses up to a point. They do still exist, but it's such a vanishingly small class I'm not exactly sure why I as a worker should be expected to defend their interests when they so rarely defend mine.
Middle Class isn't real. You are either a renter or an owner, property tax increase along with a rent ceiling and a vacancy tax only affects the owners.
I'm considered middle class despite being something like in the top 10% of earners in the US and I don't own any property. I don't know if I could afford to own property with their current prices. I'm not certain property taxes hit the middle class as much as they might have back when my parents were in their prime. Of course it still hits a percentage of the middle class, but I'm suggesting that percentage is shrinking and smaller than the revenue it would generate from the rich.