Victor Davis Hanson: New York Just Sent This Letter to Nearly One Million Homeowners

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Welcome to the Daily Signal Podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now, without further ado, here's today's take.

**Victor Davis Hanson** (0:08)
He's broke. He's had all of these lavish welfare ideas that are not fundable because he's driving out the upper middle class and the wealthy, and they're living in, drove some estimates, maybe $11 billion already in real value and revenue. So he needs money.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York, has just stirred up a lot of controversy. He said that he wanted to go after property owners who had homes worth more than 5 million, and they were likely to be second homes. In other words, they had a primary residence elsewhere, either in the state of New York or outside the state, or in a foreign country. And he wanted to tax them with a new surcharge, in addition to property tax. But then when the letters went out, they didn't just go to the upper, upper, upper middle class or the wealthy who owned five million dollar properties. Mamdani went back on his word and sent almost 950,000 letters out to property owners who on the register had a home worth more than one million dollars.
Now this is where it gets interesting. He's under a lot of criticism for this, because he was bragging and he kind of, as he always does, in his cute socialist smile. Remember, he got in front of Ken Griffith's second home and looked into the camera and said, ha ha, we're coming for you type of thing.
This email was supposed to be cute. Something's coming in the mail. But here's the problem.
A person can have a relatively modest house, and maybe they inherited it from their parents or they bought it 50 years ago for 50,000. And in crowded New York, it's worth a million dollars. They're hardly wealthy. But more importantly, in the United States, Mr. Mamdani isn't familiar, apparently, with an age-old foundational principle that you're innocent until proven guilty. In other words, you don't word a letter to people that say, I assume you are guilty of having a house which is not your principle residence. You have three weeks to prove to me that you're not guilty, and then maybe I will adjudicate you're innocent and not slap a surtax. Can you imagine hundreds of thousands of people getting a letter in the mail that they owe five, ten, twenty, fifty, eighty thousand dollars on top of their property taxes? And going into panic and then going to the New York City website with other hundreds of thousands of people trying to get in and say, Look, I've been in this house. I'm not a second property owner.
It was designed to cause confusion and anger and chaos and make Mamdani an object of fear. Don't cross the mayor. He has a long memory. But here's the other thing. Besides inverting the idea to you are guilty until you prove yourself innocent, what's wrong with having a second house? It's a free company, country. You have a right to have a free house. So what was he doing by sending this letter and threatening you? Well, one of the things is he wants, he's broke. He's had all of these lavish welfare ideas that are not fundable because he's driving out the upper middle class and the wealthy and they're living in droves. Some estimates may be $11 billion already in real value and revenue. So he needs money. And more importantly, by sending this cert tax out, on addition to property taxes, if you have a property that's worth a million or two million and you're paying $20,000 or $30,000, $40,000 in property tax, and this cert tax comes in 10, 20, 30, a lot of people are saying, you know, I'm not getting that much rent. If it is a second home, if it's a primary home, they're saying, I already paid this huge property and I have maintenance costs. If you're renting, you have rental cost, you're subject to oversight, there's rental subsidies for your renter, there's rent control. And so what he's trying to do is force people to sell, either sell their second home or he considers them affluent enough that they had their turn and it's time to sell because they will not be able to afford, especially retired people, a surcharge property tax on top of a property tax, on top of insurance. And if you have a lot of sales, the house price drops. If the house price drops, Mamdani can come in and either buy them for the city or subsidize the, quote, we oppress poor to buy. It's a huge redistribution plan.