I had really high hopes for this mayor. Mayor Mamdani. The mayor many people called a socialist.
I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. Yes, even as a firm believer in capitalism and as I witness anti-Semitism on the rise, I hoped that New York had elected a politician who genuinely had the interests of everyone at heart.
Maybe that was naive.
After 12 years of terrible administration, I wanted to believe this city deserved better and that we were finally going to get it.
But so far, I don’t see it.
The subways are still filthy. Sidewalk sheds are still housing homeless. And everything seems to be getting more expensive and less affordable.
In fact, the bright spot in the city right now is that the offices, streets, and restaurants are full again because of the very people who probably didn’t vote for him.
And now he seems intent on not only taxing those people more heavily, but publicly mocking them.
The very people who fund the city. The people who invest here, build businesses here, employ people here, buy homes here, and support the cultural institutions that make New York what it is.
And whether people want to admit it or not, they belong here just as much as the school teacher, the bartender, the artist, or the nurse.When someone buys a $5 million apartment in New York City, the government immediately collects nearly $200,000 in taxes from that single transaction alone. Roughly $75,000 from the mansion tax, another $71,000 from the New York City transfer tax, and approximately $52,000 from New York State transfer taxes.
And that’s before a single dollar of annual property tax is paid. Before renovations. Before payroll taxes. Before restaurants, stores, contractors, staff, and the broader economy benefit from that person choosing to invest here in the first place.
What’s important to understand is that many of these buyers do not even live in New York full time, meaning they barely use many of the services they are helping fund.
I’d estimate that at least half of the luxury deals we transact involve people who spend only part of the year here. They come because New York is still, despite everything, the greatest city in the world. They want to participate in it. Maybe not full time, but enough to invest in it emotionally and financially.
This administration seems determined to chase those people away with a stick.
And trolling them on Instagram while doing it is not leadership.
It’s performance.
I’m not sure when it became fashionable to openly resent successful people. Not every wealthy person is evil. Yes, it’s easy to point to people like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos and turn “the rich” into a caricature, but many of the wealthy people I know are deeply philanthropic. They support hospitals, schools, museums, charities, and the broader civic life of the city in ways most people never see.
Isn’t part of the American dream the ability to build something meaningful and be rewarded for it?
I don’t think this administration fully understands the people it is targeting, or how much of the city quietly depends on them.
Politics in New York has become lazy. Politicians assume, whether rightfully or not, that people will continue coming here regardless. They assume people will continue buying here, investing here, and spending money here no matter how dysfunctional things become.
So the city gets taken for granted.
And when that happens, leadership reaches for the lowest hanging fruit. The easiest political strategy becomes targeting the people already carrying a disproportionate amount of the financial burden in order to fund years of inefficiency and overspending.
That isn’t thoughtful leadership.
It’s lazy politics.
New York City’s proposed annual budget is now roughly $127 billion. To put that into perspective, that’s comparable to the annual budgets of entire countries like Greece or Thailand.
At a certain point, we have to stop pretending the only solution is finding new people to tax or new ways to extract more money from the same shrinking group of taxpayers.
The problem isn’t revenue.
The problem is how the money is being spent.
A city with a $127 billion budget should be capable of keeping its streets safe, its public spaces clean, its transit functioning, and its government efficient. If it can’t, then leadership should be focused less on raising more money and more on finding creative ways to spend the money we already have more effectively.
That requires discipline. It requires accountability. And most importantly, it requires leaders willing to challenge the bureaucracy instead of endlessly feeding it.
New York is the greatest city in the world, but great cities are fragile. They only stay great when the people running them understand that success is not guaranteed and that the people who choose to live, work, build, and invest there should not be treated like enemies.
New York did not become great by accident.
And it will not stay great by accident either.
Side Bar:
I’d invite the Mayor to shadow a working real estate agent for a week. We have a unique lens into the city because we move through all of it. Not from behind a desk. Not from private conference rooms. The agents who truly work this city spend their lives moving through every neighborhood and every income bracket.
We take the subway. We ride Citi Bikes. We walk the streets. And occasionally, we sit in the back of armored SUVs with security details while touring $50 million apartments.
We see the entire ecosystem.
These people all make up New York, and each of them has a claim to it. Fareed Zakaria recently articulated this tension better than anyone I’ve heard.
Let's do this-
Shaun
