New York's 'Rich Tax Hit List' Is a 200-Year-Old Spreadsheet

New York City has published the value of every property in the five boroughs in public files since 1830, when the state made recording property ownership mandatory. That timeline matters because the July 24 publication of a supplemental assessment roll by the city's Department of Finance triggered accusations of a "rich tax" dragnet, a doxxing operation, and a "hit list" — over data the city has tracked in public for nearly two centuries.

Citadel's Ken Griffin said he felt doxxed and called Mayor Zohran Mamdani's April video, filmed outside his own $238 million Central Park South penthouse, a "dangerous" stunt. His purchase price, city valuation, and ownership have sat in the same public files for years. Nothing in the file was secret.

The DOF combined two things it already tracks separately: assessed value, and which properties might not be a primary residence, in one spreadsheet. Merging two already-public columns is not a breach. But the uproar does reveal a lot about the supposed socialist takeover of New York City.

What the files actually contain

On July 24, DOF posted two new files to its property assessments page: a supplemental roll for Tax Class 1, with 684,619 properties, and one for Tax Class 2, with 275,091 — a combined 959,710, a subset of the city's full 1,048,576-row assessment roll. The city was legally required to publish the files by July 25 ahead of the tax's implementation.

The only genuinely new public data is imputed valuations for roughly 36,700 individual co-op units, almost all in Manhattan, which the DOF has never published before because co-ops are normally assessed at the building level.

Neither file is filtered beyond building classification code. The unfiltered data caught properties that plainly would not qualify: the embassies of Italy (worth $52.5 million at 690 Park Avenue), Indonesia ($57.7 million at 5 East 68th Street), and the UAE ($51.6 million at 39 East 74th Street). Reporters found DOF Commissioner Richard Lee's own Flushing home and a Park Slope rowhouse owned by former Mayor Bill de Blasio in the file, alongside Griffin, Joe Tsai, Anna Wintour, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and Spike Lee — none of which means they owe the tax, since the file was never filtered by residency.

Once the thresholds are applied, the numbers outside Manhattan and Brooklyn drop fast. Fortune's count found only 77 qualifying properties in the Bronx and 23 on Staten Island, out of roughly 24,300 citywide. One widely cited figure put the "real" list at 31,000, but an independent analysis by newsletter writer Tom Flaschen found that requires counting roughly 7,200 entire co-op buildings valued over $1 million as single taxable properties — wrong, since co-ops are taxed apartment by apartment. Corrected, the number lands close to 24,300.

A scandal of undervaluation, not overreach

Some of the loudest complaints centered on high-value properties held inside LLCs and trusts, as though the roll had cracked open a hidden vault. Owners have paid property taxes on these units for years, so the DOF has always known what they own. New York's 2019 LLC Transparency Act requires LLCs holding residential real estate to disclose their beneficial owners on any transfer after September 2019.

Of the roughly 24,300 properties that actually clear the tax's thresholds, about 9,458 — 39% — are held through entities. The remaining 61% sit in an identifiable person's name: a majority-named list, hiding in plain sight.

Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul first floated the tax in April at a flat $5 million threshold. The version the state legislature passed on May 27, 2026, signed by Hochul the next day, is more granular: 0.8%–1.3% on one- to three-family homes over $5 million, and 4%–6.5% on condos and co-ops over $1 million — 4% from $1 million to $3 million, 5.25% from $3 million to $5 million, and 6.5% above that. Estimates on scope ranged from Hochul's 13,000 units to Comptroller Mark Levine's roughly 11,000, including 515 co-ops. Projected revenue: about $500 million a year.

Take Griffin as the test case. His current tax bill on the Central Park South penthouse is $858,332 for 2026-2027; under the surcharge it rises to roughly $1.87 million — more than double, but on a $238 million apartment.

The bigger scandal is the DOF's assessment system, which does the wealthy more favors than the outrage cycle credits. City assessments on luxury properties can run at 10% or less of true market value. That is how Griffin's $238 million penthouse sits on the books at $15.5 million. "They have assessed this value on properties at much lower value, but the rate is much higher," said Denisse Moderski, a state and local tax partner at PKF O'Connor Davies. "You have to look at it from both angles: what value are they using, but then a higher rate—does this offset?"

She expects the city to close the gap eventually: "I can't imagine that the city would not come out with some adjustment to catch up on that." That undervaluation problem predates this tax by years, and it means the surcharge will keep raising less than the rates alone suggest.

A botched rollout

The city added 13 new DOF positions and 11 at the Office of Administrative Tax Appeals to handle the expected barrage of letters — partially a product of a botched rollout. In late July, the DOF began mailing notification letters to roughly 17,000 owners it believes may be subject to the surcharge, a small fraction of the 959,710 properties on the published list, but enough to catch full-time New Yorkers by surprise.

City Council Member Gale Brewer said the Upper West Side home she has lived in since 1994 was flagged: "I'm still confused." At a Wednesday press conference, Mamdani and Lee defended the process. "The tax property roll that was posted last week is a reflection of all properties across New York City, not a reflection of those, specifically, that the pied-à-terre tax will be levied upon," Mamdani said.

Lee directed his comments at the backlash. "The misconception that it is a targeted specific list of those impacted by the non-primary resident surcharge is false." Lee added that some longtime owners are getting letters because properties sit in trusts or LLCs, or records are outdated, and said DOF is proactively reaching out to co-op owners. A DOF spokesperson said the 17,000 figure could shrink as more owners verify residency.

For a self-described socialist, Mamdani's tax policy is anything but — and it pales next to the man who ran to his right twice and lost twice. In 2021, then-Governor Andrew Cuomo raised the state income tax rate nearly a full point on households earning over $2 million, pushing the top rate to 10.9%, a major reason the state now holds close to $15 billion in cash reserves. Cuomo also expanded New York's mansion tax in 2019, turning a flat 1% transfer tax into a progressive structure up to 3.9% on sales above $25 million, estimated to pull in roughly $400 million a year. Notably, Cuomo only hiked the mansion tax after dropping his initial plan: a pied-à-terre levy. A surcharge raising about $500 million from roughly 24,300 properties is arguably the least novel tax increase on the wealthy New York has passed in five years.

Late to a tested category

New York isn't inventing a new tax category; it's late to one other cities have tested. Vancouver has run a vacancy tax since 2016 — now a 3% municipal Empty Homes Tax atop a provincial tax as high as 3% for foreign owners, a combined bill that can hit $75,000 on a $1.5 million vacant unit. Toronto's Vacant Home Tax, launched in 2022, is now 3% of assessed value. Singapore charges foreign buyers a flat 60% stamp duty at purchase. Hawaii County adopted a surcharge this year on non-owner-occupied homes over $4 million, expected to raise about $94 million.

San Francisco is the cautionary tale, and the reasons it failed don't apply. California's Proposition 13 caps the statewide property tax rate at 1% of assessed value, so when voters passed Proposition M in 2022, the city built a flat per-unit fee instead: $2,500–$20,000, escalating the longer a unit in a 3+ unit building sat vacant past 182 days. A San Francisco Superior Court judge struck it down in October 2024 as an unlawful taking under the Fifth Amendment, a violation of California's Ellis Act, and a due process and privacy violation.

New York's tax doesn't punish a choice — it doesn't ask whether an owner rented a unit out or left it empty. It asks a passive question: is this your primary residence. That status-based surcharge, layered onto the existing property tax system, is exactly the design Prop 13 forced San Francisco to abandon.