Mamdani Wants To Tax the Empty Properties of New York City’s Wealthy — but What About His Vacant Land in Uganda?

Mayor Mamdani did not hide his jubilance when Governor Kathy Hochul reversed course this week and threw her weight behind a new annual surcharge on New York City second homes worth $5 million or more.“Thanks to the support of Governor Hochul, we are one step closer to balancing our budget by taxing the ultra-wealthy and global elites with a pied-à-terre tax, the first of its kind in our state,” the mayor declared.The wealthy who park money in empty luxury apartments while working New Yorkers scramble for housing, his argument goes, should finally pay their share.But critics stress Mr. Mamdani might consider applying his logic closer to home or, more precisely, closer to the River Nile. According to his own financial disclosure filings, Mr. Mamdani owns four acres of vacant, unimproved land in Jinja, Uganda, valued between $150,000 and $250,000.The property sits idle. He does not live on it and has not developed it: the filings describe it only as vacant and unimproved.Socialist Mamdani’s wealthy family owns an expansive, breathtaking compound in Kampala, Uganda. Frank Mukasa Kisso/The New York SunIn a country where the average annual income hovers below $1,000, that makes New York’s new mayor a significant landowner by local measure: the very archetype of the absent, globe-trotting property holder he now proposes to tax in New York.Political strategist John Thomas tells the New York Sun the optics are damaging.“This is a classic example of rules for thee, but not for me,” Mr. Thomas says. “He is attempting to score cheap political points while further driving the wealthy out of New York City and reminding the rest of the world why they should not invest or start businesses in the city.”A family compound and a policy blind spotThere is more. Mr. Mamdani’s parents, Columbia University scholar Mahmood Mamdani and filmmaker Mira Nair, own a five-bedroom villa overlooking Lake Victoria in Kampala, in one of Uganda’s most exclusive enclaves.For the past eight years, the compound has been listed on Airbnb, the platform their son has publicly opposed, renting to wealthy visitors at rates far beyond the reach of ordinary Ugandans. Neighbors include Uganda’s vice president, Muhoozi Kainerugwa and President Yoweri Museveni’s son, who is the commander of the country’s armed forces.The Sun’s correspondent visited the property last year and found armed guards at the gate, a private lap pool, tennis and badminton courts, and manicured gardens tumbling toward the lake — precisely the kind of absent, underutilized holding the mayor now wants to tax.His financial disclosures also contain a telling inconsistency: the Jinja property is listed as acquired in 2012 in his 2023 state filing, and in 2016 in his 2024 mayoral candidate filing. Both describe the property as vacant and unimproved. Either way, it has been sitting idle for years.In other words, the rules designed to prevent politicians from profiting off their own policies are, in practice, written by the very people they are meant to constrain.From Mr. Mamdani’s perspective, however, the tax is a matter of basic fairness and urgent fiscal necessity. New York City faces a $5.4 billion budget shortfall, and Mr. Mamdani has argued that working New Yorkers should not be left to shoulder that burden. At the same time, oligarchs and foreign billionaires park their wealth in empty luxury apartments, paying relatively little in return for the city’s schools, subways, and public safety infrastructure.Earlier this year, he warned Albany that without new taxes on the wealthy, the city would be forced to raise property taxes by 9.5 percent — a threat that galvanized both allies and opponents. The pied-à-terre tax, backed by polling cited by his office showing 93 percent of New Yorkers support it, is designed to extract at least $500 million annually from roughly 13,000 ultra-luxury properties whose owners neither live in the city nor pay city income tax, while leaving everyday residents untouched.The $500 million questionTo be clear, none of this is illegal. The proposed tax applies only to New York City properties, and Mr. Mamdani’s Uganda land falls well below the $5 million threshold regardless. Critics are not accusing him of breaking any rules: they are simply asking whether the moral standard he applies to wealthy property owners ought to apply to him as well.Ms. Hochul has said that approximately 13,000 apartments of the ultra-wealthy could be subject to the surcharge, among them the penthouse at 220 Central Park South, purchased by Citadel hedge fund founder Ken Griffin for a record-breaking $238 million.The Real Estate Board of New York and industry figures have pushed back hard, warning of lost construction jobs, lower property values, and investment drying up across the city.Whether the revenue projections hold up is another matter entirely. global risk analyst Dennis Santiago told the Sun the $500 million figure is overly optimistic.“Rich people are smart money,” he noted. “They will find ways to create ‘leakage’ in these revenue stream projections. Qualifying property leakage may already be as high as 40 percent of predicted qualifying properties, even before legislation is passed, and it won’t take long for imaginative wealth management support to identify ways to turn that into 95 percent disqualification rates.”Against a deficit of $5 to $6 billion, Mr. Santiago argued, however, that the tax risks burning significant political capital for a fraction of what the city actually needs.Mr. Thomas was equally skeptical.“You don’t solve a housing shortage by chasing away the people who build and invest in housing,” he observes. “New York City has a spending problem, not a revenue problem. This tax does nothing to address the budget shortfall. First you tax the ultra-rich, then you tax the next rung down and keep going until everyone pays their so-called ‘fair share’ of tax increases.”Mr. Mamdani has built his political identity on the idea that housing is a right, not an investment vehicle. In a resurfaced video that ignited widespread controversy, he said that if any system could guarantee everyone housing: “whether you call it the abolition of private property or you call it a statewide housing guarantee, it is preferable to what is going on right now.”For years, he projected an everyman image from a rent-stabilized Astoria apartment, before moving into Gracie Mansion upon taking office. Yet his financial disclosures describe a man who holds a vacant foreign land parcel, whose family operates a luxury Airbnb on a guarded lakefront compound, and who grew up attending Bank Street School for Children, one of Manhattan’s most exclusive private schools, where current tuition now exceeds $71,000 a year — more than Harvard.The proposal still requires approval by the state legislature and further negotiation with city officials before it becomes law. As that debate plays out in Albany, a simpler question lingers over the four untouched acres in Jinja: what principle, exactly, distinguishes that holding from the ones the mayor is so eager to tax?“Geography doesn’t change the principle,” Mr. Thomas adds. “It just exposes the double standard of taxing New Yorkers’ second homes while keeping your own foreign assets untouched.”

Mamdani Wants To Tax the Empty Properties of New York City’s Wealthy — but What About His Vacant Land in Uganda?

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