New York keeps losing residents and money to the Sun Belt, and now more wealthy residents are threatening to pack up if a Democratic Socialist, Zohran Mamdani, is elected mayor later this year.

A billionaire grocery magnate, John Catsimatidis, said he may sell or close his Gristedes grocery chain if Mr. Mamdani wins in November, which the 33-year-old state assemblyman is heavily favored to do. Real estate executives who spoke with The New York Sun say they are “in panic” over Mr. Mamdani’s socialist agenda, his promises to “tax the rich” and freeze rents on stabilized apartments, and his “defund the police” rhetoric that he’s now trying to walk back.

Others say New York is the center of culture and finance and all this talk of leaving is just that — talk. Yet a new analysis released Monday from economist Steven Moore’s Unleash Prosperity shows that an Empire State exodus to states like Florida, Texas, and Tennessee is already under way and that taxes likely have a lot to do with it.  

New York lost 1.7 million people and $111 billion in gross income from residents fleeing to other states in the 10-year period ending in 2022, according to the analysis. New York lost more money than any other state, and only California lost more people to domestic migration. The other states to round out the list of top losers were also high-tax, blue states such as New Jersey, Illinois, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.

The Covid pandemic accelerated inter-state migration nationwide, with low-tax — and most often warmer — states with open schools seeing the most gains. Florida, Texas, Arizona, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Nevada were the biggest winners in attracting wealth and people. 

More than 118,000 New Yorkers moved to Florida in 2020 to 2022, bringing with them $15.8 billion in aggregated gross income. If you add New Jersey and Connecticut to the mix, Florida gained another $11 billion in income from Yankees fleeing south.

“I don’t want to lose any more people to Palm Beach,” Governor Hochul said last month when asked about Mr. Mamdani’s proposal to “tax the rich” to pay for city-owned grocery stores and free childcare and buses.

Goldman Sachs doubled the size of its Miami office in 2022 and relocated at least 100 traders there. The top 1 percent of New York City tax filers account for at least 40 percent of the city’s personal income tax revenue. 

“The ability for NYC to offer services for the poor and needy, let alone the average New Yorker, is entirely dependent on NYC being a business-friendly environment and a place where wealthy residents are willing to spend 183 days and assume the associated tax burden. Unfortunately, both have already started making arrangements for the exits,” a billionaire hedge funder, Bill Ackman, posted to X.

One real estate executive told the Sun bankers can leave or move large numbers of their employees out of state, but those who work in real estate are not so lucky, particularly as Mr. Mamdani would only need city council approval to alter real estate tax rates. He would need the governor to sign off on an income tax increase. 

“They’ll take their business away. Why should they stay?” a Democratic strategist, Hank Sheinkopf, tells the Sun about New York’s wealthy. “It’s not like previous years, because you don’t need office space. You can do work from any place in the world with a computer terminal and Zoom.”

New York City lost population in the 1970s during its fiscal and crime crises. Mr. Sheinkopf says that if crime and taxes go up substantially under a Mayor Mamdani, he expects a similar flight to the suburbs and other states. The only reason the Empire State didn’t lose overall population last year was because of the influx of migrants.