RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Every January, New York City’s Department of Finance (DOF) does the same unglamorous thing it’s done for nearly 200 years: it puts a value on every property in the five boroughs and writes it down where the public can see it. The requirement traces back to 1830, when New York made recording property ownership mandatory statewide. In essence, for nearly 200 years, a nosy New Yorker could look up the value of their neighbor’s house, and that’s because New York has never treated property ownership as private: it’s a public record.
But that wasn’t the reaction to the publication of a supplemental roll by the DOF a “rich tax” dragnet, a doxxing operation, a “hit list.” Citadel’s Ken Griffin said he felt doxxed and called New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s April video, filmed outside his own $238 million Central Park South penthouse, a “dangerous” stunt—even though his purchase price, city valuation, and ownership have sat in the same public files for years. Nothing in the file was secret.
The DOF took two things it already tracks separately: assessed value, and which properties might not be a primary residence, and put them in one spreadsheet. Combining two already-public columns on an Excel file isn’t a breach. But the uproar does reveal a lot about the supposed socialist takeover of New York City.
What’s the hubbub about?
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 (275,091 properties), making a 959,710 combined, a subset of the city’s full 1,048,576-row assessment roll across Classes 1 through 4. The city was legally required to publish the files by July 25 ahead of the tax’s implementation. The only new thing to the public realm is the imputed valuations for roughly 36,700 individual co-op units, almost all in Manhattan, which is data the DOF has never published before, since co-ops are normally assessed at the building level. (Most of these co-ops don’t clear the thresholds for pied-à-terre tax and therefore are not included in Fortune’s analysis).
When this native New Yorker and avid ACRIS user (the city’s automated City Register that let’s you search property records) went through the new supplemental roll, it quickly became apparent why there was so much public outcry and confusion surrounding the tax.
For starters, neither file is filtered beyond building classification code. (Some coverage seized on that, pointing to modest homes on Chaffee Avenue in Throggs Neck and Challenger Drive on Staten Island as proof the list swept up working-class New Yorkers). The unfiltered file also caught properties that plainly wouldn’t qualify: the embassies of Italy (worth $52.5 million at 690 Park Avenue), Indonesia (worth $57.7 million at 5 East 68th Street), and the UAE (worth $51.6 million at 39 East 74th Street), plus large LLC-held trophy properties all wouldn’t be subject to the tax. Reporters found DOF Commissioner Richard Lee’s own Flushing home and a Park Slope rowhouse owned by former Mayor Bill de Blasio in the same unfiltered file, alongside Griffin, Joe Tsai, Anna Wintour, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and Spike Lee, but 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: our own count found only 77 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 per an independent analysis by newsletter writer Tom Flaschen , that requires counting roughly 7,200 entire co-op buildings valued over $1 million as single taxable properties and 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 sitting inside LLCs and trusts, as though the roll had cracked open a hidden vault . People use these structures for liability protection and estate planning: they’ve been paying property taxes on these units for years, so the DOF has always known what they own. (That’s because 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 on the supplemental list that actually clear the tax’s thresholds, about 9,458 (39%) are held through entities, and 61% sit in an identifiable person’s name, a majority-named list, hiding in plain sight. Scanning it for anyone actually famous is thin: a scattering of full-time New Yorkers holding property under their own name, plus a short roster of recognizable trusts, is the extent of the “hit list.”
Once the thresholds are applied, the numbers outside Manhattan and Brooklyn drop fast: our own count found only 77 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 per an independent analysis by newsletter writer Tom Flaschen , 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.
The tax itself: Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul first floated it in April at a flat $5 million threshold. The version that passed the state legislature 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, 4%–6.5% on condos/co-ops over $1 million (4% from $1M–$ 3M , 5.25% from $3M–$5M, 6.5% above). Estimates on scope ranged from Hochul’s 13,000 units to Comptroller Mark Levine’s roughly 1...
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