City business leaders are scrambling to offer socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani a compromise to his planned tax on luxury second homes after one of the prime targets of his proposal — Ken Griffin of the Citadel investment empire — suggested he may reverse a major expansion in midtown, the Post has learned.
Steven Fulop, the newish head of the Partnership for New York City, has been lobbying both the mayor as well as the governor’s office about the potential jobs losses and reduction in tax revenues that would ensue if Griffin did indeed reverse course on Citadel’s planned redevelopment of its NYC headquarters.
That project is expected to create thousands of jobs and produce billions in tax revenue.
Fulop is making the arguments to city and state officials, he tells the Post, as he pushes for an “exemption” to the luxury home tax plan.
“If a person creates 100 jobs there should be an exemption,” Fulop said. “That plus the ancillary economic activity is how you help solve the affordability crisis that Mayor Mamdani ran on.”
Any compromise would be an uphill battle given the political forces he’s up against. It’s not just Mamdani who supports the so-called “pied-a-terre” tax, but also Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state legislature.
The city faces a $5.4 billion budget gap, and the mayor is refusing to cut his record $127 billion budget to fund his socialist agenda.
But Griffin’s recent salvo — a company memo released Thursday to his employees suggesting that the expansion might not happen — could be a game changer, Fulop said.
“People aren’t happy,” he told me. “And I’ve given names to the mayor’s office of other business people who have big concerns and said you should talk to them.”
Mamdani has made Griffin the poster child of his tax-the-rich scheme with a recent social media post where he stood outside the Citadel founder’s penthouse on 220 Central Park South and stated “When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich . . . Like for this penthouse, which hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin bought for $238 million.”
The stunt immediately drew a rebuke from business leaders and commentators. Many believed it was shameful to signal out an individual given the current toxic political culture, but Mamdani also ignored all the jobs Griffin is seeking to create in the city, the economic activity it generates, plus the hundreds of millions of dollars of Griffin’s philanthropy.
One issue that is overlooked is that while Griffin is a Florida resident, he pays plenty of money in property taxes; because he doesn’t live here, you can make the case that he produced far more wealth than he costs in city services.
Meanwhile, I am told that Citadel’s 2,500 employees in NYC, including non-residents, have paid billions in taxes to the city and state. Its new building on 350 Park would create 6,000 construction jobs and support creation of more than 15,000 permanent jobs, with a total spend of $6 billion.
Yes, Griffin may not be a city resident, but kudos to him for making as much as $650 million in charitable gifts to places like Memorial Sloan Kettering, Weill Cornell, the Whitney, Met, and MoMA.
Maybe next time Mayor Mamdani goes over to Griffin’s penthouse, he should thank him before he leaves with his money and business and we’re all worse off for it.
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