Business leaders are threatening to leave New York City amid the unlikely ascension of Zohran Mamdani. This scenario has played out before—here’s what happened
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By backing a platform of economic redistribution, New Yorkers are committing "suicide by Mayor," one finance analyst said.
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real estate
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June 27, 2025
03:54 PM
Fortune
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·New York leaders are threatening to leave New York City amid the unly ascension of Zohran Mamdani
This scenario has played out before—here’s what happenedBY Irina IvanovaBY Nino PaoliBY Irina IvanovaDeputy US News EditorIrina IvanovaDeputy US News EditorIrina Ivanova is the deputy U
News editor at Fortune
SEE FULL BIOBY Nino PaoliNews FellowNino PaoliNews FellowNino Paoli is a Dow Jones News Fund fellow at Fortune on the News desk
SEE FULL BIOZohran Mamdani speaks during his victory party in the Queens borough of New York City early Wednesday, June 25, 2025, after chief rival Andrew Cuomo conceded
Barry Williams/New York Daily News/Tribune News Service via Getty ImagesNew York’s richest are balking at the mayoral frontrunner’s tax-the-rich posal to make the city more affordable for working people
It’s a meltdown as old as time—but picking up and leaving isn’t as easy as it sounds
With a leftist New York City politician appearing ly to be the Democratic mayoral candidate for the U. ’ largest city, interests are melting down over the spects of his tax-the-rich platform aimed at imving basic services
Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old assemblymember from Queens, took a commanding lead in the city’s Democratic primary Tuesday after running a campaign relentlessly focused on the cost of living and suggesting city-run groceries and free buses and childcare
For the city’s 1% and its elite, it’s a five-alarm fire. “The reaction of the community to the victory of a member of the Democratic Socialists is a combination of surprise and deep concern,” Kathryn Wylde, CEO of the Partnership for New York City, told Fortune via
Because very few have met him, “their views are defined by his campaign rhetoric and the negative ads cast against him,” she said
Billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman offered to bankroll someone, anyone, who would run against Mamdani, implying his mayoralty would spur a flight with the ultrarich. “If 100 or so of the highest taxpayers in my industry chose to spend 183 days elsewhere, it could reduce NY state and city tax revenues by ~$5-10 billion or more, and that’s just my industry
Think Ken Griffin leaving Chicago for Miami on steroids,” he posted on X Thursday
John Castimatidis, the owner of the grocery chain Gristedes, floated moving his corporate offices to New Jersey for the duration of Mamdani’s term, while financial analyst Jim Bianco accused New York of “electing to commit suicide by Mayor. ” Governor Kathy Hochul, who has positioned herself as a - moderate, preemptively nixed the idea of tax hikes, which the state would need to apve, saying, “I don’t want to lose any more people to Palm Beach. ” Talk is easy, moving is hard Is New York City at risk of a billionaire exodus
This isn’t the first time Wall Street mouthpieces and disgruntled owners threatened to up and leave over a gressive mayor-elect
In 2013, Bill de Blasio won the mayoralty on a tax-the-rich platform, spooking high-income New Yorkers, but De Blasio met with Manhattan industry leaders, former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and Rupert Murdoch, to win over the elites
The tycoons stayed, and so did Wall Street’s inhabitants
De Blasio, meanwhile, implemented a universal pre-K gram that has ved to be an economic game changer and helped reduce income inequality
Still, recent years have seen high-file examples of billionaires leaving northern states for Florida or Texas, including Citadel founder Ken Griffin, who moved from Chicago to Florida in 2022, and billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who left New York for the Sunshine State in 2019
But for Icahn, who was 83 at the time, the move was “more lifestyle than taxes,” Reuters reported
The reality is, for individuals as well as for es, choosing a place to relocate involves many factors, including what the location has to offer, and what it costs. “What makes New York attractive is we have an excellent labor market in terms of having great human capital; companies want to be here, and their employees to be in New York City,” Ana Champeny, vice president for re at the Citizens Budget Commission, told Fortune
Champeny added that high taxes play into the equation, as do other factors
Counting state and local taxes, New York City collects an average of $12,751 per capita, more than California’s $10,346. “We are well above the average, and we are significantly higher than high-tax states,” she said. “There’s always a risk that people are going to choose to relocate and es will choose to relocate, but increasing our taxes further would increase that risk. ” Back to the ’80s
While not all es can physically pick up and leave, New York’s real estate sector fears the money will do exactly that if Mamdani pulls through on his mise to freeze rents—a factor that led the landlord lobby to pour millions into rival Andrew Cuomo’s primary campaign
Kenny Burgos, CEO of the New York Housing Association, which represents landlords, argued further restrictions on rents would affect landlords’ ability to pay for repairs, making 40% of the city’s perties unaffordable and ultimately causing perty owners to “walk away. ” “You will have vacant, deteriorated buildings, abandoned buildings, much the Bronx had in the ’70s and ’80s,” he told Fortune. “You can’t pick them up and go anywhere else with them, so we are forced to contend with a potential administration who is threatening the very viability of these buildings. ” Indeed, landlords’ mass abandonment of perties during those decades forced the city and its tenants to take over much of the housing stock, leading to the creation of hundreds of thousands of low-cost apartments
For perspective, New York’s current mayor struggled to get apval for a gram to build 80,000 new units over 15 years
Partnership for New York City CEO Kathryn Wylde, for her part, is encouraging members to focus on the facts, noting that “much of Mamdani’s agenda cannot be accomplished by a mayor, but are the vince of the Governor and state legislature
A mayor cannot, for example, raise corporate or income taxes,” she said
Partnership members plan to meet with the candidate, to which he is “very open,” she added. gressive economist Paul Krugman is one of many who thinks the possibility of a crime-fueled doom loop accelerating New York’s deterioration is overstated
Compared to the crime-ridden 1980s, “New York is one of the safest places in America, and bably as safe as it has ever been,” he said on Substack, recalling his own childhood growing up in the city’s suburbs when Times Square was full of sex shops and Columbia University deployed private security to tect faculty s. “New York’s blem now isn’t rampant crime or scary immigrants
It’s affordability,” he wrote. “And while we can and should debate the ly success of Mamdani’s posals, affordability has been his main focus. ” Introducing the 2025 Fortune 500, the definitive ranking of the biggest companies in America
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