With a left-wing politician in New York likely to be the Democratic candidate for the town hall for the largest city in the United States, commercial interests are based on the prospects of its fiscal and rich platform aimed at improving basic services.
Zohran MamdaniA member of the Queens’ 33 -year -old assembly took a dominant advance in the city’s primary democratic primary, after having carried out an unreary campaign focused on the cost of living and suggested grocery products managed by the city and free buses and childcare services. For 1% of the city and its Elite Business, it is a fire with five alarms.
“The reaction of the business world to the victory of a member of the Democratic socialists is a combination of surprise and deep concern,” said Kathryn Wylde, CEO of the partnership for New York Fortune By e-mail. Because very few have met him, “their opinions are defined by his campaign rhetoric and negative advertisements against him,” she said.
Millionaire manager of the cast iron of hedges Bill Ackman Offered to finance someone, whoever, who would run against Mamdani, implying that his mayor would stimulate a flight with The Ultrarich. “If a hundred highest taxpayers in my industry have chosen to spend 183 days elsewhere, it could reduce the state and NY city tax revenue by about 5 to 10 billion dollars or more, and it’s just my industry. Think that Ken Griffin leaves Chicago for Miami on steroids,” he posted on X THURSDAY.
John Castimatidis, the owner of the GristeDedes grocery channel, floated by moving his business offices in New Jersey for Mamdani’s term of mandate, while financial analyst Jim Bianco accused New York to “choose to commit suicide by the mayor”. Governor Kathy Hochul, who positioned himself as a moderate pro-business, pre-empted the idea of tax increases, which the state would need to approve, adage“I don’t want to lose people anymore in Palm Beach.”
Talking is easy, moving is difficult
Is New York City at risk of a billionaire exodus? History suggests no.
This is not the first time that the mouths of Wall Street and owners of dissatisfied companies threatened to go up and leave during the elected progressive mayor. In 2013, Bill de Blasio won the town hall on a tax platform, frightening New Yorkers with high income, but of Blasio encounter Manhattan industry leaders, such as the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein and Rupert Murdoch, to win the elites. The magnates remained, as are the inhabitants of Wall Street. De Blasio, meanwhile, has implemented a universal pre-K program that has proven be an economic game changer and helped reduce income inequality.
However, the last years have seen high level examples of billionaires leaving the North States for Florida or Texas, including the founder of Citadel, Ken Griffin, who has moved from Chicago to Florida in 2022And the billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who left New York for the state of Sunshine in 2019. But for Icahn, who was 83 years old at the time, this decision was “more in lifestyle than on taxes”, Reuters reported.
The reality is that for individuals as well as for companies, the choice of a place to move involves many factors, including what the location has to offer and what it costs.
“What makes New York attractive is that we have an excellent labor market in terms of big human capital; companies want to be here, and their employees like to be in New York,” said Ana Chamney, Vice-President of Research at the Citizens Budget Commission Fortune.
Champeny added that high taxes play in the equation, just like other factors. By counting the taxes of states and premises, New York collects an average of $ 12,751 per capita, or more than $ 10,346 in California. “We are well above average, and we are significantly higher than high tax states,” she said. “There is always a risk that people choose to move and that companies choose to move, but increase our taxes would increase this risk.”
Return to ’80s?
Although not all companies can physically take back and leave physical mill In the main campaign of his rival Andrew Cuomo.
Kenny Burgos, CEO of the New York Housing Association, which represents the owners, argued that new restrictions on rents would affect the capacity of the owners to pay the repairs, which makes 40% of the properties of the city and finally causing owners of properties to “go away”.
“You will have vacant and deteriorated buildings, abandoned buildings, just as the Bronx had done in the 1970s and 80s,” he said Fortune. “”You cannot recover them and go elsewhere with them, so we are forced to deal with a potential administration that threatens the very viability of these buildings. »»
Indeed, the abandonment of mass by owners of properties during these decades forced the city and its tenants to take up a large part of the stock of housing, leading to the creation of hundreds of thousands of low -cost apartments. For the prospect, the current mayor of New York struggled to obtain the approval of a program To build 80,000 new units over 15 years.
The partnership for the CEO of New York, Kathryn Wylde, encourages members to focus on the facts, noting that a large part of the agenda of Mamdani cannot be accomplished by a mayor, but are the province of the Governor and the State legislature. The members of the partnership plan to meet the candidate, to whom he is “very open”, she added.
The progressive economist Paul Krugman is one of the many people who think that the possibility of a loop of misfortune fueled by crime accelerating the deterioration of New York is overestimated. Compared to the 1980s, “New York, is one of the safest places in America, and probably as safe as ever,” he said on substitudes, recalling his own childhood growing up in the suburbs of the city when Times Square was full of sex shops and Columbia University deployed private security to protect the houses of teachers.
“New York’s problem is now not a crawling crime or scary immigrants. This is affordability “,” He wrote. “And although we can and must debate the likely success of Mamdani’s proposals, affordability was its main objective.”