POLITICS: Mayor Mamdani must reform New York City’s property-tax system — it’s an avalanche of inequity

I’ve always found it morbidly fascinating there’s a scattering of deceased mountain climbers strewn out along the way up to Mount Everest’s summit.

Their frozen corpses, shrouded in bright overpriced all-weather gear, politely remind those coming after them that continuing to the peak may not be their wisest decision.

Granted I’m in no shape to climb Murray Hill, never mind Everest, but this does remind me of the body count of politicians lining the trail who’ve tried to reform New York City’s backward property-tax formula, which charges wealthy homeowners in posh ZIP codes a lower effective rate than those living in middle-class neighborhoods.

No doubt Mayor Mamdani also noticed none has yet summited that mountain after his deputy mayor committed to taking up the cause.

Look! There’s Bill de Blasio, frozen alongside his 2021 property-tax commission.

Watch your step over Eric Adams, whose flashy jacket wasn’t fire enough to get a reform bill through the Legislature.

And over there, it’s Brad Lander, Justin Brannan and even me, the former Republican leader, hitched in tandem along an awkward bipartisan rope, and yet still couldn’t avoid the deep slide into the crevasse of impotence.

Welcome to base camp, Zohran Mamdani. Godspeed. 

Bon voyage to him and his sherpa, Dean Fuleihan, long a load-bearer of political baggage and eerily familiar with the fickle weather on Mount Albany, where his knowledge of how those bodies got there will prove useful.

I genuinely wish them luck, as should all New Yorkers.

The property-tax formula has buried our city in an inequitable avalanche of injustice, in which wealthy property owners benefit from a regressive system that rewards them for living in trendy neighborhoods with transit access and successful schools and punishes the working class in the outer-borough banlieue, where they pay more for less.

This system has been passed down like a ghost story by generations of city and state politicians who can’t even recall the how, when or why it came about.

It simply exists, and I’d make good money betting members of the Legislature and council they couldn’t explain how the rates, formulas and calculations add up to your annual bill.

Go ahead, ask any one of them. I dare you!

The ideological problem for our new municipal government is the regressive system they’ve inherited stands in stark contrast to everything Marx, Engels, Bakunin and the rest of the socialist gang have long preached.

The wealthy benefit from the unfairness of this system, the proletariat gets the shaft, and the workers of the world must cough up.

And now these lefties are in charge. It is their system.

Yet in the history of socialist thought, these crises of economic imbalance set the conditions ripe for change.

There has been no shortage of criticism of Mamdani’s youth and inexperience, and he knows solving one of the city’s most complex Rubik’s Cubes of policy will go a long way in silencing the peanut gallery.

But the crisis and the mandate to make changes could come with a price.

The de Blasio Property Tax Reform Commission’s recommendations — supported by notable Mamdani allies like Lander and Brannan — had the goal of achieving a net-zero tax hike.

That means fairly assessed values and higher revenues from properties in wealthier neighborhoods were meant to be offset by lower rates for middle-class house and condo owners.

This was the goal, but it would require the socialists to actually lower taxes for many New Yorkers.

That might go over like a lead balloon with the same big-government leftists who hope to add new spending items in the midst of already raising revenues to resolve the existing $6 billion budget shortfall.

So the real question for Mamdani and his pledge to reform property taxes is this: Is the goal still to provide genuine relief to the middle-class, or has it morphed into a way to “tax the rich” while still taxing the middle class to pay for socialist programming?

The wrong answer to that could open every crevasse, trigger the landslides and bring the storm clouds that have swallowed up every politician who tried to reform the system through the Legislature.

All lawmakers will have their own agenda, specific to their constituency, and this will be the ultimate test of herding cats for a new mayor who himself hasn’t shepherded much legislation through the Albany swamp.

Still, we need him to succeed. There is a genuine bipartisan understanding that this system is inequitable and unsustainable.

Besides, does it actually help anyone to have one more failed politico, frozen in his skinny tie, added to the body count?

This could be the mayor’s first agenda item that nets him a few new supporters.

Joe Borelli is a managing director at Chartwell Strategy Group and was the Republican leader of the City Council.