New York's Property Roll Is Older Than the Income Tax
Every January, New York City's Department of Finance does the same thing it has done for nearly 200 years: it values every property in the five boroughs and publishes the result. The legal requirement traces to 1830, when New York made recording property ownership mandatory statewide. For nearly two centuries, any resident could look up a neighbor's assessed value in the same public files.
On July 24, the DOF posted two supplemental rolls to its property assessments page — one for Tax Class 1 (684,619 properties) and one for Tax Class 2 (275,091 properties), totaling 959,710 entries, a subset of the city's full 1,048,576-row assessment roll. The city was legally required to publish the files by July 25 ahead of the pied-à-terre tax's implementation. The DOF took two columns it already tracked separately — assessed value and non-primary-residence status — and combined them in a single spreadsheet.
The 'Doxxing' Claim Doesn't Survive Scrutiny
Citadel founder Ken Griffin said he felt 'doxxed' and called Mayor Zohran Mamdani's April video, filmed outside Griffin's $238 million Central Park South penthouse, a 'dangerous' stunt. Yet Griffin's purchase price, city valuation, and ownership have sat in the same public files for years, according to Fortune's reporting. Nothing in the file was secret.
The unfiltered roll also caught properties that plainly would not qualify for the tax: the embassies of Italy (valued at $52.5 million at 690 Park Avenue), Indonesia ($57.7 million at 5 East 68th Street), and the UAE ($51.6 million at 39 East 74th Street), along with large LLC-held trophy properties. DOF Commissioner Richard Lee's own Flushing home and a Park Slope rowhouse owned by former Mayor Bill de Blasio appeared in the same unfiltered file alongside Griffin, Joe Tsai, Anna Wintour, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and Spike Lee — none of which means any of them owe the tax, since the file was never filtered by residency.
The Real Number Is Closer to 24,300
One widely cited figure put the 'real' list at 31,000 taxable properties. According to an independent analysis by newsletter writer Tom Flaschen cited in Fortune's reporting, that figure requires counting roughly 7,200 entire co-op buildings valued over $1 million as single taxable units — but co-ops are taxed apartment by apartment. Corrected, the number lands near 24,300 citywide. Of those, only 77 qualifying properties are in the Bronx and 23 on Staten Island.
Of the roughly 24,300 properties that clear the tax's actual thresholds, about 9,458 — or 39% — are held through LLCs or trusts. The remaining 61% sit in an identifiable person's name. New York's 2019 LLC Transparency Act already requires LLCs holding residential real estate to disclose beneficial owners on any transfer after September 2019, so the DOF has long known what these entities own.
The only genuinely new data in the release: imputed valuations for roughly 36,700 individual co-op units, almost all in Manhattan, which the DOF had never published before because co-ops are normally assessed at the building level.
What the Uproar Actually Reveals
The numbers come first, and here they are unambiguous: this is a routine administrative publication dressed up as a political event. The real story is not a socialist doxxing operation — it is a tax whose design, scope, and enforcement mechanism deserve hard scrutiny on the merits.
Free-enterprise readers should ask the right questions: Does taxing a second home at a higher rate distort the capital that flows into New York's property market? Does it push high-net-worth owners — and the spending, philanthropy, and investment they bring — toward friendlier jurisdictions? Those are legitimate debates. But they are not advanced by treating a 200-year-old public record as a weapon. Capital rewards clear rules, and right now New York is offering neither clarity nor stability — only noise.
