New York City mayor claims exodus of rich residents actually just imagined

Democrat and socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Wednesday the city is not actually experiencing a much-reported exodus of wealthy residents over high taxes.

A surge of affluent New Yorkers leaving the city and moving to places with lower taxes such as Florida was a major story in the run-up to the 2025 mayoral election. Mamdani repeatedly called for massive tax increases to pay for a slew of social welfare programs and reports of the exodus exploded as his win looked increasingly likely. But when speaking at his Tax Day event on Wednesday, Mamdani denied there has been any such exodus, calling it imaginary and arguing that the opposite was true.

“So for all of the discussion of the imagined exodus that would take place were we to tax the wealthiest New Yorkers by the appropriate amount — I say imagined because before I was a mayor I was a state legislator and I was part of an effort to increase taxes on millionaires at that time — we were told the same thing then — and what we find now is that we have more millionaires today than we did at that time even after having passed that tax,” Mamdani said.

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“And so for all of that conversation about this imagined exodus, we have to reckon with the very real exodus that we are seeing in the city, an exodus of working class people, an exodus of those who cannot afford to live here,” Mamdani continued.

Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul pleaded on March 11 for wealthy Americans to return from Florida to help fund the state’s “generous social programs,” noting that a significant portion of the state’s tax base had moved to Palm Beach.

“For many who work here who now find their residence in Jersey City or in Connecticut or in Pennsylvania, anywhere else where their dollar can go a little bit further,” Mamdani said. “And we’ve seen just in a snapshot from 2000 to 2020, the city lost 200,000 of its black residents.”

Following Mamdani’s primary win in June 2025, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis quipped his left-wing agenda could lead to migration from the Big Apple, causing Florida’s real estate market to “skyrocket.”

“If this socialist mayor candidate wins – you’re gonna see real estate value skyrocket even more in Palm Beach, because people are gonna get out of that city,” DeSantis said. “As bad as DeBlasio was, this guy is like going to be way, way, worse.”

There has been an exodus of citizens from blue states like California and New York to Florida, which has no state income tax and has a budget roughly the size of New York City’s. An April 2023 Siena College poll showed 27% of New York residents were planning to leave the state in the next five years, with 31% saying they would leave when they retired.

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