Even some Democrats are saying this crossed a line.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a new pied-à-terre tax on second homes last week, and he didn’t stop there. His administration published a searchable online database containing the names and addresses of every property owner potentially subject to the surcharge. Over 960,000 entries. Names. Home addresses. Posted publicly on the internet, by a mayor who spent his entire campaign portraying wealthy homeowners as enemies of working people.
Democratic strategist Dan Turrentine went on The Huddle podcast and said what a lot of people were thinking. “It’s stunning,” he said.
Turrentine laid out a comparison that cuts right to the heart of it. “What if a mayor put out all the people on food benefits, public housing, SNAP and said, ‘gosh, these are the people who make me pay high tax rates because there are so many people on the public dole?’ How outrageous is this? People would be horrified.”
He’s right. The same political movement that would be outraged by a searchable database of welfare recipients apparently needed a Democratic strategist to explain why publishing the personal addresses of nearly a million people is a problem.
As originally reported, Glenn Beck put it in starker terms: “He just doxxed the very people he has been villainizing throughout his entire term. You can’t claim innocence when you create a target list.”
That framing is hard to dismiss. Mamdani filmed campaign ads in front of Ken Griffin’s home. He built his political brand around class resentment, calling wealthy second-home owners parasites and mobilizing activists around that message. Then he handed those same activists a searchable list of names and addresses.
Turrentine spelled out the real-world risk in plain language. “Do I think that if someone’s wife is walking, not that they’re all men, but a spouse with the kids are walking out and someone has their photographs and screams, your husband or wife is an SOB and you’re rich, get outta here. Yeah, in a city of 8.5 million people, I think crazy folks could hear that. It’s so irresponsible.”
There’s also a basic accuracy problem with the list. City Council Minority Leader David Carr flagged it immediately. The database likely includes thousands of properties that don’t actually qualify as second homes, or whose owners will successfully dispute the designation. So the administration didn’t just publish the personal addresses of nearly a million people. It may have published many of those addresses incorrectly.
That means ordinary homeowners, people with no connection to luxury second properties, could find their names and addresses sitting in a public, searchable database tied to a tax they don’t even owe.
Mamdani has been in office for months. Government grocery stores. Rent freezes shaped by packed advisory boards. Threats to arrest a foreign head of state. And now a database of nearly a million homeowners published online for anyone to search.
This is what the campaign posters didn’t show.