New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has repeatedly called for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, strengthened the city’s sanctuary policies to resist cooperation with federal deportation efforts, and whose proudest moment as a state lawmaker was the creation of a fund for undocumented immigrants to receive unemployment benefits they would have been denied at the federal level.
Given his fondness for the undocumented, it’s interesting to watch Mamdani this week as he is focused on identifying who is, and who isn’t, a New Yorker, so he can implement his policies of taxing and subsidizing appropriately.
The first instance for Mamdani’s use of ID relates to the government groceries Your Survival Guy already profiled. Mamdani and his interim head of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, Jeanny Pak, suggested at a press conference that shoppers would be required to be New Yorkers. She called it a “library-card-esque” system, in other words, an ID proving residency.
Mamdani is requiring ID to shop at his communist grocery store so non-citizens of NYC can’t buy the discounted food.
So why are he and the entire Democrat party opposed to requiring ID so non-citizens can’t vote? pic.twitter.com/8WkPoBK3UQ
— House Republicans (@HouseGOP) August 3, 2026
Another effort by Mayor Mamdani that you’ve read about here on YourSurvivalGuy.com is his pied-à-terre tax. The tax is supposed to target out-of-town residents who own homes in the city. To avoid the tax, you must prove you’re a resident. That’s leading to some interesting findings, as many in-town residents have registered their vehicles outside the city to avoid crushing insurance rates. Catherina Gionio reports in Fortune:
But Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax—a surcharge for anyone who owns a second home in New York valued at over a certain limit—is effectively acting as an extra tax auditor. The question is simple: are you a New York City resident? Then present your driver’s license or income taxes. Did you happen to file out of state though you lay your head in the five boroughs? Technically, that makes you a non-resident—and someone defrauding the city, per the Department of Finance (DOF).
The DOF has quietly audited residency status for years through the STAR exemption and the Senior Citizen Homeowners’ Exemption, both of which require a property to be the owner’s actual primary residence, and both of which have turned up real fraud when checked. One Comptroller’s audit alone found the DOF had improperly granted the senior exemption to properties whose owners had died and to corporations that were never eligible, a loss of at least $59.2 million over five years. The pied-à-terre tax flips that same question around: instead of catching people wrongly claiming a primary-residence break, it catches properties wrongly claimed as non-primary, to avoid the surcharge.
What we’re describing here is rate evasion, or “garage fraud,” a recognized form of insurance fraud nationally, not just a New York quirk. Insurers price premiums based on a car’s garaging ZIP code, since accident and theft risk vary sharply by density, creating a built-in incentive to register a car at a cheaper address than where it’s actually kept. A 2011 New York State Independent Democratic Conference paper on the practice found it goes well beyond individual drivers fudging an address: it documented organized rings registering dozens of vehicles at a single out-of-state address, then buying and reselling cheap out-of-state policies in bulk.
There’s bad news in the combination of these two situations. In the first, if you’re poor, you want to be a resident of New York because you may benefit from the city’s subsidies. If you’re wealthy, you’re punished for not being from New York with additional taxation, or you’re punished for being from New York with higher insurance rates.
Action Line: It’s too much for many New Yorkers, and for many residents of the big blue blob cities around the country that treat their wealthiest the same way. Many have begun looking for alternatives. If you’re looking for a better America, begin your search here with Your Survival Guy’s 2026 Super States, and click here to subscribe to my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter.
