Earlier this week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, flanked by a multi-hued cast of New Yorkers (though with no whites visible), announced the results of NYC’s long-awaited “racial equity” audit that attempts to assess the allegedly dire plight of “people of color” across the five boroughs.

The report itself, running 375 pages, makes it clear that the state of racial disparities in NYC is rooted in “settler colonialism,” noting that “New York City’s history has been one of colonization, exploitation, and racial oppression.” The report asserts, for example, that the Lenape Native American tribe are the “rightful stewards” of New York.

It also has numerous calls to action, including mandating anti-racism training for government staff and a fresh look at “fine and fee based programs” for transportation to seek out “racial and ethnic disparities”—that is, doing even less to enforce against subway fare evaders, who are predominantly black and Hispanic and who disproportionately commit other crimes on the subway. It decries the “punitive policing policies” that further marginalized “Black and Latine communities”—the very policing measures that drove the city’s historic drop in crime under Giuliani and Bloomberg.

And it goes on in this vein for chapter after chapter. But you get the idea.

New York City is racist, and it’s your fault, whitey, so you must pay even more taxes.

But the funny thing is, if racial equity actually matters, it’s white New Yorkers who need it. Because in almost every respect, the New York City government has been exploiting its white citizens—without interruption—for decades. This explains in no small part why millions of them have fled the city since 1950, even as the NYC population has grown by around a million.

There are many ways that one could analyze the degree to which white New Yorkers have been used for decades as tax cattle to massively subsidize minority groups in New York. (Obviously, these are statistical averages—there are plenty of white New Yorkers who are tax eaters, and plenty of minorities of all stripes who are paying more than their fair share of taxes, but the general pattern holds.)

For example, let’s look at New York City’s public schools. The anonymous online data maven “Charlie Smirkley,” using census data and information from a variety of government agencies, calculates that Hispanic students receive an incredible 11.2 times the education dollars per tax dollar paid that white families do, black families 4.9 times, and Asian American families 3.8 times. Essentially, white New Yorkers are footing a substantial majority of the bill for a public school system for which their kids are only a small percentage of the students.

Is this racial equity, Mayor Mamdani?

Similarly, with respect to crime, a theoretical all-white New York City would see serious violence drop dramatically, while shootings would almost disappear. An April 2026 analysis found that just 1.5% of NYC shooters over the past two decades were white. And yet, again, white tax dollars pay a substantial majority of the police force, which is necessary at this scale because of the crime and disorder brought by many non-white residents.

Is this racial equity, Mayor Mamdani?

We could do comparable analysis for a host of other areas—but perhaps the most important area to examine is housing, because affordable housing was arguably the centerpiece of Mamdani’s mayoral campaign.

Smirkley’s analysis finds that Hispanics receive 67 times the public benefits per tax dollar that white New Yorkers do, and blacks receive 61 times as much. Even Asian Americans receive 7.5 times as much. These disparities are so staggering that they are difficult to contemplate.

Is this racial equity, Mayor Mamdani?

(I should note that these data sources are imperfect, particularly tax receipts by race, and the numbers should be seen as close approximations rather than precise point estimates. But they roughly match the calculations I did when writing The Unprotected Class.)

I had some recent first-hand experience that threw the reality of racial equity in NYC housing into sharp relief. On a trip to the city earlier this year, I was looking to save money on an extended visit, so I booked a very affordable hotel in Long Island City, conveniently located just a couple of subway stops from Midtown Manhattan, yet boasting prices at around a third of the cost of Manhattan hotels.

Unfortunately, I discovered upon arrival why that was. While clean and comfortable, my hotel was almost directly adjacent to the Queensbridge Housing Project, the largest public housing complex in North America. Totaling approximately 7,000 residents, it is just a small part of the New York City Housing Authority, which houses hundreds of thousands of New York residents.

While the neighborhood around the project, once one of the most dangerous in New York City, was clearly gentrifying at least to some degree, with a Wingstop and a Wendy’s among other newer stores and restaurants, it was still very much “the hood” and not a place you would want to hang out in, particularly after dark. The pungent smell of marijuana was omnipresent. On an evening trip to a convenience store, I saw lots of folks loitering around, some clearly trying to scam the people at the register, or worse. At least one restaurant I saw was locked, with potential patrons needing to request entry.

One other thing was immediately obvious to me when I got off the train—I was one of the only white faces visible.

Now that immediately brought several things to mind. First, there is the insanity of the left-wing concept of government-owned housing. If this complex were bulldozed and replaced by market-rate housing, it would almost certainly become hugely desirable and expensive real estate given its proximity to Midtown Manhattan. The notion that the government can permanently house poor people without accounting for the inherent dynamism of cities is pure folly. By any logic, this should have been prime real estate. And yet, thanks to the massive public housing complex, the area is still dangerous and disordered.

The second thing I immediately noted (subsequently confirmed by research) was the utter lack of whites in New York City public housing. It’s something we almost take for granted, but we shouldn’t—we should challenge it. Public housing in NYC is largely for blacks and Hispanics, with some Asian Americans. In 2025, just 3.25% of public housing residents in New York City were white. Even Asian Americans (6.2%) outnumber whites, although the number of whites in NYC outnumbers the number of Asian Americans 2-1. The overwhelming majority of public housing in New York City is occupied by Hispanics (45%) and African Americans (44%). Of course, there are plenty of poor white people in New York City—and, more importantly, far more poor white people who would love the opportunity to live in the city, especially in convenient places like Queensbridge. But they are virtually shut out of public housing in New York City. 

Is this racial equity, Mayor Mamdani?

Democrats often oppose the policing of criminal behavior in public housing. “When people with prior criminal legal contact are systematically barred from housing, the racial discrimination embedded in the criminal legal system gets infused into the housing market—a sector that is already rife with racial discrimination. (In Fiscal Year 2023, more than 2,000 race-based fair housing complaints were filed with the federal government),” reads a 2023 report from Biden’s Department of Housing and Urban Development to Congress.

Historically, while everyone wants to live somewhere safe, it is particularly important for whites. They have been targeted for racial violence in public housing in the same way they are targeted in prisons today and were targeted in urban neighborhoods in the 1950s and 1960s, which helped drive white flight. And even when they are not specifically targeted, a general culture of tolerating criminality in these areas disproportionately affects whites, who are statistically far less likely to be involved in criminal behavior than the overwhelmingly black and Hispanic public housing tenants. This is true even among the poorer whites. At an equal income, blacks making $36,000 per year are more than four times more likely to be incarcerated than poor whites.

A recent calculation highlighted by the American Enterprise Institute’s Howard Husock shows that an estimated 20% of violent crime in NYC takes place within 100 feet of public housing, even though this population represents just 4% of New Yorkers. Given that white New Yorkers commit only a minuscule portion of the city’s violent crime, replacing minorities in public housing with more whites would almost certainly bring the crime rate there down significantly, improving safety for all residents.

Achieving real racial equity would involve an even greater security presence in public housing. Strict rules would need to be enforced against tenant misbehavior and non-payment. There would also need to be zero tolerance for violence, with particular awareness of anti-white racial violence. It is implausible that in hyper-diverse NYC in 2026, whites would refuse to live in highly affordable units next to minority neighbors because of the color of their skin. So the problem must be the content of the character of far too many public housing residents.

There is also anti-white bias in housing allocation due to discrimination against citizens. Due to NYC rules, if even one resident of a public housing complex has legal status, everyone in the residence can qualify for public housing. And even if they are legal immigrants, non-citizens are prioritized over citizens. 

Is this racial equity, Mayor Mamdani?

And yet, there is tremendous demand for such heavily subsidized housing. A 2025 analysis from AEI’s Husock found that “in New York City alone, there are 227,000 on the wait list for public housing apartments.”

The average income for an NYC public housing tenant is $25,000, and the average rent is just $588, which is absurdly low. Of course, the stated incomes are a joke, because so many public housing residents are working under the table.

Yet even these extremely low rents often go uncollected. Beyond crime, there is a culture of non-payment in NYC public housing, with numbers during the height of COVID reaching over 40% of all renters. In 2023, only 65% of modest rent payments were being paid, with over half a billion dollars in rent arrears. White New Yorkers, essentially locked out of public housing, have to pay their bills on the private market or they will be evicted. Compounding this problem is that whites and Asians are far less able to get into rent-stabilized apartments on the private market, 44% of which are occupied by the foreign-born.

Additionally, and to no one’s surprise, the entire public housing system invites corruption. In 2024, in a single sting, 70 employees of the New York City Housing Authority were charged with accepting kickbacks and bribes. And that’s just the ones that were caught. 

Is this racial equity, Mr. Mamdani?

While Trump’s HUD Secretary Scott Turner claims the agency is “DEI-free” and aims to impose time limits and work requirements on public housing tenants, these reforms are not guaranteed.

So if Mayor Mamdani is interested in “racial equity” in New York City, I have a number of suggestions for him on how he could achieve it.

But of course, the premise itself is absurd.

Mamdani really has no interest in racial equity, which would involve, amidst a host of other policy reforms, kicking out tens of thousands of non-paying tenants (overwhelmingly black and Hispanic) from public housing. It would also involve keeping non-citizens and illegal aliens out of public housing in favor of citizens. Moreover, it would mean ensuring the safety of hugely underrepresented white residents, cracking down on crime, and adding a city-wide school voucher system that would allow white taxpayers to spend their tax dollars on their own kids’ schooling rather than subsidizing anyone else’s, virtually all of which would benefit white New Yorkers.

Instead, Mamdani is interested only in a pure racial shakedown in which his non-white constituents continue to milk the predominantly white NYC tax cattle even more assiduously, all while crying racism against anyone who dares challenge them.

In 1950, there were approximately seven million whites in New York City. Today, there are just 2.7 million in a city whose population has grown by roughly one million in that span of time. Millions of white residents leaving New York City did not happen randomly. Rather, it was the result of specific anti-white policy choices of Mamdani’s predecessors, virtually all of which, if his new report is taken at face value, Mamdani looks to accelerate.

Is this racial equity, Mayor Mamdani?