New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new 15-member Business Advisory Council, which includes Jewish real estate heavyweights like RXR CEO and chairman Scott Rechler and Steiner Studios chairman Douglas Steiner, is getting mixed reviews.
City Hall said on Thursday that the new panel will “meet quarterly with the mayor and deputy mayor for economic justice Julie Su to help shape the city’s next phase of economic growth and innovation.”
“The doors of City Hall are always open to New York’s business leaders, and I look forward to welcoming their experience and strategic guidance as we build a stronger, more dynamic economy,” Mamdani stated. “This council brings together the people building the next generation of New York’s economy—in finance, tech, life sciences and beyond—to help us double down on what makes this city the best place on Earth to start a company, grow a business and build a career.”
“We want the most ambitious people in the world to come here, stay here and build here,” said the mayor, who is aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America.
In his inaugural address, on Jan. 1, Mamdani said that “we will answer to all New Yorkers—not to any billionaire or oligarch who thinks they can buy our democracy.” In June 2025, he told “Meet the Press” that “I don’t think that we should have billionaires because, frankly, it is so much money in a moment of such inequality.”
Santiago Vidal Calvo, a cities policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute, a think tank, told JNS that “Mamdani has realized that his relationship with businesses is broken.”
“He has started wars with some of the biggest business leaders in New York and realizes now that he can’t keep that up,” Vidal Calvo said.
At an April 15 tax forum, Mamdani said that the prior day, he stood in front of 220 Central Park West. “Ken Griffin owns a penthouse that he bought, I think, for $228 million, north of $200 million,” he said. “This is the kind of wealth that is being stored in the city, and it is a residence that is so often empty.”
Mamdani is pushing a “pied-à-terre tax,” which would focus on homes that he said are scarcely used, and he has made Kenneth Griffin, CEO of Citadel, the face of that initiative. Griffin has called Mamdani’s tax video, which mentions his penthouse, “creepy and weird.”
A business exodus?
Some have predicted a corporate exodus from the city, but billionaire hedge fund mogul Bill Ackman, a frequent critic of the mayor, recently said that he is giving $400 million toward creating a brain research and treatment facility in Manhattan.
“It is too soon to say whether that is actually happening,” Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, a retired vice president and principal at Bernstein Investment Research and Management, told JNS of a business exodus.
The firm had been headquartered in New York since its 1967 founding, but “a couple of years ago, Bernstein’s headquarters moved to Nashville, which has lower corporate tax rates,” Wiesenfeld told JNS. “Many of Bernstein’s employees moved with it.”
Some 800 Bernstein employees work in Manhattan, compared to a workforce for the public company that was once 2,000, and the move south is saving shareholders some $65 million annually in corporate taxes, according to Wiesenfeld.
Hy Schermer, director of acquisitions at a mid-size real estate development and investment firm in Manhattan, told JNS that his employer, which he didn’t want to name, owns about 800 Manhattan apartments.
“It used to be a lot more,” he said.
The company recently bought an 80-story office building in Chicago and is purchasing properties in Denver and in Amsterdam. It owns some 45 million square feet of residential, commercial and office space and is shrinking its New York City portfolio, according to Schermer.
“New York isn’t attractive anymore,” he told JNS of the real estate market.
“My CEO doesn’t want to do business here,” he said. “There are too many forces working against us.” Some of those forces predate Mamdani but won’t improve during his tenure, Schermer said.
State laws said to be tenant-friendly, which passed in 2019, “have made it impossible for landlords now,” he told JNS.
‘Contrary to the best interests of New York City’
Wiesenfeld said that “everything Mamdani is doing is contrary to the best interests of New York City.”
Vidal Calvo, of the Manhattan Institute, told JNS that “even if the business leaders make the best recommendations for the city, Mamdani is not legally required to take them.”
He called the new business council the “latest act of the greatest showman.”
“What does he want from this?” he told JNS. “Is this a publicity stunt?”
Some critics have also called the mayor’s plan to open discounted grocery stores in each of the city’s five boroughs, for which he has committed $70 million, a stunt and have said it would put neighborhood bodegas, or corner stores, out of business.
The New York Post reported on Wednesday that immigrant business owners who decried Mamdani’s supermarket plan are being slapped with city sanitation fines.
“When we started going door to door two weeks ago, that’s when the fines started,” Frank Garcia, chairman of the Multicultural Business Coalition, told the Post of fines he said went up to $1,000. “The owners don’t speak English.”
In the announcement of the business panel on Thursday, City Hall appeared to acknowledge that there could be a corporate exodus from the Big Apple. It said that the council will advise on the “industries driving New York’s economy” and on the “infrastructure, talent pipeline and regulatory environment those industries need to grow here rather than elsewhere.”
In addition to Rechler and Steiner, the panelists are Brandon Blackwood (eponymous brand), Priscilla Sims Brown (Amalgamated Bank), Rafael E. Cestero (Community Preservation Corporation), Keia Clarke (New York Liberty), Dr. John D’Angelo (Northwell Health), Kruti Patel Goyal (Etsy), Tony James (Jefferson River Capital), Kevin Ryan (AlleyCorp), Marcus Samuelsson (chef), Hamdi Ulukaya (Chobani), Pat Wang (Healthfirst), Antonio Weiss (SSW) and Robert Wolf (32 Advisors).
