New York City is bleeding jobs to the South — and one of the city’s own business leaders is warning that it is only going to get worse under Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Steve Fulop, CEO of the Partnership for the City of New York, told 77 WABC Radio’s “Cats Roundtable” with billionaire John Catsimatidis on Sunday that Nashville — along with Dallas, Miami and South Florida — is actively working to pull employers out of New York as the democratic socialist mayor pushes a wave of tax hikes, according to the New York Post.
“New York City is on a trajectory that we’re less and less competitive every single day,” Fulop warned, urging the City Council and the mayor to take the threat seriously. “Dallas and Miami and Nashville are actively pushing strategies to take jobs away” from the city.
Mamdani’s agenda — higher income taxes on top earners, a steeper estate tax and increased corporate levies — is the obvious culprit, but Fulop said the problem runs deeper. “I’m not only talking about taxes, [but] bureaucracy and layers of reporting and more difficulty to run a business,” he said. “All of that stuff layers on top of one another and makes it pretty difficult to run a business in New York City.”
The warning is not hypothetical. Apollo Global Management, the $900 billion asset manager, is planning a second U.S. headquarters in the Sunbelt, with Nashville on the shortlist alongside Texas and South Florida — an office expected to employ roughly 1,000 people, matching its New York workforce. Apollo paid about $1.28 billion in total income taxes in the city in 2025. Starbucks has reportedly pledged $100 million and 2,000 jobs to a new Nashville hub, and AllianceBernstein moved its headquarters from New York to Nashville back in 2021.
Wall Street’s heaviest hitters are sounding the same alarm. Citadel’s Ken Griffin and Apollo’s Marc Rowan have both warned they could move thousands of jobs as a direct consequence of Mamdani’s “tax the rich” crusade. After Mamdani used Griffin’s $238 million Midtown penthouse as a backdrop in a social-media video, Griffin scrapped a $6 billion Park Avenue development and said he would expand in Miami instead.
“We will add far more jobs in Miami over the next decade as an immediate and direct consequence of the mayor’s poor decision,” Griffin said.
Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, is sinking $500 million into a new Dallas campus for more than 5,000 employees. The Partnership for New York City estimates Mamdani’s rhetoric alone already puts some 2,700 financial-industry jobs and $168 million in annual tax revenue at risk — the early bill for an experiment the city’s job creators never signed up for.
Source: nypost.com
