Photo: AP

Last week, one of Donald Trump’s attorneys requested that he no longer receive a tax credit afforded to middle-class families in New York City—defined as those with annual household incomes lower than $500,000. The city complied, and about $1000 will be added to Trump’s next property tax bill.

The whole affair has been completely baffling for a number of reasons—at first City Hall said they’d made a mistake, but then they said they hadn’t—not least of which is the fact that it would appear to undermine Trump’s claims about his wealth. “Because of tax secrecy laws, we cannot say whether or not he is or was eligible,” a spokeswoman for the Department of Finance said.

Unless he releases his tax returns, we likely won’t know whether Trump was actually eligible for the STAR credit—or, more to the point, exactly how much he is worth. (His most recent self-evaluation was over $10 billion—this is almost certainly not true, though it could still be quite high.) What we do know, thanks to Crain’s New York’s excellent follow-up reporting, is that Trump is the only ostensible billionaire in New York City to receive the New York State School Tax Relief Program (STAR) credit. From Crain’s:

In order to determine how many of Trump’s peers are getting the STAR credit, we started by turning to the annual Forbes 400, which lists about 60 billionaire New Yorkers. The list is led by industrialist David Koch and former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, followed by a raft of media moguls, money managers and real estate developers. (Incidentally, there is only one female New Yorker in the Forbes 400: Joan Tisch.) Forbes reckons that Trump’s fortune is $4.5 billion, or less than half the amount the candidate has claimed.

Once we had a list of billionaires, we began looking up where they live. Some addresses had been disclosed in the press—for instance, when hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb paid $45 million for a condo at 15 Central Park West. But many others had to be dug up by reviewing real estate records filed with the city Department of Finance. Addresses for about 20 billionaires couldn’t be found, probably because they purchased their homes using limited liability companies that shield their identities. Nonetheless, we were able to find addresses of 38 billionaires.

According to Department of Taxation and Finance records, Trump is the only New York billionaire (as designated by Forbes) registered to receive the STAR credit. There are, however, two other residents of Trump Tower receiving the credit.