Meet the $1.5 million socialist: DSA boss preaches class warfare while Dad picks up the tab

BS BULLETIN:

A Brooklyn civil-rights leader is demanding NYC-DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo resign over his $1.5 million family-funded home and other controversies.
The socialist leader’s renovation was once mocked as looking like a “Hamptons beach house.”
Gordillo has also faced an eviction lawsuit and questions about his union credentials.

The saga of New York City’s champagne socialists has finally reached the point where even local civil-rights leaders are asking whether somebody might want to check the price tag on the revolution. Brooklyn activist Rev. Kevin McCall is calling for NYC Democratic Socialists of America co-chair Gustavo Gordillo to resign as new details continue emerging about the anti-capitalist leader’s rather capitalist-looking lifestyle.

McCall has even supplied a new name for the DSA: “Double Standards of America.”

Ouch.

At the center of the controversy is the roughly $1.5 million Bedford-Stuyvesant townhouse where Gordillo lives — a home purchased through an LLC by his wealthy parents. Gordillo’s father, a successful businessman whose family owns millions of dollars worth of Florida real estate, previously confirmed the arrangement. “My son and my other son both live there,” the elder Gordillo told the New York Post. “The LLC purchased the home, and then we did the renovations.”

Those renovations have now become a story of their own. The 1901 row house sits in a historic section of Bed-Stuy, but plans for its extensive makeover drew objections from neighborhood officials and members of New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.

One commissioner delivered the architectural review from hell: the proposed house looked more like a “Hamptons beach house” than a Bedford-Stuyvesant row house. The local community board said the design was “not in alignment” with the neighborhood. The Landmarks Preservation Commission eventually approved the project in 2023 after requiring changes, but the problems didn’t end there. The city’s Buildings Department later issued a stop-work order amid permitting problems.

And McCall says there is a much larger issue. “At a time when NYCHA residents are living with mold, leaks, broken elevators, and apartments in desperate need of repair, it is unacceptable for a leader who claims to fight for housing justice to be connected to a luxury renovation that is reducing housing opportunities for Black residents in a historically Black Brooklyn community,” he said. “That is not housing justice. That is not practicing what you preach.”

There’s more.

Gordillo has presented himself as a union electrician and working-class organizer, but the Post reported last week that he was dismissed from his IBEW Local 3 apprenticeship after months of nonparticipation. He subsequently helped convince NYC-DSA to turn its formerly unpaid co-chair positions into jobs paying $95,000 annually plus benefits. Then came another particularly awkward development for a tenants-rights socialist. Gordillo was sued in Brooklyn housing court after allegedly missing three $2,500 rent payments on a Crown Heights apartment he leased while renovations were being performed on the family-owned townhouse.

And the estimated cost of the townhouse work? Permits reportedly put it at roughly $1.4 million. The Post also reported that the extensive work wasn’t being performed with union labor — another eyebrow-raiser for a DSA leader who built his political identity around organized labor.

Now McCall wants answers about Gordillo’s housing, employment history and leadership of the socialist organization. If DSA doesn’t respond, McCall says clergy members and NYCHA residents are prepared to organize “days of action” demanding accountability.

Neither Gordillo nor NYC-DSA responded to the latest requests for comment.

MY QUICK TAKE

I think I’ve finally figured out socialism.

Your parents become successful capitalists. They buy you a million-dollar Brooklyn house. They spend another small fortune renovating it. You get a $95,000 salary from the socialist organization. And then you lecture everybody else about the evils of wealth and property ownership.

Why didn’t Karl Marx explain it this way?

And somewhere in Brooklyn, an actual working stiff is paying $3,000 a month for an apartment the size of a Buick while a socialist leader’s daddy renovates the revolution’s $1.5 million townhouse. Workers of the world, unite!

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