Over 300 Democratic Socialists of America members are demanding Mayor Zohran Mamdani kill a $1.2 billion public housing rebuild in Manhattan — turning on their own endorsed candidate and using low-income tenants as leverage in an intramural power play that could leave dilapidated housing standing.
The DSA draft resolution, which has already secured 335 co-sponsors — well over the 125 needed for a November convention vote — calls on Mamdani to halt the demolition and reconstruction of the Fulton-Elliot Chelsea Houses. The socialist organization that flooded his 2025 campaign with volunteers and voter outreach now wants him to side with a handful of holdout residents against the project. The move exposes the left's real calculus: the poor are a political prop, not a constituency to serve.
Four DSA members penned the nearly six-page document, which condemns Mamdani for pressing ahead with the public-private partnership between NYCHA and Related Companies through the city's RAD-PACT program, according to a screenshot obtained by the New York Post. The resolution accuses the mayor of proceeding "despite unambiguous protests from residents and community members." It also argues the city is prioritizing demolition in the tony Chelsea neighborhood while other NYCHA complexes remain in "much worse structural shape."
The project, originally struck under Mayor Eric Adams in 2021, would demolish and rebuild all 2,056 current apartments and add 3,000 units of mixed-income and market-rate housing. The construction would temporarily relocate roughly 4% of tenants, including residents of a senior-only building. It would also shift residents from Section 9 government housing to Section 8 voucher-based housing — a privatization mechanism that should raise questions about who profits when public stock converts to voucher dependency.
Related Companies, the private partner, stands to gain handsomely. Follow the money.
Some senior residents are refusing to leave. "I'm not going anywhere!" 67-year-old Doris Ruffin told the Post. "They're gonna have to knock th[is down]" — her sentence cut in the Post's report, but her defiance was clear.
Brooklyn Council member Chris Banks, chair of the council committee for public housing and a champion of preserving Section 9 housing, welcomed the DSA's involvement. "Folks are fighting for their lives and we welcome them taking this position in wanting to invest and preserve traditional public housing," he said. "I hope the mayor listens."
Mamdani doubled down. Spokesman Matt Rauschenbach said the administration supports the redevelopment because "NYCHA tenants deserve safe, healthy homes and the investment that has been denied to public housing for far too long." NYCHA faces over $80 billion in capital repair needs. "Too many leaders have walked away from public housing. We are not going to," Rauschenbach said.
The Examiner reported that DSA's own magazine, Democratic Left, recently published an interview where Police Reform Organizing Project director Robert Gangi accused Mamdani of protecting "racist" policing practices — allowing disproportionate arrests of non-white New Yorkers. The DSA's two-front war against its own mayor, on housing and policing, raises the question: was Mamdani ever anything more than a vehicle, and will the left discard him the moment he governs?
The real tension: a $1.2 billion investment in public housing hangs in the balance while socialists maneuver against their own mayor. The residents of Fulton-Elliot Chelsea deserve safe homes. What they're getting is a political standoff where their lives are the ammunition.
