The people who want to seize the means of production keep seizing brownstones first.
The New York Post has now caught two more New York City Democratic Socialists of America leaders living the capitalist dream they spend their weekends denouncing. Labor coordinator Olivia Gonzalez Killingsworth flipped an inherited Upper West Side triplex for $2.4 million. Steering Committee chair Julie Swoope sits in a half-million-dollar Brooklyn co-op with skyline views and “great closet space.” They join co-chair Gustavo Gordillo, the Yale sculptor whose telecommunications-millionaire father gifted him a $1.5 million Bed-Stuy townhouse.
Three leaders. Three properties. Zero irony detectors.
The Marble Shower Revolution
Killingsworth, elected DSA labor coordinator in 2025, sold the two-bedroom, three-bathroom triplex on September 12, 2022. One block from Central Park. Ten-foot ceilings. Fireplace. Marble showers. Bay windows looking out on Callery pear blossoms. Public records put the sale at $2.4 million. Two days later she closed on a one-bedroom in Brooklyn for $521,000.
She inherited the triplex from her aunt Elizabeth, who died in 2018. That is not a crime. Inheritance is how families pass on what they built. The problem is the sermon that comes with it. Killingsworth told the Post she has “the privilege of stable housing, something that should be guaranteed to every New Yorker.”
Guaranteed. By whom? With whose money? The woman who just banked a multimillion-dollar family property wants the rest of the city treated as if housing were a human right extracted from somebody else’s balance sheet. She runs a bookkeeping business. She acts. She sings. She is not sleeping on a cot in a union hall.
Queens Councilwoman Vickie Paladino did not miss it.
Once again we’re finding out why DSA actually stands for Daddy’s Savings Account. Selling a multimillion-dollar Manhattan Triplex to go play pretend bohemian with your rich comrades in Brooklyn is a luxury working-class New Yorkers will never have.
The Committee Chair With Closet Space
Swoope bought her $510,000 one-bedroom co-op near Prospect Park in 2021. High ceilings. Skyline views. Closets the listing bragged about. She told the Post she became a private property owner and built a family “after living in a rent stabilized apartment.” Fair enough. Then she logged onto X to scold anyone who noticed the pattern around her co-chair.
Charges of hypocrisy against Gustavo or any DSA member who has comfortable financial background are dumb. It’s not hypocritical to want others to enjoy the economic security that you do.
That is the whole trick. They enjoy the security private property created. They want the state to manufacture the same result for everyone else by punishing the system that produced their own pads. Swoope’s late mother was an artist who spent three years on a live-aboard sailboat and belonged to a Florida boat and ski club. Again, not a scandal. The scandal is pretending this résumé is the proletariat.
Both women’s apartments sit more than $100,000 above the average U.S. home price of $387,400. Nearly 70 percent of New Yorkers rent. The people writing the housing program own.
Gotham’s Socialist Landed Gentry
Gordillo is the mascot. The Post reported earlier this month that his father bought the Bed-Stuy row house through an LLC. The place has taken a facelift since 2019. Decks. Landscaping. A fine hanging over unpermitted work. He used to talk like an IBEW electrician. The union story did not hold. He has said nobody should have a “constitutional right to double-digit returns on their investment.” Easy doctrine when Dad already bought the building.
A source close to the chapter told the Post the revelations have rattled the shop. “They’re like babies opening their eyes for the first time, and everything’s blurry. Many of them have never worked a job before and now they’re realizing if they want to be a player in New York, people are going to ask them questions.”
Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers.
That is the DSA housing gospel in one verse. Heap rent control, land-value seizures, and “guaranteed” apartments on the city. Keep the inherited triplex, the Prospect Park co-op, and the father’s townhouse. Call the gap solidarity.
New York does not have a shortage of lectures about landlords. It has a shortage of people who will say out loud that private property, families who save, and an aunt who leaves you a brownstone are not crimes. They are how a civilization houses its children. The socialists know it. They just prefer the lecture from the good side of the closing table.
