DSA Moves to Cushy Manhattan Digs While Leaders Rake in Dough

The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is doing so well for itself these days that it’s moving into two expensive new offices and giving its co-chairpersons $95,000 salaries.

Movin’ on Up

Yes, according to the New York Post, the folks who claim to represent the downtrodden working class are abandoning their tiny, leaky, “communist red” office on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where “meetings were regularly interrupted by wandering vagrants.” That one cost a mere $5,200 a month.

Now they’re renting an entire floor of a Midtown Manhattan building — all 5,150 square feet of it — for nearly triple that, plus a two-level office in Brooklyn for another $7,000.

The Midtown office building, on West 35th Street in Hudson Yards, has 14 stories and comes “complete with a doorman, 24/7 security and furnished rooftop,” the Post reported Saturday. Its $15,000-per-month rent will constitute “the chapter’s second-largest monthly expense” after the salaries of its two leaders.

Observed the Post:

The socialists — who regularly rail against landlords — didn’t seem to have any qualms renting from one of Gotham’s biggest and most controversial real estate developers as they moved to deluxe digs in the sky.

Their new landlord, the Chetrit family, has faced class-action lawsuits from Brooklyn tenants for allegedly skirting rent-stabilization laws.

“Nothing says ‘we hate capitalism’ like sitting in a high-rise Midtown boardroom cosplaying as extras in Succession,” former New York City Council minority leader Joe Borelli told the paper.

“At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if I bump into them in the suite level at the Republican Convention this week.”

The Brooklyn office, which will be the DSA’s first home in that borough, is located on Bedford Street in Bed-Stuy, “in the heart of the ‘Commie Corridor,’” wrote the Post. The real-estate listing for the offices states that they have “large teardrop lighting” and central air conditioning that “provides a feeling of a high-end artist loft.”

The office, whose front doors feature posters of elected Brooklyn DSA officials alongside “ICE out of NYC” and “rent controls” signs, is currently being refurbished.

Salary Flap

The DSA began a fundraising drive for the Brooklyn space in May. Penned the Post:

“Are you tired of taking organizer calls from your Citi Bike?” asked socialist Brooklyn Councilmember Chi Osse, one of the many DSA silver-spoon leaders, in an Instagram video. “To be effective organizers, we need to meet our community where they’re at,” he continued, before taking viewers through a tour of the space.

After the appeal from Osse surpassed its initial goal of $20,000, the organization hiked its fundraising target to $100,000. It’s raised more than $68,000 so far.

The DSA is going to need quite a bit more than that if it’s going to afford its supposedly proletarian leaders. Co-chairs Grace Mausser and Gustavo Gordillo just got themselves salaries to the tune of $95,000 a year each — even as Mausser admitted they were unaccountable to anyone.

“I’ve gotten a lot of questions about who is supervising the co-chairs. I mean, the answer is no one,” the “democratic” socialist told a Brooklyn DSA branch last month. “We’re not a nonprofit with a board. We’re not hiring an executive director. There’s no one that’s going to put me on a performance improvement plan.”

Mausser pitched the proposed salaries as necessary for her and Gordillo to be able to work full time advancing the cause of redistributing other people’s wealth. Not everyone was buying it.

“I would love to see working class leaders be able to commit full-time to DSA work. But that’s not what this is,” a 10-year DSA member said during the meeting. “Gustavo is not working class. Grace is not working class. Most of our co-chairs and most people in the DSA have laptop jobs and are upper middle class.”

Laptop Leftists

Indeed, as with most left-wing movements, the DSA is composed largely of the educated and reasonably well-off. A 2021 DSA internal survey found that the group’s members are primarily white, college-educated (often with graduate degrees), white-collar workers. Twenty-eight percent of DSA members at the time were earning more than $100,000 a year. (Perhaps fearing the results would make the DSA look even worse now, the group declined to ask for this information in its 2025 survey.)

According to the Post:

Some of the DSA’s laptop class include members like Ahmed Husain, an engineer from Bahrain living in the Big Apple who recently called for “ending the US empire;” Leemah Nasrati, an immigration attorney who’s been hosting anti-ICE trainings; and Hanna Johnson, a DSA leader who doubles as State Assemblymember Emily Gallagher’s deputy chief of staff.

And the DSA’s poster boy, Mayor Zohran Mamdani — the son of Disney filmmaker Mira Nair — comes from a family whose vast wealth includes a lush compound in Uganda that boasts its own housekeeper, gardeners and security.

Then there’s Gordillo, who claims to be a union electrician and the son of working-class Peruvian immigrants. In fact, reported the Post, he lost his union card because he didn’t show up for his apprenticeship, attended (but did not graduate from) Yale University, and lives in a $1.5 million house in Brooklyn that his multimillionaire dad bought for him.

As with all socialist movements, the DSA will do nothing to improve the lot of the working class. But, as with all socialist movements, it will pad the pocketbooks of the people at its peak. And isn’t that really the point?