Anti-Landlord Socialist Has A Family Landlord Problem

Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Democratic Socialist who just beat moderate leftist Adriano Espaillat in the New York primaries, has run on a platform of resistance to New York’s profit-seeking landlords. However, a recent investigation just exposed her father as one of them.

Public records show that her father Frank Avila, whom Chevalier claimed was a humble truck driver, had enough money to purchase a condominium in Miami in 1998 for $92,900, the New York Post reports. This is about $193,000 in today’s dollars. 

Similar units in the complex now average around $375,000, which means that her father has had a fourfold return on his apartment investment. This does not include the revenue her father receives from the apartment’s tenant.

July 2025 records also show him taking a loan off the apartment complex, a traditional tactic New York landlords perform.

Avila Chevalier ran a populist campaign centered on limiting market-rate housing and fighting “corporate greed,” and once reposted a proposal on social media calling the government to “seize all properties from landlords.”

Chevalier has also argued that New York has given real estate too much to the free market, which erodes the identity of long-established, working-class neighborhoods.

“In Congress, she’ll take on corporate greed, bad landlords, and D.C.’s broken political system. At a time when power is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, Darializa will fight in Congress for New York City’s working families,” her platform read. “She’s the champion we need for a city New Yorkers can actually afford.”

Chevalier has argued that houses that are owned are kept in land trusts that limit how much landlords can own, though her father’s property is in no such land trust.

“[We should be] making sure that we are pushing back on bad landlords, making sure that we are also creating pathways to homeownership, investing in community land trusts and HDFCs, and making it so that people can actually stay in the city that they helped build,” she told CNN.

Chevalier has not publicly spoken about her father’s property or mentioned his status as a landlord.