Gustavo Gordillo is 38 years old, co-chairs the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, and wants to transfer land "from landowners to the landless." He lives in a nearly 2,000-square-foot Bedford-Stuyvesant row home that was purchased through a family LLC called Chucuito and renovated with new facades, landscaping, interior upgrades, and two added decks.
His parents paid for the whole thing.
The New York Post reported this week that Gordillo's father — also named Gustavo — is the founder of Draftpros Inc. and confirmed the arrangement himself. "My son and my other son both live there," the elder Gordillo told the Post. "The LLC purchased the home, and then we did the renovations." The Brooklyn property was bought in 2019 for under $1 million. Dad, meanwhile, owns a 5,000-plus-square-foot home in Boca Raton listed at $3.1 million and another property in Weston, Florida, valued at roughly $3 million.
So we're talking about a guy whose family portfolio includes multiple multi-million-dollar Florida estates, and whose idea of roughing it in the city is a fully renovated brownstone in one of Brooklyn's hottest neighborhoods — bankrolled by the LLC his father set up. Before moving in, Gordillo rented a Lower East Side apartment for $2,600 a month from 2016 to 2019.
This is the same Gordillo who told Fox News in July, "We don't think that anybody should have the constitutional right to double-digit returns on their investment." He's a Yale graduate, class of 2010, where he studied art. Born in Peru, raised in South Florida. He joined the IBEW in 2019, though he's stopped identifying as an IBEW Local 3 member since 2024.
The resume reads like a parody of progressive activism: Ivy League degree, millionaire parents, union card picked up the same year the family bought him a house, dropped as soon as it stopped being useful as a credential.
Local renter Faith Smith, 36, had the most honest reaction to the whole thing. "I wish my family could afford to buy me a million-dollar home," she told the Post. "It's a rich kid. That's basically people who don't have to deal with the struggles we have to deal with."
This is a pattern we've seen from coast to coast. The loudest voices against wealth accumulation almost always come from people who've already accumulated it — or had it accumulated for them. The socialism isn't the point. The status is. Yale to DSA co-chair is a career path, not a revolution.
Gordillo wants to take land from landowners and give it to the landless. He just doesn't count his family's properties when he's sorting people into those two categories.