Gustavo L. Gordillo, the embattled co-chair of New York City's chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, has made a name for himself railing against property ownership, landlords, and real estate investors who enjoy robust rates of return.
"It's time to take over apartments owned by landlords freeloading off hardworking taxpayers," Gordillo, 38, posted on social media in June.
But Gordillo—a Yale-educated art-world staffer turned fired union electrician who once proclaimed that "inheritance is DEI for white people"—may want to take a look at the eye-popping rents charged by his wealthy parents, who’ve heavily subsidized his life.
Gustavo E. and Elizabeth Gordillo are successful real estate investors who recently rented out a Florida mansion they own for $18,000 a month. For six years, their socialist son lived in a nearly $1 million Brooklyn home owned by the couple, who had paid the younger Gustavo’s rent for at least three years prior. He’s now living elsewhere while the Brooklyn home undergoes an extensive, $1.4 million roof-raising renovation his parents have bankrolled.
To uncover the Gordillo family fortune and how it’s benefited the prominent DSA leader, the Washington Free Beacon scoured thousands of pages of documents obtained through public-records requests and searches of public databases. Many of the revelations are being reported for the first time.
The Gordillos immigrated with their son from Peru and have spent three decades flipping homes to acquire what is now nearly $5 million in South Florida real estate (that the Free Beacon could identify). They have recently charged $17,000 to $18,000 in monthly rent for a five-bedroom mansion they bought for $2.24 million in Weston outside Fort Lauderdale, a property they’ve struggled to sell at a robust rate of return.
In a July 17 Fox News interview, Gordillo notoriously criticized New York City landlords for enjoying what he claimed (absent evidence, and likely in error) was an average 12 percent rate of return on their investments. The prominent socialist said of his political tribe, "We don’t think that anyone should have a constitutional right to double-digit returns on their investment."
But the younger Gustavo has directly benefited from his parents’ profitable adventures in real estate, given that in 2019 they purchased for nearly $1 million a 2,400-square-foot, 2-family home in Brooklyn for him to live in, as his father told the New York Post. Voter rolls indicate his brother Gabriel, 33, in 2025 moved from their parents’ Florida home to Brooklyn. The brothers are both now believed to be renting temporarily as they await the completion of the seven-figure renovation of the spacious Brooklyn home owned by their parents.
None of the Gordillos responded to requests for comment. The DSA did not respond to a request for comment.
The DSA is enjoying a remarkable political ascendance in New York, thanks to its close ties to Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has stood by Gordillo amid scathing press coverage over the conflicts between his public statements about landlords and his personal housing situation. Two rising New York DSA stars controversially backed by Mamdani—Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez—are all but certain to enter Congress next year, where they would join Queens DSA pioneer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a small but growing DSA cohort.
New York’s DSA chapter is the nation’s largest, and has more than doubled its size, to some 15,000 members, since Mamdani launched his successful campaign. The radical political group, which opposes capitalism, asserts in its national platform that investment properties should be strictly regulated and subject to universal rent control. Gordillo has suggested that the DSA’s true intentions are more extreme. The Post reported that at a 2022 New York DSA "housing justice" meeting, he said "abolishing landlords and rent" was among "our long-term socialist goals."
Gordillo has practiced what he preaches, if just in part, given his recent record of not paying rent. As the Post reported, he was in March slapped with a non-payment petition for his recent Brooklyn rental. This followed a rent and eviction notice he received the previous month. The petition indicates that this was due to his failure to pay some $5,000 in rent owed from December and January after he had established a habit of settling his rent about every three months.
In 2024 Gordillo posted on X against a proposed rollback to state rent laws, a change he said would give "landlords a weapon to evict NYers & our comrades."
Gordillo had secured a $2,500 per month lease on the one-bedroom apartment in May 2025, days before the first construction permit was issued for the Brooklyn home renovation. While his father told the Post that he’d paid his son’s $2,600 monthly rent for three years before the home purchase, it remains unclear whether he similarly paid for the recent rental.
It’s also unclear where the son is currently living, as the renovation remains unfinished. The New York Department of Buildings slapped it with a partial stop-work order and a $2,500 fine (still unpaid, per city records) in late August for working in a landmark-protected building without a permit (which expired in May).
Also in August, the DSA voted to grant Gordillo a full-time salary of $95,000; he’s up for reelection in November. This came after he was fired in March from his union electrician position for being a no-show for months, as the Post reported. He had in November 2023 signed a contract for a five-and-a-half year apprenticeship starting at $18 an hour. Gordillo, who studied art at Yale, reported on FEC filings that he was an electrician with IBEW Local 3 from June 2024 through March 2026.
His X handle remains "@unionGustavo." But he recently nixed "union electrician" from his bio.
Florida property records for Gordillo’s parents, who according to their son began their life in the United States as menial laborers, chart an American dream-suffused narrative of striving immigrants making it rich. Gordillo told the New York Times that his parents’ financial success is "absolutely the exception" in the United States and said democratic socialism could "build a world where that’s not exceptional."
From a humble Weston three-bedroom townhouse they purchased for just under $100,000 in 1996, the Gordillos traded up through at least 10 property purchases, including two purchases of raw land and seven sales, through 2024, according to local property records. For stretches, they’ve owned more than one property simultaneously and have rented out at least two homes—the first as far back as 2001. They were hit hard by the 2008 financial crash, selling one home at a steep loss and seeing another claimed by Wells Fargo. But they bounced back.
Today, the Gordillos own at least two South Florida luxury homes and run a company that, per a Weston business-tax receipt, provides "drafting and mapping for the telecommunications industry."
The Gordillos in 2021 bought for $2.24 million a 6,300-square-foot, 5-bedroom mansion in Weston, an upscale, master-planned community, living there for two years.
The couple have been struggling to flip the mansion for what they evidently hoped would be a huge profit. After first putting the property on the market in September 2022 for an ambitious $4.25 million, they cut the price in stages, dwindling to $3 million on July 17, 2026.
The couple in January 2024 bought a different house to live in, a 5,160 square-foot, 5-bedroom home in nearby Boca Raton for $2.44 million. They listed it in May for $3.1 million; there has been no registered sale.
With the Weston property languishing on the market, the Gordillos secured a tenant at $18,000 per month with $54,000 paid up front in November 2023.
After the first tenant moved out in June 2025, they secured a new one for $17,000 on a one-year lease, with $51,400 up front, starting in January. But the tenant vacated eight weeks later. Local utility records, which include property leases, indicate the home has since stood empty, with an asking rent of $18,000 as of July.
Then, on Aug. 18, the Post broke the story about the father providing his sons the rent-free Brooklyn home. The following week, the Gordillos took the Weston home off both the rental and the sale market.
The parents purchased the Brooklyn home in question in 2019 for $935,000 through a family holding company. While, according to voting records, the younger Gustavo moved in soon after, the property has done double duty for the parents’ business interests. The couple soon used the property as collateral for an $850,000 ceiling for borrowing against the unpaid invoices of a company they co-owned.
Papers filed with New York’s Department of Buildings budgeted the 148-year-old Brooklyn home’s renovation at $1,440,156. Having satisfied the previous mortgage, the Gordillos secured a hair over $1 million through two new mortgages against the property through their holding company.
Approved to begin in May 2025, the project is adding an extra half a floor and will include 2,400 square feet of total living area, including a lower unit with an extra 1,100 square-foot cellar and a duplex penthouse with a roof deck and back terrace. The construction will appoint the home with rooftop solar panels, a steel and polycarbonate porch, a rear-yard deck, and a metal cornice with a built-in irrigated planter.
It’s unknown whether the Gordillo brothers stand to inherit anything from their parents.
What is evident is that Gustavo is politically opposed to postmortem wealth transfers.
"Inheritance is DEI for white people," Gordillo proclaimed on social media in March 2025, in response to a post from comedian Stacy Cay, who insisted, "Kids shouldn’t be allowed to inherit anything from their parents."
Asked about his ethnicity for his electrician apprenticeship, Gordillo indicated he was white Hispanic.
In June 2024, Gordillo posted derisively about the New York congressman who is a member of the Levi Strauss clan as "actual trust fund baby and heir Dan Goldman." Goldman was ousted in this summer’s Democratic primary by an anti-Israel challenger backed by Mamdani.
In July, Fox News host Martha MacCallum remarked that Gordillo’s parents had been Maoist-communist guerillas in Peru. Without disputing her characterization, he said they had fled the country due to poor economic conditions, which he blamed largely on "the imposition of capitalism and American imperialism."
"So they come here because they don’t like the imposition of American imperialism in the country that they’re in?" MacCallum asked.
"Yes," Gordillo replied.
