David Holowka, April 24, 2026

I’m voting for Layla Law-Gisiko in the special election for city council because Chelsea is in the fight of its life and there is no one I trust more to save it. NYCHA’s plan to replace the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses on just a third of their sites and use the rest to build skyscrapers mainly for the rich will devastate the neighborhood’s social and physical character, and set the stage for demolition of true public housing across the city.

Layla is the only City Council candidate to oppose demolition and the only one to support the tenants’ right to retain public Section 9 status rather than transition to private Section 8 status as NYCHA’s plan demands. While other candidates say they would try to “shape” the plan, she speaks for all of us who know that it is entirely indefensible. In her refreshingly forthright words: “It is a disgrace. It has no redeeming qualities.” She’s not about wishful thinking but action. She has already been instrumental in bringing the plan to a possibly permanent halt, connecting the residents with lawyers who recently won a Temporary Restraining Order against its advancement.

I would vote for Layla even if the NYCHA plan wasn’t the most pressing issue facing our community. Over the years, I’ve watched her defend the public interest as chair of Community Board 5’s Land Use Committee, and fight a winning, against-the-odds battle with big real estate’s plan to overdevelop the Penn Station area. I’ve been informed and empowered by the many webinars she has hosted with experts on issues important to the community.

Layla’s credentials include presidency of the City Club of New York and Assembly District Leader, but her engagement with the NYCHA plan has raised her stature as a leader to another level.

Our elected officials including Erik Bottcher, whose City Council seat Layla hopes to fill, have uniformly supported the plan in the face of overwhelming public testimony against it by tenants, virtually unanimous opposition by the wider community, and a vote of no support by Community Board 4. For the many of us in Chelsea who have felt abandoned by these leaders, Layla has become our de facto representative—actually doing the job she’s now running for. She has shown the vigilance our elected officials so disappointingly lacked. She has attended all the NYCHA and City Council hearings on the plan, combed through the fine print of thousands of pages of documents to uncover critical details, and brought to light the financial liabilities and health hazards to which it exposes the public. She has obtained critical documents from NYCHA under Freedom of Information Law, successfully suing the agency for their release when it failed to comply.

Is she right to oppose the plan? It would rezone Chelsea to midtown-like density and shadow the High Line, Chelsea Park, and the historic south-facing grounds of the General TheologicalSeminary. It would eliminate an estimated 260 public-housing bedrooms. It would compact the residents of 18 public-housing buildings into only six new, much larger and taller ones that would be harder to monitor and secure. It would move older tenants from the safety of their all-senior building into one of these dangerously oversized new ones among tenants of all ages, a fate the seniors desperately fear. It would destroy 370 mature trees in what a federal report calls the city’s zone of least tree cover, least temperature reduction by trees, least pollution removal by trees, and least runoff avoided by trees—an affront to the very principle of environmental justice given the disproportionate impact on public-housing residents. It would squander a staggering amount of embodied carbon on needless replacement of structurally sound buildings during a climate crisis. It would dedicate public land to more luxury than public-housing apartments. Its gentrification would increase Chelsea’s average rent. It would turn an area totaling more than three city blocks into a construction zone for at least 16 years, subjecting homes and schools to noise, disruption, fine particulate, and toxins released by disturbance of highly contaminated soil—contamination we know of thanks to Layla’s research.

Perhaps least excusably, the project would use government funding to build new segregated housing. Its entire design hinges on replacing the public-housing buildings before beginning the mixed-income ones, locking in segregation that would obviously profit NYCHA’s private-sector development partner, the Related Companies. To support the project but not its segregation, as Erik Bottcher has claimed to, is hypocrisy, like supporting the Confederacy but not slavery.

The plan would never have gotten off the ground but for the lie that renovating the NYCHA buildings would cost as much as replacing them. The agency now admits that this claim didn’t include the cost of demolition and new-building design. Documents obtained by Layla through Freedom of Information Law show the project cost has ballooned to $2.4 billion, about twice NYCHA’s renovation estimate. Only late in the game did the agency announce that revenue from the mixed-income units would go into its general fund for use throughout the city rather than improving Chelsea’s public housing as originally promised—in other words, that the plan was really about making Chelsea its cash cow.

When NYCHA and Related entered into a Master Development Agreement formalizing the plan, Layla characteristically put it under a microscope. She found that Related’s required capital investment in the project and financial penalty for withdrawing from it were inconsequential amounts. The developer would have no real skin in the project’s success or failure. If things went south, it could impose new demands for keeping the plan alive, effectively holding it hostage. That would be in line with what it did after winning the 2021 Request for Proposals to renovate, and specifically not demolish, Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea. Once Related had a lock on that project, it announced that its own conditions assessment had found the buildings in poorer condition than NYCHA had previously determined. Without ever sharing that estimate orproviding a shred of evidence that renovation couldn’t proceed according to the original plan, Related blew the project scope up into a vast no-bid public contract for full demolition and replacement plus 3,500 mixed-income units.

Which brings us to a critical point about Layla’s unique opposition to demolition. Imagine the leverage Related would have if any buildings were removed and the project was stalled with gaping holes in the ground and relocated tenants marooned in temporary apartments.

Alongside many of the tenants, Layla supports saving Section 9, which she rightly calls “the only true public housing. ” The other City Council candidates have thrown in the towel on Section 9, noting that its federal funding couldn’t be secured even when Democrats were in power. Layla argues that it’s not a law of nature that prevents funding but a lack of political will. She plans to use land-use authority, budget negotiations, and oversight authority—tools with which she is singularly familiar—to work with city, state, and federal partners.

The mayor would be one of these partners. As a socialist, he should care about the fate of New Yorks’ social housing. I want Layla to be in a position to have his ear. We can’t let public housing go without a fight. If anyone can find a path to save it, Layla can. “It’s not a done deal” is practically her mantra. I’ll take courage, imagination, and initiative in a leader over resignation any day.