Editor’s  Note: Recently, several Chelsea Community News readers have submitted writings that speak to their support of a candidate—or candidates—in April 28’s NYC Council District 3 Special Election (with Early Voting happening through April 26). We’ve compiled these expressions of support into the following Letters to the Editor column. For more info on Early Voting and April 28’s Election Day, click here. Send your own Letter to the Editor via scott@chleseacommunitynews.com.

************************************************

Dear Editor:

The city has elected its first progressive mayor in 80 years. But Zohran Mamdani needs support from the City Council to promote his programs for economic and social justice otherwise being trampled by the administration in Washington and possibly stalled by regressive forces on the Council itself.

Lindsey Boyland has pledged her support for Mamdani’s efforts to create an enlightened city government. She will join with the Council’s Progressive Caucus in its efforts at a just, equitable and affordable New York.

—Randy Petsche

*************************************************

To the Editor:

I’m excited to rank Lindsey Boylan #1 for our City Council seat. What sets Lindsey apart for me is her progressive vision and her consistency in speaking to issues like affordability and protecting our community. She showed incredible bravery and tenacity in standing up to Andrew Cuomo but I think her work exposing him is just one example of her tenacity and her ability to advocate for people who are victims of our broken systems. I trust she will meet the truly transformative moment we are living through in the City and always fight for the everyday New York.

—Taylor Morgan

************************************************

To the Editor:

I support Lindsey Boylan to be our next City Council member because she is the progressive candidate in the race. She is the one running to help defeat Trump’s fascist agenda and policies. She is the candidate who will best support and advance in the City Council the affordability agenda of Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Lindsey is a fighter. She showed that when she helped bring down Andrew Cuomo and prevent him from becoming mayor. She wants to ICE-proof our city. She demonstrates that when she shows up for us on picketlines and demonstrations for public housing, trans rights, workers’ rights, immigrant rights, in defense of our LGBTQ+ neighbors. She is for universal childcare, affordable housing for all, a $30 minimum wage and a jobs guarantee. Lindsey is for Us. She is for District 3 and for Our City.

She is a Westside mom, an urban planner, and when in the state government helped secure hundreds of millions in state funding for NYCHA and helped win the $15 minimum wage and paid family leave. Now she wants to bring that know-how and those skills to the City Council – for us.

I have canvassed Penn South buildings with Lindsey and watched and listened as she met and talked with hundreds of my fellow cooperators. She will listen to our concerns and she will be here for us.

I am proud to support Lindsey Boylan and to endorse her campaign, as have organizations like the Working Families Party (WFP), Met Council on Housing Action, The Professional Staff Congress (PSC) and UAW Region 9; and elected officials and leaders like Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander.

—Jay Schaffner

***********************************************

To My Neighbors & Friends Across the Westside:

There is a profound urgency to vote; it empowers you and me. As a Puerto Rican New Yorker whose family has dedicated 50 years to public service, I have sat on your local community board for a decade and left a private-sector career to organize tenants. This path has provided me with robust experience in City Hall and Albany, fighting for our most vulnerable neighbors. I am imploring you to use your ranked-choice voting power to vote Lindsey Boylan as #1 in the special election and the June primary for NYC Council District 3. 

I grew up on 47th Street, but the life experiences that shaped me come from across the Westside. My understanding of what it means to fight for a living comes from the generations before me. My mother was born in NYCHA housing, the daughter of a man who worked for a paint manufacturing company. My father was also raised in NYCHA, the son of a machinist who labored in NYC’s sweatshops. My abuelo and abuela made 47th Street our home nearly 70 years ago. My family has built a life out of grit to uphold the promise of a city that cares for its own. 

The Garces and LeBron families have always been in the trenches for civil rights. We’ve marched, organized, burned bras, and taken over Nassau Hall to demand an end to the support of an apartheid state. I am the nephew of a beautiful man who died of AIDS when I was only ten years old. For my family, civil rights is not an abstract concept; it is a history written in sacrifice and a duty to uphold what G-d and our founders found self-evident. 

As a progressive and a public servant who has built alliances with diverse groups in City Hall and on block associations, it is the vigor and quality of Lindsey’s work that inspires me to endorse her. Knowing these candidates over the last decade gives me inside knowledge of how they operate—which is vital, as the winner could serve in the City Council for 11.5 years. 

That is a significant amount of time to represent our corner of New York City. As a city planner who has worked in the state executive branch, Lindsey has the professional expertise to represent us while some of the largest infrastructure projects in our country are taking place (The Freedom Tunnel, Hudson Yards, the Port Authority Bus Terminal, and the Penn Station redesign). She also understands the gravity of the displacement facing one of our district’s largest concentrations of minority residents. 

Today, the Westside faces unprecedented challenges. We can no longer afford to treat identity politics as “business as usual.” We must reject the pessimism that change means taking steps backward and instead embrace a progressivism that delivers material results for those hurting most. Nearly 62% of New Yorkers are living paycheck to paycheck, and one in five requires SNAP assistance (2026 True Cost of Living Report). Proposed austerity cuts are unacceptable in a country where the stock market does not reflect the health of our real economy. 

I ran for public office to “break the wheel.” I was driven by a deep love for my home and the need to end the theater of “dog poop and trash can” politics. I ran to address real crises: the rise in hate crimes against our Asian American neighbors, small business closures, and housing shortages. I ran to stop the “machine” from doing the bare minimum when a politician’s whole heart is needed to respond to human suffering. I ran to end NYCHA demolition plans in Chelsea and to protect the seniors and immigrants whose access to healthcare and food is constantly under threat.

Our family has always lived by a three-part standard: service for the world, service for our country, and service for our home. Since the 1980s, when we organized to clean up Times Square and Hell’s Kitchen alongside Mayors Koch and Dinkins, Ruth Messinger, and the late Ronnie Eldridge, we have been at the table with the old guard. Yet, while some of those same politicians remain entrenched today, Lindsey Boylan is the one who truly embraces these principles of service. 

We choose to work in service of all because the random acts of kindness we experience here are powered by a deep love for our home. That love drives us to demand more. 

The upcoming special election on April 28 is critical. Lindsey Boylan and Leslie Boghosian Murphy are the leaders who will protect the generational work we have committed to on the Westside. 

Early voting is happening now through April 26. Please join me in supporting them this election season.

—Christopher LeBron (former candidate, State Assembly, District 75)

************************************************

To the Editor:

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 Theological Seminary. 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 or providing 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.   

—David Holowka

—END—

ChelseaCommunityNews.com (CCNews) is an independent, single-owner online newspaper providing news, arts, events, and opinion content to Manhattan’s Chelsea community and its adjacent areas (Flatiron/NoMad and Meatpacking Districts, Hudson Yards, Hell’s Kitchen, Broadway/Times Square, and the Penn Station area).  Our editorial content is made possible by advertising revenue, grants, quarterly pledges of support, and voluntary reader donations (click here for our GoFundMe campaign). To join our subscriber list, click here to receive ENewsletters containing links to recently published content–as well as an occasional “Sponsored Content” email featuring an advertiser’s exclusive message. 

ChelseaCommunityNews.com is a member of the New York Press Association (NYPA) and the Empire State Local News Coalition. Our content is collected for placement in the United States Library of Congress’ LGBTQ+ Studies Web Archive. (“We consider your website to be an important part of  the historical record,” read a July 26, 2019 email.) Our freelance reporters have been recognized by NYPA’s annual Better Newspaper Contest, with Honorable Mention wins for Best News or Feature Series  (2021 & 2023). CCNews is a three-time winner in the Coverage of the Arts category (First Place and Honorable Mention, 2022 and Third Place, 2023).

PLEASE SUPPORT LOCAL JOURNALISM: HELP CHELSEA COMMUNITY NEWS THRIVE BY FREQUENTLY  VISITING THIS WEBSITE TO READ OUR ARTICLES AND CLICK ON THE ADVERTISEMENTS.