Chevalier claimed that ‘the most marginalized should always be at the center’ of her work, a category that apparently includes people with felony convictions
A socialist candidate for New York’s 13th Congressional District has called for revoking a rule that keeps violent criminals out of New York City public housing.
Darializa Avila Chevalier, who is currently locked in a tight and divisive Democratic primary race with incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, has said she supports eliminating the New York City Housing Authority’s “permanent exclusion” policy.
The NYCHA regulation, the agency says, allows the city to keep murderers, drug dealers, sex offenders, and other criminals out of the country’s largest public housing operation, with as many as 400,000 residents, most of them women and children.
“Our campaign … is a campaign to end New York City Housing Authority’s policy of ‘permanent exclusion,'” Chevalier said during a 2017 panel discussion. “As folks who operate within the black queer feminist lens, we know that the most marginalized should always be at the center of our work.”
In her remarks, Chevalier said the program was being abused and that even those busted for “minor infractions” like “fare beating” and “marijuana possession” were being caught in the permanent exclusion net.
Chevalier made the remarks at an event called “The Criminalization of Home: Organizing to protect communities from NYC to Palestine.” She appeared on the panel as an organizer with the New York City chapter of Black Youth Project 100, “a member-based organization of radical 18-to-35-year-old people that work toward the liberation of Black people,” a YouTube description reads.
Chevalier’s claims about permanent exclusion fly in the face of what even far-left progressive groups have said about the issue.
“There are very few offenses that make you permanently ineligible. NYCHA overlooks most nonviolent offenses that aren’t related to drugs, weapons, or abuse,” reads an informational page from the Legal Aid Society.
The Vera Institute of Justice, another progressive nonprofit, has also credited the program with improving community safety, noting in a 2017 report that:
As a landlord, NYCHA must take into account strategies to address the distinct crime challenges facing its developments that threaten the safety of its tenants. Tenants and other neighborhood stakeholders not only consistently express elevated fear of crime in surveys, but also make demands to NYCHA and public officials for increased efforts to ensure their safety. Certain forms of violent crime—particularly those related to narcotics trafficking—pose a security risk to public housing communities. As an extensive body of research makes clear, tackling such crimes can produce real security gains and are not simply a futile game of “whack-a-mole.” However, these crimes cannot be adequately addressed through regular police enforcement and may require other mechanisms to safeguard communities, such as through exclusion and eviction.
Less than 5,000 people have been impacted by permanent exclusion between 2007 and 2014 (a drop in the bucket), the City & State blog reported in 2015.
“This is far outside the bounds of where mainstream Democrats and most New Yorkers are,” said Democratic Bronx councilman Eric Dinowitz. “Someone who wants to abolish the police and believes, as the far left does, that crime is a social construct is not someone who is aligned with the people of Harlem, Inwood, of Washington Heights and of the Bronx.”
Jay Martin, executive vice president of the New York Apartment Association, called ending permanent exclusion “insane.”
“Existing tenants deserve to live in a safe environment and not have to worry about violent criminals and sexual predators living next to their children and families. Living in public housing isn’t a birthright with no requirements. Not being a danger to your neighbors is one of those requirements,” Martin said.
It’s far from the first eyebrow-raising statement which Chevalier has made—with much of her most fiery vitriol coming against fellow Democrats. In now-deleted social media posts, she called former president Joe Biden a “rapist” and said “F–k Kamala Harris.” Espaillat and his allies are running attack ads in English and Spanish against Chevalier highlighting her remarks about Harris and Biden, who are popular with black residents of Harlem, part of the majority-Hispanic 13th district.
Chevalier has already faced controversy for attending a pro-Hamas rally in Times Square the day after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis. In other old X posts, she has also condemned interracial relationships and said she used the American flag as a washrag. She has blasted American military veterans as “child murderers” guilty of “war crimes.”
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