Darializa Avila Chevalier once called for the government to seize all properties from landlords.
But her own father is currently renting his Florida condo out for $1,750 a month, The Post has learned.
The 32-year-old Mamdani-backed Democratic Socialist stunned onlookers this week when she defeated five-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat for the Democratic nomination to represent New York’s 13th Congressional District, covering upper Manhattan and parts of The Bronx.
Avila Chevalier ran a populist campaign centered on limiting market-rate housing and fighting “corporate greed.”
Still, her father owns market-rate property, and rents it out at market rate, to boot.
Public records show Frank R. Avila purchased a condominium in Miami in 1998 for $92,900 — about $193,000 today.
The unit sits inside a sprawling complex tucked into the Fontainebleau neighborhood roughly 10 miles west of downtown Miami, a densely urban area where 84.8% of residents primarily speak Spanish at home and more than 64% were born outside the United States.
It is a working-class immigrant community — exactly the kind of place Avila Chevalier says she is fighting to protect from the economic forces of appreciation and displacement.
Those forces, it turns out, have been very good for Frank Avila. And now he is charging his tenants for them.
According to Realtor.com and Apartments.com, his unit was recently listed for rent at $1,750 a month — and found a new tenant in June, records show. The two-bedroom, 2.5-bathroom townhouse-style condo with updated bathrooms, tile floors and an assigned parking spot has been actively on the rental market since at least 2011, records also show.
Similar units in the complex now average around $375,000 in value — a fourfold jump from what he paid nearly three decades ago.
In July 2025, Frank and his wife Zoraya Avila took out a $190,000 mortgage on the property through A&D Mortgage LLC, with a maturity date of 2055, according to Miami-Dade County records obtained by The Post.
In other words, he borrowed $190,000 against a property whose value was built entirely by the market, and is now collecting rent from a tenant to help pay it back. It is, by any definition, the landlord playbook.
The irony is not subtle, given what his daughter has spent years saying about exactly that kind of wealth accumulation.
Her father’s latest transaction stands in contrast to one of the central themes of Avila Chevalier’s housing platform. Throughout her congressional campaign, the Harlem progressive has argued that New York has leaned too heavily on market-driven housing solutions, warning that new market-rate development can accelerate displacement and erode the identity of long-established neighborhoods.
A CNN KFile review of Avila Chevalier’s since-deleted Twitter account found that she had reposted a message calling for the suspension of rent and mortgage payments and the seizure of “all properties from landlords.” Her father owns one, rents it out and just borrowed nearly $200,000 against its appreciation.
Avila Chevalier told CNN the posts did not reflect who she is today, saying “I have grown considerably since in the years since these tweets, and I am focused on our community and our community’s future.”
Avila Chevalier did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Her more recent, polished positions are only marginally less pointed. On her campaign website, she describes herself as a renter who knows “what it’s like to watch the vast majority of each month’s paycheck go towards rent,” positioning herself squarely alongside the 88% of her district’s residents who do not own their homes.
When Avila Chevalier does endorse homeownership, she is careful about what kind. In a recent interview with the New York Times editorial board, she said housing policy must include “creating pathways to homeownership, investing in community land trusts and HDFCs,” the latter of which are income-restricted affordable co-ops in New York.
Community land trusts are explicitly designed to cap the equity gains that make the landlord model so lucrative. Frank Avila’s condo operates under no such restrictions.
She has been particularly sharp about what landlords do to working-class neighborhoods.
“When folks who can afford those buildings move in, that also has an impact on the market,” she told the Times board. “The folks who don’t make quite as much, who are living in surrounding buildings … they are the ones that are getting screwed over.”
Title records suggest the ownership history of the unit shifted along the way. A 2016 quit claim deed removed a prior co-owner, Maria Chevalier Avila — the congresswoman-elect’s mother — from the title, suggesting a separation or divorce. A 2024 quit claim deed added Zoraya Avila to the title before the couple took out their mortgage in 2025 and listed the unit for rent.
Avila Chevalier has not been shy about what she wants to replace the current housing market with. She has championed the HOMES Act, which would create a federal social housing development authority, and has called for a Green New Deal for Public Housing.