Chris Silvera Stood Up for Public Housing—Who Else Will Join the Fight?

IBT Local 808 Secretary-Treasurer Chris Silvera [l] is seen here alongside FEC Houses activist Johnnie Stevens [r] and other Chelsea residents at an anti-demolition rally held outside former City Council Member Erik Botcher’s residence on Sept. 13, 2025. Photo/Joe Maniscalco

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By Joe Maniscalco

Before his recent passing, IBT Local 808 Secretary-Treasurer Chris Silvera bravely stood alongside public housing tenants in Chelsea fighting to save their homes from privatization and demolition.

He called low-income communities like the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses [FEC] on the west side of Manhattan the “support system for the working class” and said labor leaders should be the “driving force” protecting New York City public housing from privatization and dissolution.

“To destroy public housing for fancy development is antithetical to the labor movement, and antithetical to what we stand for,” Silvera told Work-Bites last year.

Chris Silvera is gone now, but the campaign to sell off and raze New York City Housing Authority [NYCHA] neighborhoods located between 9th and 10th avenues in Chelsea, from West 17th up to West 27th streets, continues.

And if opponents of the RAD/PACT conversion plan are correct, it will be used as the blueprint for wiping out what’s left of public housing across the rest of the city, too. Maybe even beyond—all under the guise of vital redevelopment and so-called public-private “partnerships.”

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, despite his democratic-socialist branding, is now at the wheel driving that privatization push home. His recently-released Block by Block housing plan earmarks some $2 billion for privatization efforts.

The New York Times’ Emma Fitzsimmons said last week that the current mayor’s housing plan “embraces many of the strategies that his predecessor, Eric Adams, tried,” with Mayor Mamdani insisting he is “making greater investments” that will “build off the progress Adams made.”

But don’t believe it, public housing advocates fighting back against demolition warn.

“This proposed budget should alarm the entire city,” Save Section 9 activist Ramona Ferreyra told the New York City Council Finance Committee on June 10. “It is the largest transfer of public monies and assets in recent history and it will destroy the only truly affordable housing we have in New York City that locks your rent to your income—not to AMI [Average Median Income].”

The City of New York needs to strip public housing tenants in Chelsea of their Section 9 housing protections and push them into the weaker Section 8 program. Doing so paves the way for private developers, including Related Companies and Essence Development, to come in and demolish the existing communities there. In Chelsea that means leveling the FEC Houses and supplanting them with a towering new complex of mixed luxury housing á la Hudson Yards.

NYCHA claims it simply doesn’t have the money necessary to fulfill its mandate of providing low- and moderate-income New Yorkers with safe and affordable housing—and has no choice but to climb into bed with private developers who, in turn, can’t wait to get hold of the 99-year leases the city is offering.

Public housing advocates fighting demolition warn New Yorkers shouldn’t buy that argument either.

Somehow, $1.5 billion in HPD capital funding has been made available to hasten the push to privatization. That, demolition opponents further insist, is money that should go to maintaining and repairing the existing public housing stock—and not privatizing it through RAD/PACT.

“The city keeps saying that there is no money for Section 9, in Congress, too. And yet here we are staring at a $1.5 billion already in the budget,” District Leader and City Council candidate Layla Law-Gisiko told the Finance Committee last week. “It’s easy. We’re not asking for more money. We’re just asking for a reallocation. That money should go to comprehensive modernization, for the basic physical repairs NYCHA residents have been demanding for years.”

A Temporary Restraining Order issued in February blocking the demolition of the FEC Houses remains in effect this week following an appellate court hearing held the day after the City Council’s Finance Committee hearing.

Visnja Vujica, attorney for residents fighting the planned demolition of the FEC Houses, sounded hopeful Chelsea residents will ultimately prevail as the case continues to make its way through the courts.

“I think [the judges] understood the point that two-thirds of this public housing land is planned to be given away to luxury housing,” Vujica told Work-Bites following Thursday’s court proceedings. “I hope that they agree that NYCHA doesn’t have the authority, and they have to follow the process, and make a plan that works and is authorized.”

NYCHA may not yet have the green light to demolish the FEC Houses. But that hasn’t stopped authorities pushing the plan from going to outrageous lengths to intimidate and harass tenants.

As Work-Bites has previously reported, FEC tenants have been subjected to an intense pressure campaign aimed at getting them to surrender their Section 9 housing protections. But they continue to fight for the future of public housing, nonetheless.

Chris Silvera stood beside them. It remains to be seen if there are other labor leaders out there who are ready to do the same.