Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) recently minimized the value of her luxury DC apartment, likening it to a public housing unit during a town hall event in the Bronx.
Ocasio-Cortez made the comparison and minimized the significance of her living arrangements during the event, mentioning a public housing unit she recently visited in Queens.
“I move into this building, and it’s marketed as a ‘luxury’ building in D.C.,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “It’s an efficient building, it’s clean, it has public space, it has a rooftop garden—y’all watching my Instagram—it has clean air, it has clean water. And I think about this and I’m like, ‘Hm, this is what a luxury building is like.'”
Ocasio-Cortez’s luxury apartment is located in DC’s Navy Yard neighborhood. Studio apartments in the building reportedly cost over $2,000 a month, and three bedroom apartments can be as high as $5,000. The complex is equipped with an array of features, including an indoor lap pool, dog park, and Peloton cycling studio.
The newly-constructed complex, built adjacent to a Whole Foods, also features both an indoor lap pool and a rooftop pool, a rooftop dog park and dog wash station, numerous gyms including a Peloton cycling studio and a yoga studio, a demonstration kitchen with a wood-fired pizza oven, private massage rooms with hydromassage beds, a golf simulator studio, a basketball court, a racquetball court, and a rooftop tennis court with a “parabolic hitting wall” in case you’re alone with nobody to play with.
“What we have been taught that [sic] is a luxury should not be a luxury,” Ocasio-Cortez said before floating her dreams of buildings that aren’t profit-driven, or “tenant-owned.”
“Another world is possible,” she said. “We can live in buildings that are not-for-profit, or tenant-owned, there are so many ways we can slice this and we can structure it in a way where all people have the right to a dignified home.”
“What we have been taught and what we have been conditioned is that basic rights are a luxury and a privilege when they are not,” she added.
In live video posted in April, Ocasio-Cortez noted her “unfurnished” luxury apartment and claimed to be living a “completely depraved lifestyle.”