Did New York City's Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani, his team or any credible media outlets announce that the incoming city administration plans to convert Trump Tower into a homeless shelter? No, that's not true: Lead Stories did not find a confirmation supporting the existence of such a plan on the pages officially affiliated with Mamdani. No credible media outlets reported the story, either.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X on November 6, 2025. It opened:
🚨🇺🇸 BREAKING -- Mamdani Plans To Convert Trump Tower into Homeless Shelter.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: Lead Stories screenshot of post at x.com/PamphletsY)
The earliest variation of the claim identified by Lead Stories dates back to October 22, 2025 (archived here), when it was first published on Facebook. Yet, at the time, it did not describe the idea as a decided matter or as something that had originated from Mamdani's team -- it sarcastically speculated about it as one of many hypothetical scenarios.
The November 2025 version of the claim was elaborated in an article (archived here) published by a website named "Pamphlets," which was also the name of the account that posted the entry reviewed in this fact check. Its headline read:
Mamdani Ally Leaks Plans To Convert Trump Tower into Homeless Shelter.
New York's new mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has announced plans for a state-run luxury rehabilitation compound for homeless and addicted veterans -- turning the relics of capitalist greed into centers of recovery, work, and collective renewal.
The project, known as the Veterans' Rebirth Compound, would combine housing, physical training, and political education to help veterans rebuild their lives through discipline, purpose, and solidarity. Empty hotels and abandoned corporate properties are being considered for conversion.
Yet, the rest of the piece didn't say anything suggesting that Trump Tower is one of the properties considered for the project -- the body of the article didn't even mention Trump Tower for the second time or offer a direct quote from the purported source cited in the title of the material.
(Source: Lead Stories screenshot of page at pamphlets.blog)
A search for the supposed project's name across Google News yielded zero results:
(Source: Lead Stories screenshot of search results page at Google.com)
A number and a type of the complaints made to city agencies coming from the Trump Tower, occupying one block between 56th and 57th streets on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, for the period between January 1, 2025, and November 7, 2025, did not indicate that the building is especially badly maintained:
(Source: Lead Stories screenshot of search results page at portal.311.nyc.gov)
As seen in the screenshot above, the address was not reported as an abandoned property (archived here) or so-called zombie home (archived here), and the building did not appear on the city's list of "vacant, open, unsecured" buildings.
As of this writing, Trump Tower had a functioning website (archived here), and a few of the tower's units were listed for sale (archived here).
"Pamphlets" (archived here) described itself as "a revolutionary communist news media project dedicated to unraveling the misconceptions and lies about communism, communist countries, and capitalism". According to the WhoIs domain lookup tool (archived here), as of this writing, the website was less than a year old:
(Source: Lead Stories screenshot of search results page at WhoIs.domaintools.com)
The platform (archived here) that Mamdani promoted during his mayoral campaign doesn't discuss the destiny of Trump Tower at all. Furthermore, it does not include a suggestion to convert any existing, non-abandoned residential or mixed-use buildings into homeless shelters.
As an advanced Google search shows, the word "shelter" appears on Mamdani's campaign website just once:
(Source: Lead Stories screenshot of search results on Google.com)
But if one clicks on that link, it becomes self-evident that the entry doesn't contain a proposal to convert Trump Tower into a homeless shelter (archived here).
Mamdani's account on X mentioned Trump Tower twice, but in absolutely different contexts:
(Source: Lead Stories screenshot of search results page on X.com)
Recording the second video (archived here), then-candidate Mamdani explicitly said that what he was addressing was not Donald Trump or Trump Tower per se -- he was talking about the candidacy of former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who was also running for mayor of New York City at that time.
(Source: Lead Stories screenshot of post at x.com/ZohranKMamdani)
Additionally, the picture of a building used in the Pamphlet's article didn't even show Trump Tower: It was an image of Trump International Hotel (archived here) located across Central Park on the West Side of Manhattan. As of this writing, there were no signs that it had already been abandoned or was about to become one of the city's abandoned buildings.
