Where does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez live?

This is perhaps the most famous rookie Congressman in America, but in New York, the representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a virtual ghost.

It does not have a district office or local phone number, unlike the other three first-year members of the state.

And it's unclear whether the 29-year-old lawmaker, who represents the Bronx and Queens, still lives in the Parkchester neighborhood, so closely tied to her rise – even though she won her thwarted victory over her colleague, the MP Democrat Joe Crowley. with accusations that his home in Virginia made him too focused on Washington to serve his district.

Ocasio-Cortez uses since 2012 the condo of his father who died in the Bronx for his registration on the electoral lists. She even posed in the Bronx apartment of a bedroom of the famous photographer Annie Leibovitz in the profile of a Vogue magazine after her magnificent November election. But the Post could find little indication that she continues to live there.

The Post has sent four e-mails to Ocasio-Cortez spokesman Corbin Trent with specific questions – all of which have been ignored. On Saturday, the post office joined Corbin by phone.

"We will not comment," he said. Among the questions that he refused to answer: Where does the congressman live?

Ocasio-Cortez was in New York last weekend and this weekend, with appearances in Queens on both Saturdays. Yet she was not seen coming or going out of Parkchester that day.

The neighbor next to her apartment said that she had never seen Ocasio-Cortez. Another neighbor, who has been living in the corridor of the congressman's apartment for 40 years, said he had never seen her, nor her boyfriend, Riley Roberts, who claimed to have the address as his last spring.

"I would have remembered it," said the neighbor when he was shown a picture of Ocasio-Cortez.

Employees at Jerry's Pizzeria, less than a block away from her building, and the local grocery store, said she had never sponsored their businesses – and a waiter in a nearby taqueria said the Congressman had only come to be filmed by press teams.

A postal worker who delivers mail to the building stated that over the last 10 years he had seen only Occasio-Cortez intermittently and that several months of regular mail was accumulating in the mail box. letters before anyone retrieves it. The worker said that Ocasio-Cortez and Roberts were the only ones to receive mail at the address.

"It's not because their names are on the box that they live there," he said.

And in 2017, when Ocasio-Cortez started filling in scripts to become a congressional candidate, she did not even know which district she was living in, mistakenly stating that she was planning to run for the neighboring district 15 before correcting the mistake a few days later.

In Washington, Ocasio-Cortez rented a carpet in a luxury building in the upscale Navy Yard, where studios start paying $ 1,840 a month, according to the Washington Examiner.

New digs include gold-plated equipment such as a rooftop infinity pool, a cycling studio with a dozen expensive pelotons, saunas for men and women, and a golf simulation lounge – but no affordable housing for residents low income, despite local law. that forces them, reported the news site.

In the eight months since Ocasio-Cortez's dramatic defeat against the long-running Crowley in power in June – a victory that almost guaranteed victory in the very difficult District 14 – the Congress failed to open a local office.

Ocasio-Cortez has made four trips to the city since being admitted to Congress on Jan. 3, according to an article in the magazine Post on published reports and social media. These trips included five public events in his district – and three prestigious appearances in Manhattan, including a Jan. 21 stint on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert".

A district office "makes the government immediately accountable and accountable to citizens," said Jadan Horyn of Reclaim New York, a government oversight group.

"Voters must know that their representatives work for them and not for their national fame."

The space for the Ocasio-Cortez Constituent Office is in a new building in Jackson Heights.

The suites at 74-09 37th Avenue are rented at a price of about $ 40 per square foot. The Ocasio-Cortez office, on the third floor, is just under 5,000 square feet, bringing the annual undiscounted rent to $ 200,000, or nearly $ 17,000 per month.

In January, Ocasio-Cortez sought to blame the delay to a tenacious owner in another building where his predecessor, Crowley, had one of the two district offices.

"Although we tried to take over the lease from our predecessor, the owner wanted to almost double the rent", from 7 800 to 15 000 dollars per month, she tweeted January 22 – without specifying which of the spaces of Crowley whom she hoped to inherit.

"This peak would have meant fewer social workers for our community," she said. "Instead, we are creating a new space with a family business!"

But Ocasio-Cortez failed to mention that his rent would probably exceed the cost of Crowley's previous searches.

During The Post's visit last week, the congressman's office was still under construction, with workers building interior walls and installing drywall. A carpenter stated that the work would probably take several more weeks. A staff member said at a community council meeting that he would open on March 4.

It is unclear whether taxpayers or the owner are paying for major renovations.

A spokesman for Cow Bay Contracting, the Nassau County construction company working on the offices, declined to comment. The Ocasio-Cortez office refused to answer the question.

In the absence of a district office and having no way to contact the new congressman, voters resorted to desperate measures.

"Voters come here and leave notes on the door," the postal worker told her Parkchester apartment last weekend. "But it's a waste of time."

Additional report by Sydney Denmark