Longtime Sunnysider Melissa Orlando is a mom, works a 9-5 and teaches evening ballet classes. Now, she’s also running for the State Assembly. Where does she find the time?
By Carol Chen
SUNNYSIDE — Melissa Orlando, a candidate running in the 37th Assembly district, described her average day: she gets up at 8:30 a.m to log on to her remote job at a healthcare company. When she finishes her work day in the late afternoon, she gets out to knock on doors between Sunnyside and Long Island City through the early evening. Three nights a week she teaches a ballet class at Sunnyside Ballet Studio at 7:30, and when she is finally home, she drafts the next day’s social media and answers her remaining texts and emails. By her own count, it was at least a 12-hour day, and closer to 16.
“My days are really interesting, because unlike many other candidates, I am still working,” she said.
Orlando is running for the 37th Assembly District, the open Western Queens seat that three Democrats are fighting to claim in the June 23 primary. A single parent who holds two jobs, Orlando says she could not afford to stop earning to run, and she waited until her son, now 20, was old enough to be self-sufficient before she did.
The seat opened when Assemblymember Claire Valdez, who took office in January 2025, left to run for the congressional seat being vacated by Nydia Velázquez. Valdez is backing tenant organizer Samantha Kattan, a fellow Democratic Socialist who’s earned endorsements from the DSA, the Working Families Party, 32BJ SEIU, Make the Road Action, and, this month, Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The third candidate, Pia Rahman, is a community board member and former health care worker.
Orlando is running without a movement behind her and trailing in fundraising. Despite that, she remains optimistic. “Endorsements don’t vote,” she said. “The voters go to the polling place, and I believe when I talk to voters, they choose me.”
Orlando was born in Manhattan, spent part of her childhood in the Bronx and Rockland County, and grew up from age six in Orange County. She graduated from SUNY Purchase and lived on her own in Goshen before a long commute into the city drove her to look for somewhere closer. Friends in Queens told her to try the borough on for size. Sunnyside won her over with what she calls its “small town in the bigcity” feel and its diversity, and she ended up staying for 26 years. She has lived in three apartments, all within a six-block radius of one another.
She has only moved twice. The first time was for more space after her son was born. The second was because of a fire.
On Dec. 20, 2023, a five-alarm fire tore through her building on 47th Avenue, set off, she said, by a contractor the landlord had hired who used a blowtorch to strip paint from a door frame. She was home, fresh out of the shower with wet hair and no socks, when she smelled smoke and opened the Citizen app to find the fire was in her own building. She grabbed her son, her coat, whatever shoes were by the door, and stood on the sidewalk in 20-degree cold watching the building burn. Two and a half years later, the building remains under a full vacate order, she said, and no one has moved back.
That night, at a Red Cross station set up in a nearby school, Orlando started a WhatsApp group, collected her neighbors’ names and numbers, and spent the following months helping displaced tenants find places to sleep and claim what few benefits they were owed.
Orlando described the organizing around the fire “really a turning point” for her — solidifying her desire to help other people through community work.
Ask Orlando what she is proudest of, and she does not name the fire or the Chamber of Commerce presidency she held from 2018 to 2019. She names the advocacy around the 7 train.
A decade ago, as the line buckled during a long signal replacement, Orlando founded Access Queens, the transit group that grew out of the Facebook page, 7 Train Blues. Elected officials told her the only way to move the MTA was to embarrass it in public. She did not believe them. Instead she built a community group, worked directly with the agency, and organized a town hall where riders put their complaints to the head of the MTA in person. “We created change by partnership,” she said, “and that really informs how I think about what we can achieve. It does not have to be combative.”
Her policy ladder follows the same logic of using what already exists before reaching for the largest tool. On housing, her first priority is a mandatory, apartment-by-apartment database of rent-stabilized units, which she says would expose landlords who collect tax benefits while warehousing what she estimates are 20,000 to 25,000 vacant apartments. After that, she would build on publicly owned land, and only then turn to larger projects scaled, she says, to a neighborhood’s character. She points to Long Island City, where towers rose without the schools and grocery stores to match, as the cautionary tale.
If elected, she lists top three priorities: a stalled bill protecting tenants after disasters, which she ties to a recent run of fires in the district; the New York Health Act, which will give New Yorkers single-payer healthcare; and commercial rent regulation to shield small businesses from steep lease hikes, an idea she championed at the Chamber.
For all her 16-hour days, Orlando is learning piano and studying classical voice, on top of the ballet she has taught for years. And she still manages to find time everyday to frequent one Sunnyside small business. “When you walk around on the street, you see your neighbors, see people who know you,” she said. “There is community here. That is the thing I love the most.”
