Our Bronx
Homes Guarantee and Community Control
Community Health and Wellness
Just and Quality Education
Equitable Economic Development
Safety and Dignity in Our Communities
Participatory Democracy and Co-Governance
Disability Rights
Although the Bronx has been largely known to the world for its negative statistics, those of us who grew up here know it’s a borough of resilience, creativity, and innovation. In the face of abandonment and disinvestment, we have organized tenant associations, exposed racist redlining practices, and won investments in our neighborhoods. When developers have proposed projects that would take public subsidies but provide only poverty-wage jobs, we have shut them down and organized to win historic community benefits. When we have experienced under-resourced, overcrowded, and over-policed schools, we have organized and put youth voices at the center of designing school safety.
Recently, living in the epicenter of a pandemic and facing yet another wave of police brutality, we have organized to ensure that our families and neighbors are cared for, addressing the root causes of the inequities we experience, and fighting for equitable resources to not only protect and defend our community but to sustain us and help us thrive.
Having been raised in Kingsbridge Heights in District 14 in the Bronx, I understand that those most impacted need to be at the center of decision-making, and that the way we govern must be more transparent and inclusive. Informed by my community, my lived and organizing experiences, and a commitment to co-governance, our platform reflects issues impacting my family and neighbors. I welcome your input in developing a shared vision for our future.
Where we live is fundamental to our overall health and wellness. After decades of fighting for investment and rebuilding the abandoned housing stock in our communities, the Bronx now faces displacement, unhealthy housing conditions, landlord harassment, evictions, and more. Everyone deserves safe, affordable, and quality housing that builds shared ownership and supports our communities to thrive. Development here should invest in our people and in residents co-governing where they live, and ensure long-term affordability.
- Ensure housing affordability and security for all, including investing resources to provide permanent housing for homeless New Yorkers.
- Strengthen landlord accountability and enforcement mechanisms.
- Protect homeownership by investing in small owner-occupied buildings, HDFCs, and cooperatives so that they’re financially and physically sustainable for low-income residents.
- Invest in Community Land Trusts that guarantee resident control, and support collective tenant ownership through the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA).
- Adjust housing-affordability levels to reflect local neighborhood-based average median-income levels to promote development without displacement.
- Fully fund NYCHA, ensure long-term affordability and tenants’ rights, and leverage existing HUD regulations, including Section 3, to invest in residents and involve them in governance.
Health is not just the absence of illness but also a reflection of overall community wellness. With the Bronx ranked the unhealthiest county in New York State, we understand intimately that health is determined not only through our individual choices but by social and economic factors. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the inequalities that already existed in our community. Now more than ever, we must address the root causes of the health disparities we experience, including the economic, housing, and education policies of the city as well as the need for quality and accessible care for all.
- Invest in a caring economy that ensures all residents, including undocumented immigrants, have access to family, child, long-term, and disability care.
- Provide access to quality health care for all residents, starting with the New York Health Act.
- Equitably fund, protect and strengthen our safety net, including public hospitals, so they serve as wellness centers that provide comprehensive preventive and short-term responsive care.
- Protect our care workers with safe staffing levels, adequate wages, and essential resources.
- Ensure comprehensive mental health services that support our residents to thrive.
- Mandate neighborhood health-equity assessments annually to evaluate community wellness and to inform development priorities at the borough and citywide levels.
- Keep ICE and police out of public hospitals and other care institutions.
- Expand access to healthy, affordable food and local ownership over our food system by protecting and investing in community gardens, food hubs and co-ops, and mutual-aid initiatives.
For decades, our city and state have disinvested from one of the most important pillars in our communities—our schools. From the draconian budget cuts to the criminalization and over-policing of students of color and the removal of parents’ and students’ voices in policy and decision-making, our schools have been set up to fail. All of our students—Black and immigrant, students of color, LGBTQI+ and gender-nonconforming—deserve a just and quality education and pathways to college and/or careers.
- Dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline and create police-free schools where all students are safe, supported, and free of criminalization, surveillance, and police violence.
- Ensure city and state investment for our public schools and address the privatization of education.
- Invest in culturally competent teachers, social workers, counselors, and mental health professionals in all New York City schools.
- Fully fund restorative and transformative justice practices to create positive school cultures that build trusting and healthy school communities.
- Fully fund robust child care and Pre-K through college and/or career programs and pathways for all students and families.
- Create real mechanisms for student, parent, and broader community engagement in decision-making within our schools and the Department of Education.
- Implement culturally responsive education that reflects and affirms the lived experiences and realities of our diverse student body.
- Make the City University of New York free for New York City students.
- Ensure that all families have access to virtual learning technology, including free high-speed internet.
- Secure funding to retrofit and upgrade school facilities to ensure that they are COVID-19 safe.
Too many of our leaders in the Bronx have spoken about the need to “return to normal.” The normal that existed in our district before COVID-19 was not one that we should go back to. We must instead set a new normal for the economy of our neighborhoods and the Bronx.
For far too long, economic development in our borough has meant gentrification and low-wage jobs. Rezonings and landlord speculation displace our neighbors and small businesses while ushering others in to enjoy the improvements. At this moment, we are experiencing levels of unemployment and underemployment in our district not seen since the Great Depression. Even before COVID-19, youth unemployment was in the double digits. This violence needs to end. Equitable economic development must advance the well-being and needs of people over the interests of big business and a wealthy few. For the borough and for our district, we cannot allow for an economic recovery to be a return to normal.
- Protect the livelihoods of all workers, especially essential, domestic, and care workers, by ensuring living wages and benefits and aggressively pursuing wage theft.
- Create new living-wage, union jobs to address the unemployment and underemployment in our communities.
- Protect small businesses and stabilize our commercial corridors through commercial rent stabilization and Minority and Women-Owned Business Enterprise (M/WBE) reform.
- Connect and leverage the resources of our Bronx anchor and civic institutions to grow living-wage, high-road jobs and shared wealth, and invest in community-led housing and economic development.
- Invest in our young people to be leaders and pioneers in a green and knowledge-based economy through innovation hubs and Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP) opportunities.
- Make SYEP into a job-guarantee program for all people 26 and younger.
- Transform who sets the agenda of our economic future so that Bronxites get to define our economic policies, and have access to dignified work, shared wealth, and support for small businesses.
- Work with colleagues in the City Council and the State Legislature to tax billionaires. We need to ensure that New York has a modernized and deeply progressive tax code.
- Extend paid sick leave and the “ABC test” to prevent misclassification and ensure workplace protections for eligible gig workers and freelancers.
- Support unionization drives in our district and across the city to create new living-wage, union jobs.
- Protect prevailing wages for jobs created with public investment, and also investigate and enforce occupational safety requirements for COVID-19 in my district and the city.
For too long, discriminatory and abusive policing has targeted and disproportionately violated communities of color, young people, homeless people, immigrants, LGBTQI+ residents, and Muslim communities. This is not safety. Safety means being able to live and thrive in our communities without fear of harm and violence, which are symptoms of larger systemic issues—like racism, health inequities, unemployment, and housing instability. We must tackle these underlying issues and create real safety for all residents that’s free of criminalization, incarceration, and abuse.
- Hold police officers accountable for racially discriminatory policies and practices.
- Remove ICE and the New York Police Department from social services, homeless outreach, public hospitals, and New York City schools.
- Invest in community-led strategies and practices that address harm, create accountability, and generate safety and healing for all residents, especially survivors of violence.
- Redirect funds from the New York Police Department to community-driven safety practices and programs, including fully funding violence interruption and intervention in our neighborhoods.
- Develop and fully fund robust first-responder networks to address mental health and emotional distress crises.
- Ensure that New York City closes Rikers Island before 2026 and stop the current proposal to construct four new borough-based jails.
- Work with the City Council to ensure that all of our community remembers returning from incarceration are supported and have access to meaningful employment, housing, health care, and educational programs.
- Fully fund robust alternatives to incarceration programs and services, including housing security, employment, and education.
Our democracy is strongest when all of its residents are actively engaged and invested in as leaders. Public servants must listen to and work with community residents and stakeholders, especially those most impacted by issues, in order to craft real solutions, ensure accountability, and share governing power.
- Institute local legislative assemblies that bring residents into a process of co-creating public policy and its implementation.
- Implement a comprehensive participatory budgeting process that engages residents of all ages in determining investment in the district.
- Ensure non-citizen municipal voting for local issues that impact all residents.
- Support municipal voting for residents age 16 and older to increase civic engagement.
- Fight for voter access reform that protects the rights of all residents to engage in the electoral process.
- Support organizing by being a hub for organizers, workers, and other community-led efforts working to improve the lives of residents in our community.
Nearly 22,000 people in District 14 live with a disability. Community members living with disabilities too often have to deal with infrastructure and systems that weren’t constructed with their needs in mind. In the 30 years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed we’ve seen how thoughtful policy can help to improve the lives of disabled persons. But much work remains to be done in our own city. To begin with, we must ensure that every subway station—as well as every public office building and every sidewalk—is 100% accessible and ADA-compliant.
- Ensure that all subway stations, public buildings, and sidewalks are fully accessible and compliant with the ADA
- Invest in community-based mental health services as an alternative to incarceration
- Have trained mental health professionals, instead of law enforcement, serve as first responders, so that people suffering from mental health issues are met, not with violence, but with the care that they need to keep themselves and everyone around them safe
- Ensure that people with disabilities have access to all essential services that they need to remain in their homes and communities
- Aggressively enforce paid sick leave law for home health care workers, so that predominantly immigrant home health care workers don’t have to choose between keeping their jobs and keeping their patients safe
- Require long-term care facilities to invest a majority of revenue in direct care
- Raise the minimum wage for home health workers to $18 an hour
- Require that one nursing home nurse is assigned to no more than five acute-care patients
- Fund grants that allow people with disabilities to weatherize and retrofit their homes
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