I’m running because ordinary working-class people in Jersey City deserve a lot better than we’re getting right now. The cost of living is out of control here, and we don’t see the quality of life in our communities that we deserve.

The corporate entities that buy and sell Jersey City and a lot of Jersey City’s politicians, from the Kushner developers to property managers like Equity, have so much power. There’s a really nefarious cycle of campaign donations from real estate developers, their executives, their lobbyists, and so on, leading to massive waves of displacement and gentrification throughout our city. We need to build a movement to fight back, and I see this election as part of that.

The main issues are cost of living and quality of life. We’re running on a platform of universal rent control, universal childcare, and safe, clean, green streets.

Universal rent control also means housing as a human right in the background. Whether you’re a tenant or a homeowner, people’s cost of living is through the roof. Jersey City is 70 percent renters; [that’s why it’s so necessary to] expand rent control in our city.

We are giving tax breaks to people like the Kushner developers — they’ve been getting decades-long tax abatements. We need to end that practice, which is straining our city budget. And this is a city budget that’s borne on the backs of ordinary homeowners who are just trying to scrape by, and many of them are feeling the squeeze right now with a 50 percent increase in their tax bills over the past five years. This is tightening the grip on working people whether they are renters or homeowners.

Parents should be able to depend on our city to support them for childcare for kids aged zero through two. We have universal pre-K — we should be expanding that and extending it. But we need to invest more money in K–12 as well. We have crumbling classrooms and classrooms without air conditioning units in our neighborhood. We have a teacher-to-student ratio that doesn’t work for anybody.

So we need to really invest in our public schools. That’s both a city-level fight and a state-level fight. Should we get elected to city council, we need to take on state-level fights too.

An employee of NJ Transit reached out to me before this strike was announced, and I’m grateful that he trusted me to talk. We chatted, and he shared his perspective from the inside as a worker at NJ Transit. We cowrote a piece that he wanted me to put out in my name, addressing the strike and the fact that the CEO — he’s a temporary CEO just for this year, Kris Kolluri — was brandishing this anti-union sentiment during the strike. It was very disturbing because one of the basic demands was pay parity with other train engineers in the tristate area.

It costs so much to live here. If you want NJ Transit engineers to be able to actually live here and have families here, we’ve got to pay them enough. To pit the workers’ demands for a salary commensurate with the labor that they put in and commensurate with other workers in the same field in the region — to pit that against “the riders are going to be affected, the commuters are going to be affected, ordinary people are going to be affected” — this is just pitting working people against working people.

What we really should be doing is hammering away at this new corporate transit fee that the state of New Jersey set up. We should be expanding that, because the corporate transit fee now takes a little money off the top of the biggest corporations in New Jersey and puts it into NJ Transit funds. For the first time, there’s this permanent source of funding. Which is nuts that we don’t have other permanent sources of funding for our mass transit here — but we need to be expanding that instead of saying, “Workers deserve less.”

The vast majority of the transit here is either the NJ Transit buses or the PATH [Port Authority Trans-Hudson] train in and out of the city. There’s also the light rail, which folks depend on. The PATH is controlled by this joint board between New York and New Jersey, the Port Authority. Just the other month, I was speaking with some other folks from Jersey City at a board hearing, because conditions on the PATH are so bad and there’s really inadequate service, especially for off-peak and weekend hours.

[We need to] invest more in service for working-class people for all of these times. Let’s remember, not everyone works a 9–5 job, and even folks who do work 9–5 jobs are packed like sardines into these trains. We need more service during normal hours too. But at least as a first demand, these off-peak hours need way better attention.

Meanwhile our state is considering a turnpike expansion — widening the highway that runs through Jersey City and Hoboken. This is disastrous environmentally and public health–wise. We’d likely see high increases in asthma rates in the area, and [widening lanes] does nothing to alleviate traffic. So instead of investing untold amounts of money into widening a turnpike, let’s put that into mass transit. Let’s put that into increasing bus service. Let’s put that into increasing PATH service. We are one of the areas of the country that has some of the lowest car ownership rates, but that is not matched by the kinds of access to public transit we have.

Christ Hospital lies on the border of the district that I’m running in. This is the community or neighborhood hospital for residents in the Heights in Jersey City, where I’m running for council. The nurses there are represented by Health Professionals and Allied Employees (HPAE). I’m really grateful to have the endorsement of HPAE in my campaign for city council.

Long before I got that endorsement, I wrote this opinion piece, because it seemed clear that another private company coming in to save a hospital in trouble is not the answer. Health care should be a human right. It should be a social good, not a profit-making venture. And even nonprofit companies will run hospitals and their CEOs are making millions of dollars, which doesn’t make any sense.

Christ Hospital faced a lot of trouble over decades. In these different moments of crisis, different private companies [and nonprofits] have come in and said, we’re going to solve things. CarePoint was the last round, about a decade ago, and that hasn’t lasted or worked very long. And so Hudson Regional Health came in — mind you, this company is buying up more and more hospitals, and it has executives who have donated tons of money to the current mayor’s PAC.

Hudson Regional Health said that they were not going to recognize the [prevailing] union contract. So when HPAE members and organizers showed up to Jersey City Council and demanded that our city council speak out against this egregious behavior by this private health care company, I echoed their call.

It seems like members and the union have settled on a contract with the new management. But it remains to be seen: Are the new managers and new executives going to again run this [hospital] into crisis? Are we going to have to see a whole new round of negotiations between these private entities, or can we as a city invest in a long-term plan for buying out Christ Hospital?

I don’t pretend that this is going to happen overnight. But if we start with the premise that public hospitals statistically perform better in terms of care — especially in care for people without insurance, poor people, working people, people of color — these are the communities that Christ Hospital serves predominantly. . . . So we need to start with that premise and then see how we can get [to public ownership]. I think it starts with a plan for a long-term buyout over time, and maybe that’s [in partnership] with the state of New Jersey. It doesn’t have to be all Jersey City. Maybe it’s partnering with Hudson County, and the different towns and cities here going in on it together. We can’t have private companies ordering around our nurses and our health care workers, because that doesn’t result in the best outcomes for patients or for workers.

It could have been prevented. It should have been prevented. Andrew Washington should still be alive, and my heart is with his family. It is just awful. And unfortunately, we saw a not dissimilar event in New Brunswick, New Jersey, [in August], where Deborah Terrell, a woman experiencing a mental health crisis, was killed by police. This is not abnormal.

The New Jersey State Legislature passed a law providing for this ARRIVE Together program that helps cities pair police response with mental health crisis response, so that police officers would be joined by mental health crisis professionals on calls like this, with the idea that this can help prevent needless and senseless killing of people who are having a crisis. That’s huge, and we need to expand that to 24/7. Right now, we have a limited amount of time each day and each week, or only sometimes on some days, that this mental health crisis response is available. We need to push to make sure that we have a mental health crisis hotline that someone could call, and ideally the police wouldn’t even show up — we would just have professional mental health crisis responders going there.

The ARRIVE Together program was [rolled out] in New Jersey because of Andrew Washington’s death and the death of Najee Seabrooks, another black man, in Paterson, New Jersey, who was killed by police. These stories are already informing some change, and this is the least that our elected leaders can do. But we obviously need to do way more, and it goes back to health care again. If we have health care that’s privately run in Jersey City and the rest of New Jersey, it’s going to be harder and harder for people who need mental health care to get the support that they deserve. Again we start with the premise that health care, mental health care included, is a social good. Then [we ask,] what do we need to do to get there?

We need to codify our sanctuary city status through municipal council legislation and not only have it be through executive order. And we need to be very intentional in communicating with Jersey City law enforcement that under no circumstances do you voluntarily cooperate with ICE. There are times when ICE has the warrants, they have all of the documentation, they have all of the legal power, and I think it’s still important to push back as much as possible.

But certainly in cases where it’s at all blurry whether they have the legal right to be somewhere, to search somewhere, or to get some information, the answer is no. They’re not allowed into our buildings. They’re not allowed into our schools. They’re not allowed into our city hall. They’re not allowed into businesses.

That’s one thing: our city being very proactive about directing not only public safety but all of our offices to practice the maximum extent of noncooperation with ICE. The other thing is, we should be offering stay-in-city sanctuary services. If someone comes to the city and says, “I’m fearing for my status; I’m fearing that ICE agents might get me,” support them with in-city sanctuary. That can look like temporary housing for an extended period of time, to make sure that they can be free of this terror that ICE is imposing.

We had an ICE jail in Hudson County back before 2020, and I was very active in the fight against that ICE jail. Toward the end of this campaign, we were going to these county commissioner meetings, just asking the county to cancel this ICE contract. It turned out that it hinged entirely on the county executive to cancel this contract with ICE and stop using our jail to warehouse immigrant detainees. In the fall and winter of 2020, there was a hunger strike taking place at the jail. I ended up getting unconstitutionally arrested with a few other people at a peaceful vigil that we were doing outside of the county executive’s home. These were activists on the ground taking our lead from hunger strikers and people in detention.

That’s the kind of stuff we have to be doing if it comes to that. We need to sometimes be doing riskier actions and riskier demonstrations. That shouldn’t have been a risky one, by the way — the arrests were totally unconstitutional. But we need to put ourselves out there, and no elected official can accomplish this [on our own], this Herculean task of making a sanctuary city a reality. We need a movement. We need a mass organization. We need democratic socialist organizers to work with immigrant justice organizers and with other community groups and organizers.

The legislative part, the legal part, the policy part — that’s all very important. We also need really robust ICE watch networks that do the rapid response work that a lot of networks here are doing. Elected officials have to be investing in those and showing up to be supportive of those movements on the ground.

Democratic socialism means that working people are in charge. Right now, if you look around, it’s very clear that ordinary working-class people are not in charge.

Otherwise housing would not be a commodity such that the Kushner developers are shooting up luxury skyscrapers and flipping them for profit, leaving thousands of empty apartments in Jersey City. If working-class people were in charge, we wouldn’t see our hospitals run privately and fail to actually provide the care that we deserve. We wouldn’t see mass transit defunded; we wouldn’t see our public schools challenged by charters and by our state defunding them.

Democratic socialism is the movement to actually put working-class people in power. We should be contesting for elected positions in city government, in state government, and in the federal government. But it also crucially means that in workplaces, working people should be contesting for power against the boss all the time. They should be building up militant unions, because elected officials can’t do much without workers organized in their workplaces.

It looks like the tenants movement. Our cities, Jersey City being a prime example, are so dominated by the real estate industry specifically that a movement of tenants is going to be critical to pushing back [against it] and building that independent political power that we need. In our workplaces, in our buildings, and in elected offices, we need to constantly be contesting for power so that working people are in charge — so that we can prioritize meeting our basic needs over profit-making.

I wouldn’t be running without being a member of DSA. I asked my local chapter to endorse me before I announced that I would be a candidate; it was very important to me that this campaign would be one that has buy-in from a membership-led organization with anti-capitalist left politics, that identifies as democratic socialist. Being a DSA member for the past five years–plus and having relationships with people in the chapter really led me to this moment and to this campaign.

This is an election campaign: it’s very fast-paced, and there’s no easy way to constantly be like, “Hey, let’s get the entire DSA chapter to come together and make decisions about what’s going to happen today and tomorrow.” That realistically can’t happen. But having the democratic buy-in of the chapter and routinely meeting with folks from across the chapter to talk about what’s going on with these races is critical.

DSA is not the only organization [involved in my campaign]. Like I mentioned, I’m proud to be endorsed by HPAE, the major health care union in the state of New Jersey. I’m also in the process of seeking endorsement from a few other unions; I have the support of and relationships with other community organizations that don’t do elected candidate endorsements, but I’m tapping into these networks of people who are already doing amazing work in neighborhoods throughout Jersey City.

An elected official can’t do anything on their own. If we pretend that we can go in there and change things without boots on the ground, without people in this fight in greater numbers than just ourselves, then we’re just going to get sucked into this same system of negotiations with big developers, or with politicians who are bought and sold by those big developers. We’re going to constantly feel the need to compromise and compromise. Compromise will happen, but we need to make those compromises transparent and participatory as opposed to behind closed doors.

But that whole process has to be done out in public with the people in our communities, with the people throughout Jersey City and in the Slopes and the Heights in Ward D where I’m running. Again, I’m not going to be able to do all of that work of bringing all these decisions and all this information out in public. I’m going to work very hard to do that, but we need a movement to be able to constantly do that work together — to be campaigning for universal rent control, universal childcare, and safe, clean, green streets.

It’s been an uphill battle throughout this campaign. I’m running independently in the race. It’s a nonpartisan election, so there was no primary for it. We have five people in the city council race. Every other candidate is on the ticket of someone running for mayor as well.

I’m the only candidate in the Ward D Council race in Jersey City that is running independently. That means not only that I’m running independent of a mayoral candidate at the top of the ticket, but also that I’m running independent from any real estate developer money, independent from any corporate PAC money or donations, and independent from contributors who have pay-to-play contracts with the city.

Some folks will look at me and be like, “How do you not have a mayor at the top of the ticket? Do you have any chance at all?” When I talk about all the work we’ve been doing and all the support we’re getting, sometimes they’re very surprised to see that, but it really resonates with people. Having someone who has an independent voice, who’s attentive to the issues of the ward and the community first and foremost, as opposed to attentive to another politician or attentive to corporate donors — that resonates with people.

We have a real shot of winning. It’s going to take a lot more work, but we’ve had 150 unique volunteers. We’ve raised nearly $100,000 in the campaign so far. We’ve made over eighteen thousand attempts at the doors at this point. We’re going to ramp all that up exponentially in the weeks before Election Day. We have a real shot at winning as an independent democratic socialist in Jersey City.