Policy Platform:

  • I know Berkeley is a wonderful place to live, and I want to keep our city growing and welcoming new neighbors. We offer the strongest sanctuary laws, tenant rights, and labor protections in the county, and we should make those available to more people!

    We need to invest in new housing of all types: affordable and subsidized housing, cooperative and land trust models, and market-rate, affordable-by-design building. We need to build housing for everyone in our community including students, seniors, and growing families.

    We need to protect the housing we already have. I support universal tenant protections, tenant unions, and pathways to ownership through the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA). I support investing in affordable family housing through the Small Sites program.

    We need safe streets for all. Berkeley should be building infrastructure designed for a future with more cyclists, more transit, and denser communities. I support aligning and implementing our current streets studies.

    We need to take care of our most vulnerable. The Harrison Street encampment is not safe or healthy for anyone, and we need to work hard as a city to respond. I support relocating unhoused residents to an alternative housing site with running water, sanitation, and wrap-around services.

    As we grow, we need to make sure our small businesses, city infrastructure, and affordability goals are able to keep up.

    We need to invest in our small businesses, reduce vacant storefronts, cut permitting wait times and processing fees, invest in expanded open space and parklets, and help keep commercial spaces vibrant, clean, and full of art!

    We need to support ‘Mom and Pop’ landlords by seeing them as partners in addressing the housing shortage. I'll work hard to provide resources, support, and guidance to make it as easy as possible to provide quality housing to our neighbors.

    I'll also work to ‘Keep Berkeley Weird’! We need to support local creatives, build beautiful buildings, and offer outlets for activism, free speech, and self-expression. Berkeley can grow without losing what makes us special!

  • While our public safety debates so often become controversial, we all fundamentally want the same thing: to feel safe as we walk our streets, play in our parks, and bike to school.

    We need to keep our services funded. Berkeley needs to keep our fire and police budgets solvent through the national municipal budget crisis caused by the Trump Administration. This includes raising revenue through Measures U and V and making sure we're appropriating effectively, taking care of our staff, and focusing on prevention.

    We need to invest in crime prevention through design and policy. This includes urban lighting, afterschool and summer programming, and street diversion.

    We need to hire the best people for the job. There are lots of types of city staff that can help us stay safe: mental health responders, street ambassadors, and civilian enforcement.

    The Berkeley Police lead the country in de-escalation and non-violent response. This success is because of, and not despite, civilian oversight. We need to make sure our civil liberties are protected and our police are accountable.

    We need to cancel our Flock contract. While the city has made good efforts to reduce the harm of Flock, there are other types of Automated License Plate Readers that do not threaten our civil liberties, and we should switch to those. Flock has shown a clear pattern of abuse and misuse, and no municipal privacy policy can protect us.

    We need to respect the Police Accountability Board (PAB). After the murder of George Floyd, Berkeley voters approved the creation and funding of civilian oversight with over 80% of the vote. Over the last few years, the PAB has been systematically sidelined and ignored.

    We need to keep our progressive use-of-force policies. There has been an effort to roll back policies that restrict how much force police should use in different situations. Many of the policies have been in place for decades and play an important part in keeping our community safe.

  • Berkeley is in a structural budget crisis, and even if Berkeley voters approve both revenue ballot measures, the next council will need to manage further budgeting concerns. Budget cycles are never easy or predictable, but there are some things I will commit to:

    I will keep our city workers involved in every step. We can't promise that no staff positions will ever be cut in the coming years, but we can keep our unions informed, involved, and empowered throughout the process. Our city workers know better than anyone what it takes to keep our services running, and their voices help us do our job.

    I will plan for our future. We need to keep up with our long-term pension liabilities, deferred maintenance, and minimum staffing levels. We can hope future federal governments reverse the current cuts, but we can't take anything for granted.

    I will engage the community. There are long-standing models of community budgeting that allow neighbors to come together and caucus and negotiate their priorities with real-world constraints. The more we involve and educate the public about the necessary trade-offs, the more effective our results will be.