Richmond 7th District City Council Race - 2024

For me, it is not simply just addressing the means to rental or housing or homeownership, it is the full continuum. And that’s what we have done already, because we've identified the full continuum, starting from addressing homelessness. And I mentioned before, we have $2 million in the budget for a year-round emergency shelter. But that's not sufficient. Once you have individuals on that route, it's also going to be critical that we have the resources and support so they can get on a path to long-term sustainability, eviction diversion for those who are in housing, but there's the possibility of eviction. And so again, as I mentioned, we put in $1 million for that, and also $500,000 provided by Council.

So we are in a crisis, and when we are in a crisis, we need to take action. We need to speed up this process, decommodification of our housing, increasing the housing stock and diversifying that housing stock. We have a missing middle and it needs to be built - that's not just housing, that's in our businesses, that's in our buildings, that's in our entire city. We go from downtown to the suburbs real quick. We also need to improve the tax code. I brought up a replacement based tax code over a market value based tax code, because it keeps people in their homes. We spend billions that we're flushing down the drain by not taking action, by giving it to companies to work. We need to be the driver in the seat. We are the first line of defense for citizens, and we need to make it happen.

We're dealing with a systemic challenge in terms of finance. For me, it was important to go down to the finance office after listening and hearing from citizens the challenges that they had - utilities, meals tax, real estate tax - going down, taking a look at what's going on in the finance department, which I did, and other council members did as well. 

And once we did that, what then is the plan of action? And in talking with the district, this is broken, it must be fixed, and it needs to be fixed quickly. And so for me, then what resources are needed? The software, the hardware, the human employees. And so in this budget, we put in $2.3 million so that this item could be fixed. I have walked with restaurants in my district to walk through the meal tax, and worked with other members to deal with utility bills that were too high, to get reimbursement. 

It's interesting what we do and don't do. It's interesting that the person who's in charge of natural gas is also a lobbyist. (Editors note: Context here.) It is interesting the amount of power government wields over who exists on our oversight, who is responsible and who is let off the hook. 

I don't want to be the one making those decisions. I want a functioning bureaucracy, getting things right from the beginning. We should not have a meals tax fiasco. We should not have a credit card spending fiasco. We should not have fiasco after fiasco that concludes the utility overbilling. This is a systemic problem. We have to fix the system.