Policy Priorities
1) Rent Control and Tenant Protections
The problem isn’t avocado toast and coffee.
Average rents in LA County went up 12% from 2023 to 2024.
The average home price in Burbank is currently $1.2 million dollars.
Working class Burbankers are being squeezed, subject to the whims of a brutal market and decades of bad housing development priorities.
If you’re one of the half of LA County Renters that are cost burdened, you’re not able to save nearly as much, and also mortgage interest rates are starting at 7%.
And all the while, rents can go up as high as 8.5% in this city every year.
We need tenant protections now - and we need someone on council who will defend those tenant protections from the inevitable corporate backlash.
2) Housing Opportunity and GOOD planning
I’m not a doctor, so I don’t perform surgery on people. But it’s remarkable how often long-term planning decisions are routinely put in the hands of people who know nothing about creating cities and the built environment, or how starving one area of resources creates problems everywhere.
Local politics used to be, and too often still is, a hobby for retirees, lawyers, and used-car impresarios like Ben Gezzara in Road House (the unbeatable Swayze original).
Burbank voters can instead back an actual urban planner, trained in and experienced with affordable housing development, state and local housing policy, and dissecting housing elements. I will put the concerns of working people and families above marginal upgrades to the prestige of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods.
3) Defending Public Educators
Teachers are perhaps the most important public servants in our society.
Somehow in the Greatest* Nation on Earth, we’ve underfunded schools to the point that teachers have to pay for supplies out of their own increasingly meager paychecks.
I’ll ensure that educators and schools get the resources they need.
But not even that is enough in the present moment, because the fringe right-wing has eaten the heart out of ‘compassionate conservativism’ and is physically and institutionally threatening our school boards and teachers.
Win, lose or draw, I’m standing with our educators.