Everyone deserves a safe and affordable home, but rising rents and property taxes are crushing working families and breaking up our neighborhoods. Corporate landlords are buying up single-family homes all across the state and driving up housing costs. I’ve watched my longtime Black neighbors get pushed out of Old Fourth Ward, where I grew up, my whole life as the area has been gentrified and developed without regard for the people who live here.

Housing is a human right, and we must guarantee affordable housing for all, through legalizing rent control, banning rental price-fixing, ending corporate ownership of single-family homes, and investing in deeply affordable social housing. We must ensure that Georgia holds landlords accountable by establishing a Tenants Bill of Rights and lifting the state ban on the establishment of rental registries. We must invest in our communities without displacing current residents, and when we invest, we must build affordable and dense housing so that those who have been forced to leave can come back home.

Healthcare is a human right, but our current for-profit system is failing to meet the needs of everyday Georgians. Costs for prescription drugs and hospital care are astronomical. Every day, more Georgians take on medical debt and delay necessary care, all to line the pockets of Big Pharma and healthcare executives. Black women in Georgia face a much higher maternal mortality rate than white women, and Black people in general have historically been neglected and exploited by our healthcare system. Our government has repeatedly embraced legislation to restrict the care we are able to receive, particularly women and trans people, and put Georgians’ lives at risk. Abortion bans in particular have killed at least two women thus far.

We need to pass the Georgia Medicare for All Act, and establish a universal, single-payer healthcare system with no copays, no fees, no deductibles, and no premiums. We must treat abortion, birth control, and gender affirming care as essential components of health care, by lifting existing bans and encoding these rights to ensure that everyone has access to care no matter who they are. We deserve a functional, affordable, inclusive healthcare system where health is a right for every Georgian, not just the wealthy few, and where healthcare decisions are made between patients and their doctors–not by legislators.

Working families are struggling to make ends meet, while billionaires and their corporations are posting record profits. Every day, hardworking Georgians fall through the cracks even while fighting to survive, because this economy isn’t built for us, it’s built to extract our labor and benefit those at the top.

We must bring down the cost of living and make our economy work for the working class. We must support working parents by guaranteeing paid family leave, universal no-cost childcare and Pre-K, and a comprehensive grant system to fund before/after school programs at all schools. We must create well-paying jobs to fix our crumbling infrastructure that has been allowed to languish for decades. We must raise the state minimum wage to a living wage of at least $20 per hour, repeal Georgia's repressive anti-union laws like “right to work", and establish a progressive income tax system that makes the top 1% pay their fair share.