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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.

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 licensed medical professionals–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 so the top 1% pay their fair share.

Across the nation, and especially in Georgia, our public schools are underfunded and under attack. Elites have been lobbying our government to implement measures like private school vouchers, which siphon tax dollars from public schools to fund unaccountable, unregulated private schools. Those same elites have been trying to censor discussions of race and gender, curtail the rights of LGBTQ+ students and teachers, and ban books from schools and libraries. 

We must fully fund our public schools, which serve 90% of Georgia’s students, and repeal all private school vouchers and tax credit schemes that benefit the wealthy at our expense. We must update the outdated school funding formula and increase pay for teachers and auxiliary staff (including paraprofessionals), instead of legislating their lesson plans, increasing their class sizes, and taking away planning periods. Lastly, we can and should implement free breakfast and lunch for all students, because no child should go hungry in our state. We must invest in our public schools to ensure that every student, no matter their zip code, has the resources and support they need to learn and thrive.

For decades, we have been sold a lie that we can solve crime by spending our tax dollars on policing and jailing our community members who were born into poverty. We know this doesn’t work and instead results in people cycling in and out of incarceration, and families being ripped apart. Our district houses the Atlanta City Detention Center, a stark reminder of the promises made and broken to those who sought solutions instead of punishment.

Our communities need real investment. We must build, fund, and prioritize alternatives to policing across our state that are preventative and justice-centered, like Safe Streets initiatives and PAD Atlanta. We must end the school-to-prison pipeline that primarily funnels working-class, Black, and disabled youth into jail cells instead of college or the trades by implementing restorative practices, and other alternatives to exclusionary discipline like suspension and expulsion. We must invest in infrastructure like bike lanes and sidewalks across our district to make our communities safer and more livable. We must address historic wealth inequality by reinvesting money into affordable housing, health care, education, and community stability and care, instead of criminalizing our fellow Georgians.

Our country is under siege by Trump and the Epstein class. ICE is a private militarized police force for the Trump administration to release at any moment. Its officers have publicly executed multiple people, and at least 23 people have died in ICE custody since October. We have been inundated with the idea that our immigrant neighbors are to be feared or shunned. As a son of immigrants and a Georgian, I reject that narrative. 

We must immediately end all collaboration with ICE in Georgia, including by repealing HB 1105 and ending any existing 287g agreements. We must dismantle ICE and investigate its officers. We must reform our immigration system to be humane and just and stand with our immigrant neighbors by refusing to let them be scapegoated and criminalized.

Hundreds of thousands of Atlantans use mass-transit for their commutes every week. Still, MARTA is among the country’s largest regional transit authorities with no dedicated state funding. Instead of expanding public transit, for example through high-speed rail between Atlanta and Savannah, our state government funds highway expansions, leading to more money spent on gas and more time spent in traffic. 

We must reform the MARTA board so that it is run by people who rely on the transit they manage, and we must reorient GDOT to focus on mass public transit and not highway expansion. We must advocate to drop restrictions on transit taxes and for MARTA and other regional transit authorities across Georgia to receive adequate state funding. We must expand MARTA’s reach in our district and throughout the metro area to get working people where they need to go. We need to do what it takes to turn MARTA into a world-class transit operation that serves those who need it most and make sure it stays that way.

AI datacenters are draining our water and sending our power bills sky-high, while creating profits for billionaires. Corporations freely dump waste into our rivers and pollute our air. Our planet is on fire, and we need to slow the problem while we work toward solutions. 

We must invest in climate mitigation right now, including sustainable energy to keep fossil fuels in the ground and out of our air. We must sustainable infrastructure, including mass transit and dense housing. We must implement a state-wide moratorium on AI datacenters and ensure that technology companies pay their fair share in everything from taxes to utility bills. We must hold corporations accountable for poisoning our soil, water, and air, and pass legislation to prevent them from doing so ever again.

Georgia’s restrictions on reproductive care, primarily the 6-week abortion ban, have killed at least two women and continue to put Georgians’ lives at risk.

Abortion is an essential component of health care, and any legislation that disregards that must be repealed to ensure that health care decisions are made between patients and their doctors–not the state government.

Trans Georgians deserve support and care the same as anyone else, and any attempt to take away their rights is an attack on all of us. The villainization of trans people and their life-saving health care is an attempt by people in power to deflect their failings and corruption onto a marginalized community. It’s the same playbook every time, and we will not fall for it.

We must reject any legislation that treats trans children differently than their peers, so they are able to be themselves and participate in the same activities as their classmates. We must ensure that gender affirming care is treated as healthcare, that gender neutral bathrooms are standard, and that “conversion therapy" is banned as unscientific and abusive. We must pass legislation to ensure that trans people can find sanctuary in Georgia instead of being forced to leave for their safety.

Trump’s administration is intent on winning an election they are sure to lose, and it is very apparent they are trying to cheat. Republicans in Congress are trying to pass the SAVE Act, which could make it difficult and costly for millions of Americans to vote–including women, people living in poverty, and people of color. The Trump administration is seizing millions ballots–including 600 boxes of Fulton County ballots–to identify voters and try to suppress their vote. Our state government has continued to underfund our elections, resulting in closed polling locations, primarily in Black neighborhoods. 

We must protect our elections and remove election officials who reject democracy in order to ensure that everyone’s vote is counted. We must reject legislation that would depress voter turnout and put the integrity of our elections, and our democracy at risk.

Israel is committing a genocide in Palestine, and our government is supporting it. Full Stop. Our own Georgia State University hosts the GILEE program, through which our police are trained by the Israeli military. This is not an anomaly. Our government, and others like Israel and the UAE, are committing atrocities around the world for the sake of greed and domination of the wealthy few.

At the state level, our capabilities are limited, but we can still make a difference. We must divest from all countries committing genocide, including from the Israeli bonds that Governor Kemp purchased. We must end the GILEE program. We must protect the right to fight back against atrocities, which includes rejecting any attempts to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism, and advocate to roll back the use of the IHRA definition of antisemitism. It is a moral imperative that every person does what is in their power to stop this bloodshed.