Issues
Housing Affordability for Renters and Owners
Providence is the least affordable city in the country for renters. I have felt this housing crisis personally: I moved repeatedly to find affordable rent, and have watched neighbors get pushed out of places they love. The affordability crisis has real causes and real culprits. Big corporate developers have treated our neighborhoods like a financial opportunity — jacking up rents and sometimes even using illegal rent-fixing algorithms. My approach to housing policy rests on three pillars: stabilizing the rent, increasing housing supply, and alleviating costs for homeowners and owner-occupiers.
I support rent stabilization. I helped research and draft the policy framework that brought it to the City Council, and I believe it is one of the most important tools we have to keep Providence livable for the people who built it. A thoughtful rent stabilization policy can include exemptions for new construction to protect the incentive to build, and for owner occupiers so that small landlords who live in their buildings are not caught in the same net as corporate investors extracting from our community. I also helped craft the ordinance to ban algorithmic rental price-fixing — and we became the first city in the country to sue a corporate landlord for violating this law.
I support the right of all tenants to organize, collectively bargain with their landlords, advocate for better conditions, and have a meaningful voice in decisions that affect their homes and their lives.
To address the crisis at scale, we need to build more housing. Zoning reform is essential, not just to increase density but to create more variety in what gets built, more mixed income development, more multi-family housing, more design diversity that respects the character of our neighborhoods, more options for the people who actually need a place to live here. We also need to implement models that work elsewhere, like a revolving public development fund to create permanently affordable housing.
For homeowners and owner occupiers, the property tax burden is real and growing. I will pursue alternative revenue sources for the city that can provide meaningful relief. Affordability and prosperity are not opposites. Getting that balance right is exactly what good policy is for, and I have spent three and a half years learning how to make it happen — including working on a tax reform commission that led the state to allow Providence to access some new non-property tax revenues.
High-Quality Public Education
As the state takeover of Providence Public Schools ends, our city resumes one of its most consequential responsibilities. This moment calls for steady, honest, unglamorous work on behalf of teachers, principals, and students.
I have been doing that work. I served as the City Council's designee on a special State House commission chaired by Senator Sam Zurier that studied labor-management practices in Providence Public School District (PPSD), contributed to a working group convened by Councilor Jill Davidson to reform the district's procurement process, and stood alongside former Councilwoman Helen Anthony at State House hearings advocating for greater state aid to Providence schools. That effort helped produce an ordinance bringing critical reforms to the city's purchasing process, strengthening the systems Providence needs as responsibility for its schools returns to local government.
The Providence City Council does not run the schools — but it does oversee the resources that make them function. As councilor, I will ensure transparent, efficient, and equitable procurement of the materials essential to teaching, learning, and student wellbeing. I will work with my colleagues on the Council, and collaborate with School Board members, the Mayor's administration, PPSD central office, the teachers union, and our state delegation.
In addition, as councilor I will advocate for the state to pay Providence its fair share of education funding. Good outcomes for Providence students are the result of people across institutions doing their jobs well together, and my job as a councilor is to be a reliable partner in that work.
A City Hall That
Works For You
The people of Ward 1 deserve to feel their government is working for them. Trash is picked up. Streets are maintained. A City Hall that answers when you call and follows through when it says it will.
Getting that done requires showing up where decisions are made, not just where cameras are rolling. City Councilors sit on boards like the Board of Contract and Supply that approve the contracts and investments shaping our daily lives. Those meetings are not glamorous, but they are where the real work happens. I will be in those rooms, reviewing the documents, asking hard questions, casting informed votes, and reporting to my neighbors exactly what happened and why.
My record demonstrates my approach to leadership. For example, as Deputy Director of Policy for the City Council, I supported the Council’s Special Commission on Waste Management Services, helping shape language in its final recommendations on reducing waste, improving service, and making Providence’s waste system more sustainable and cost-effective.
A Thriving, Inclusive
Green Economy
Fiscal Honesty and Accountability
Residents just absorbed a major tax increase — money owed to our own school district after years of underfunding. This city has serious financial obligations ahead, including a pension liability that will require hard choices made honestly, not just at election time. The people paying the bills deserve a representative who tells them the truth, even when the truth is complicated, and even when it is not what anyone wants to hear. I have read the contracts. I have worked through three city budget cycles. I know where the pressure points are, and I know what has been left unaddressed for too long.
I also had the privilege of staffing the Special Commission on Taxation and Revenue, which spent four months working alongside experts, industry professionals, and the mayor's administration to develop a more equitable and fair tax structure for Providence. The commission examined every revenue stream available to the city and produced concrete recommendations, including returning to separate owner occupied and non owner occupied tax rates to protect homeowners, expanding exemptions for vulnerable residents during revaluation years, pursuing a consumption based tax to reduce our over reliance on property taxes, returning vacant and underutilized properties to productive use, and requesting an increase in state PILOT payments to the city. As councilor, I will work alongside my colleagues to advocate for the full implementation of these fiscal reforms — which can put our city on more stable financial footing for generations to come.
I will also ensure that entities that have benefited from tax breaks follow the law. Since 1986, Providence has required that companies receiving large tax breaks, grants or loans hire local residents for job openings. Decades later only about 20% of jobs created through tax stabilization agreements actually go to Providence residents, and the city has repeatedly refused to enforce the law. When we hand out tax breaks and subsidies worth millions of dollars, the least we can demand is that Providence residents benefit from them. I will ensure our public money goes into real investments and meaningful economic activity, helping our communities flourish and thrive.
A thriving economy means all residents can access employment and business opportunities — and it means encouraging sustainable practices and a healthy, safe environment for all.
To achieve this, I will
encourage new commercial and mixed-use development that brings jobs, services, and investment to our neighborhoods,
support commercial vacancy taxes or fees to discourage landlords from leaving storefronts empty while waiting for higher rents,
explore measures to prevent rent gouging by commercial landlords,
advocate for local preference in city contracting and procurement,
strengthen design standards and preservation rules so new development respects the character of our neighborhoods, and
support funding for facade improvement programs for historic commercial buildings.
I will also advocate for:
protected and well-maintained bike lanes throughout the ward connecting neighborhoods to downtown and the waterfront,
transit oriented development that relieves parking pressures and reduces car dependency in our densest neighborhoods,
better bus infrastructure including shelters, frequency improvements, and reliability on key routes like the 92,
complete streets policies that design roads for everyone, pedestrians, cyclists, transit riders, and drivers.