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Our platform is centered around a vision of housing, climate, and care. These don’t exhaust what we’re running on, but they all inform each other, and I think they all form a fairly complete vision. The pillars of the platform are universal family care, a homes guarantee, and a Green New Deal for Pennsylvania. The idea being that Pennsylvania is suffering from a triple crisis of economic and ecological devastation and public disinvestment. Those express themselves in the cost of childcare, elder care, and health care and the state of our public institutions, especially our public schools, but also public housing and the lack of it.

We are investing so much in the private wealth that is gained from the extraction of fossil fuels as opposed to public transit and green energy that benefits millions of people. What I want to do is to push for a society that would really value care and care work and caregivers.

For a country that talks a lot about innovation and dynamism, the public discourse has a very poor grasp on what the future of work is. Much of it lies in care work and in home health care aides, nurses, but also, I include in this, teachers and hospitality workers. There is a lot of work that is being done that is not valued, is considered low-wage, but really doesn’t have to be low-wage, and this work is also low-carbon. Care work is the kind of work that doesn’t put a burden on the earth in the same way that a lot of our historical patterns of work have done, and I want to center that kind of work and those kinds of policies — policies that would make it less burdensome to care for children and care for elders. I support, 100 percent, a single-payer health care plan. We should also expand Medicaid on the state level in the meantime and guarantee health care to everyone who needs it.

Philadelphia, in particular, has a housing crisis like many cities across the country. Ours maybe looks different than certain wealthier cities like San Francisco, New York, and Seattle. We have a number of people who are cost-burdened — I believe it’s 50 percent — who pay over a third of their income in housing costs, but there is actually quite a lot of housing stock in the city, so it’s not a scarcity of existing housing infrastructure. We do have a scarcity of affordable housing in richer neighborhoods, which is familiar in places like New York or San Francisco. But then we also have severe disinvestment in poorer neighborhoods where the housing stock is not affordable to people who don’t have the income to keep up with the rent. The cost of rent is really high, eviction rates are extremely high.

I — like many candidates across the country — am calling for a homes guarantee, which would combine renter protection through statewide rent control that does not exceed the cost of living in any given municipality, statewide just cause for eviction, and statewide right to counsel in the case of eviction. I’m also calling for a generational investment in affordable housing. Pennsylvania could do a million units of affordable housing, and this involves either building it, preserving the housing that we have, or converting existing housing so that it’s usable, the point being that you would also want these houses to be low-carbon or carbon-neutral.

This is tied into our Green New Deal plan because we believe that housing, transit, and the conversion to renewable energy use are necessities for the state. Pennsylvania produces 1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, which is an extremely disturbing, disproportionate number. We can’t continue to do that to ourselves and future generations.