Emeryville Issues

Issues Coming from Outside City Borders

The following issues affect us significantly from outside our jurisdiction. Each of them require us to manage up to county and state representatives.

1. Housing*
   • Repeal Costa Hawkins
   • Sensible Zoning Reforms (no skipping environmental reviews)
2. Anti-Fascism*
3. No Coal in Emeryville*
4. Data Centers
5. Property Crime

Some of them are marked with an asterisk * to indicate that we may need to do something locally now because it’s urgent enough that we can’t wait for the proper regulatory spaces to handle it.

Affordability (Housing and Beyond)

I now have a full detailed Housing Affordability Deep Dive page for this section, but below will be a high-level summary.

The best way to improve housing is to build more of it.

The next way to improve housing is to regulate large corporate landlords. They manipulate “market value” for rent to people paying over $2,000 a month for a studio apartment in slumlord conditions. We need to end all the ways landlords nickel-and-dime renters on top of the already exorbitant rent.

Raising Working Class Income

Because all of these things are connected, we also need to improve the distribution of income. We need to do our part to reverse the damage done from the lie of trickle down economics. I want to tax big corporations who operate in Emeryville based on the pay gap between their top executives and their lowest paid workers. Thus incentivizing those companies to pay their workers — who’re often our own city residents — better or pay more into our city to help us provide services and make improvements.

Commercial Real Estate & Small Businesses

Whenever one of my favorite small local businesses close, it’s almost always because their lease was up and the rent got too damn high. Running a small business has thousands of factors to manage, but the reason Bay Area storefronts remain empty is rent.

Most new businesses to come into our city have been national or regional brands who can afford the risk. I want small businesses to thrive here. More bodegas, family restaurants, boutiques, farmers markets, and — if I can selfishly dream for a minute — a decent video arcade.

We need to support local entrepreneurs more aggressively than the way we court these huge chains. I love that we have IKEA, Best Buy, AMC, and Uniqlo. I’m psyched about the Tokyo Central Market. (As a queer person, I could do without the Chik-Fil-A…) I want more local alternatives to these national chains that charge us more to supplement their profit in rural states.

Unhoused People & Homelessness in Emeryville

I’m appalled at encampment sweeps. I know I’d be punching well above my weight to try and take on the U.S. Supreme Court, Gavin Newsom, and other heartless representatives who salivate at the idea of ripping apart the only safety, community, and consistency many of these poor folks have in the world. But I’d damn sure try.

Read more: Housing Affordability

I’m against any [more] Data Centers being built or operated in Emeryville. My resistance goes beyond the horrific environmental impact and the strain it places on power grids and local water supplies. I oppose the existence of data centers because they do little but provide hostile corporations and authoritarian regimes with ammunition to harm regular working people.

They allow the tracking of our movements, personality traits, and circumstances that data brokers can sell on an unregulated market to the worst people on the planet to exploit us. To raise prices on everything from groceries to rideshare trips to rent. To stalk us. To find ways to suppress our first amendment rights to protest.

Most of that data is gathered without consent of its subjects. And despite California’s privacy protections, deleting that data does little to stop them from gathering it once again from other data brokers.

They’re used to train AI to steal jobs, defraud us, and generally worsen our consumer experience.

Data centers are an active threat to the average American worker on many fronts. I don’t want any of them to exist anywhere.

So-called artificial intelligence tools destroy jobs, rob from human creatives, and produce inaccurate, bigoted, shoddy results. I don’t believe any part of our city’s budget should go toward supporting these products or paying for prompt/query tokens. I will propose a formal prohibition on the use of generative AI for any creative materials (anything that would normally be produced by a paid artist) used by the city.

If individual workers want to use an LLM to help them spell check, interpret and format data, or handle other tasks it’s suited for, I won’t stop them as long as they take responsibility for checking all the results for accuracy, bias, and quality before submitting them. Example: I pay for my own GitHub subscription even though I frequently use it for work, because I find it helps my productivity.

In addition, generative AI has burdened our courts and local governments with slop that diminishes our ability to govern effectively, makes us irrationally afraid of our neighbors, and tears apart our ability to find consensus on work we could be doing to improve the lives of everyone.

AI has done mostly harm to all of us, in ways we’re probably not even aware of yet, because of who’s in power today. For example, AI is being used to deny our healthcare claims. This will never change, because the people in power who’d want to use these systems will inevitably use them against the rest of us to keep their own position in society.

Protecting Our Neighbors

Watching federal forces smash car windows, kick in doors, and drag innocent people off the street into unmarked vehicles is terrifying. Emeryville is, thankfully, a sanctuary city, and I aim to keep it that way. There are other ways I’d like to explore protecting our neighbors from unjust persecution, no matter who’s currently in charge.

Our residents have the right to protest and protect their neighbors from tyrannical occupation and unjust deportations. I will work however I can to prevent our city’s resources being used against its residents.

Public Safety

I now have a full detailed Public Safety and Surveillance Capitalism policy page for this section, but below will be a short summary.

Surveillance Doesn’t Keep Us Safe

On the topic of safety, I want to point out one issue that I keep seeing all over the country. Surveillance is ramping up everywhere. Speeding cameras, license plate readers, and CCTV have paved the way for bad actors to know every move we make. And we’ve paid for it with our tax dollars.

Maybe you’re not as skeptical as I am about this. Maybe you think “If I don’t do anything wrong, I should have nothing to hide.” But think about who gets to use this data. It’s not just our friendly EPD cops we run into at Rudy’s Can’t Fail. It also gets into the hands of ICE. and other federal agencies we may not want in there. It’s also in the hands of the third-party services who enable the technology. They can sell it to whoever they want, including stalkers, identity thieves, and pretty much anyone else who wants it. Even if they tell us they won’t do it, their databases can be breached.

Our country doesn’t properly regulate data collection and distribution. Even in California, where we have more protection than other U.S. states, it’s still sparse compared to other countries. We shouldn’t let these corporate and fascist interests make us afraid of our neighbors. We need to stop handing them the keys to our private data.

Fearmongering About Public Safety

Despite all the fearmongering clickbait headlines attempting to waste our time recalling DAs and installing corporate-friendly replacements, crime is trending down and has been for decades.

Worst of all, they’re not even effective. If we look at the other cities who’ve implemented these expensive solutions, none of them have actually dropped crime significantly. They’re only doing what their true objective is: lining the pockets of the worst wealthy billionaires in the country and siphoning as much taxpayer money as they can to their amoral shareholders.

Read more: Public Safety and Surveillance Capitalism

Supporting Emeryville Small Businesses

Beyond commercial property costs, many of our beloved small local businesses are barely scraping by right now. In the shadows of large corporate chains, they’re stuck having to compete for customers, marketing space, crime prevention resources, and assistance dealing with hundreds of confusing regulations from all levels of government above our city level.

We should continue to move forward with our big city projects, but we can’t just expect our small businesses to suck it up and endure the fallout. We need to support them quickly and directly, perhaps even financially in some cases. When we consider new regulations, we need to make sure to design them progressively so the impact on our small local businesses is minimized while big chains like Target pay their fair share.

Update: Luckily, Choc’late Mama may have found a new home, but sadly it’s no longer in Emeryville.

Public Health

Environmental justice is close to my heart. We’re an industrial city who benefits from our commercial space, but let’s make sure we continue to regulate these businesses. We must account for all kinds of pollution (including noise) before welcoming them. The planning commission is doing a great job of this recently, and I’d want to continue down that path.

Cities don’t tend to have a ton of power over making sure residents have access to healthcare they need. I’d seek out ways to make sure everyone can find vaccines, testing kits, masks, or trustworthy health information has help finding them. Not just in times of crisis, but always — because we can’t forget about our disabled and aging population among other important issues.

Public Transit, Bike and Pedestrian Safety

A big part of public health is our ability to move around the city safely. The more we make sure our neighbors — regardless of age and ability — can access everywhere as pedestrians, joggers, and bikers, the healthier we’ll be.

One of the main reasons I chose to put roots down in Emeryville is how walkable our city is. I love that I can get almost anywhere in The Bay by hopping on the Emery-Go-Round and transferring wherever we need. All the bikes we see around our city are a sign of vibrance. Don’t even get me raving about The Greenway!

Let’s keep moving in that direction. I want to slow down cars that speed through our residential neighborhoods for a shortcut into other cities. Let’s focus less on private cars and more on pedestrian, bike, and transit safety. I want to do it in ways that benefit our local businesses with more foot traffic and fewer parking woes.

The Sutter Hospital Proposal

This is a huge issue in Emeryville right now, so I have an entire policy page dedicated to it: Sutter Hospital Proposal