Atlanta for the 99%
Atlanta has become unaffordable for working people. Together, we can raise the standard of living, lower the cost of housing, and win a Green New Deal for Atlanta. We deserve a City government that works for the 99% — not just billionaires and developers.
Our campaign is fighting for Affordable Housing, Green Public Transit, and an Economy for the 99%.
Read about our priorities below, and let us know what matters most to you, by reaching out to info@KelseaBond.com.
Affordable Housing
The cost of housing is through the roof! Why? Because colluding landlords and irresponsible developers have worked to make a profit off the backs of renters. Since 2019, rent in Atlanta has increased by 36% — 3x faster than wages, and home ownership remains far out of reach for young people like me. Enough is enough!
Housing is a human right – not a commodity. Atlanta needs to invest now in dense, social, affordable housing, and hold developers accountable to their promises to build affordable units — especially in rapidly gentrifying areas like the Beltline. We need to raise our expectations and redefine “affordability” to reflect the wages of average Atlanta residents, invest in affordability programs to help senior and low-income homeowners so legacy residents can afford to stay in their neighborhoods.
Atlanta can afford to build enough housing to meet our growing city’s needs, while also ensuring long-time residents can stay in their communities with access to transit, good schools, walkable neighborhoods, and affordable grocery stores.
Green New Infrastructure
Summer after summer, Atlanta reaches new levels of record heat. Just last year, hurricanes waged a destructive path through the Southeast, threatening our most vulnerable residents’ livelihoods, health, and safety. We need to commit now to building a resilient City to protect Atlantans from the effects of climate change, ensure access to clean water and air for all residents, and divest from fossil fuels into sustainable alternatives.
Studies show that the most green, resilient, and energy-efficient cities encourage dense mixed-use neighborhoods, walkability, and green modes of transportation. This means our City needs to be more intentional about neighborhood planning and zoning decisions – and bake in plans for green transit, walkability, and affordability from the very start so residents can get around without dependency on gas-guzzling cars.
Extreme heat can be lethal. Today, Atlanta experiences heat waves six times more frequently every year than we did in 1960. To regulate summer heat, it’s crucial that we preserve our declining tree cover, green spaces, trails, and parks. Tree cover is essential to public health. It keeps our air, water, and soil clean, is the #1 way to mitigate the urban heat island effect, and can prevent flooding in neighborhoods.
We all remember this summer, when water in the city shut off for days because of our antiquated water pipes system. Clean water is a human right. We cannot afford to keep neglecting our city’s infrastructure at the expense of the health and safety of Atlanta residents. We need a complete overhaul of our city’s car-dependent, dated infrastructure, and a plan for a Green New Deal as an investment in the generations to come.
Economy for the 99%
Atlanta should be a place where anyone can afford to live, work, and raise a family. But increasingly, Atlanta residents are forced to take on multiple jobs while they struggle to make ends meet. Thanks to corporate greed, the price of groceries, gas, electricity, medical care, and child care is piling up for families. Compared with other large American cities, Atlanta’s inflation rate is the third highest, with prices rising nearly 30% since the start of the pandemic.
We need an economy that works for us — not just the 1%. Billionaires and major corporations depend on working people to generate their profit, but don’t even come close to paying their fair share back to the community. Commercial trophy properties are significantly undervalued, meaning our city and schools miss out on hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue each year. We deserve a government that puts money into public services like social housing, public grocery stores, after school care, and public health programs that help working families thrive. To do this, we need fair taxes for corporate and commercial developers to make life easier for working people like you and me.
Public Transit, Bike Lanes, & Walkability
Everyone deserves to live in a walkable, bikeable, and transit-friendly city. Investing in green, alternative modes of transit is not just an environmental issue – it’s also an economic issue. Georgia is the 7th most expensive state to own a car, and only one in five Metro Atlanta jobs are located within a 90-minute commute on public transit. We can do better!
We all know how bad Atlanta traffic can get. Imagine if, instead of adding one more car lane that won’t even ease traffic, we swap out every 40 cars on the road for a high-speed bus with its own dedicated lane. Why are we spending hours a day stuck in gridlock, instead of investing in practical, affordable transit solutions? It’s time to reimagine transit in Atlanta. We need better opportunities to move around the city safely, quickly, and affordably with or without a car.
I’m committed to pushing for high speed bus lanes, light rail, and fully connected bike grid and sidewalks — in all parts of Atlanta. We should work with MARTA to improve bus routes, construct sheltered bus stops, and increase train and bus frequencies. No more excuses – if we want Atlanta to work for working people, we need a robust transit system so people can get to work, school, and more without depending on costly, fuel-inefficient cars.
Workers’ Rights & Good Union Jobs
Atlanta has one of the widest wealth gaps in the entire nation. That is not an accident — it’s the result of deliberate policy choices. For decades, the Georgia Republicans have pushed anti-worker policies like right-to-work, low minimum wages, and bans on collective bargaining which keep workers precarious and discourage union organizing. To close the wealth gap, we must support union organizing and workers’ rights here in our city, and stand up against union-busting companies like Delta, Amazon, and Starbucks which underpay and exploit Atlanta workers to make a quick buck.
Through our city’s newly created Department of Labor, we should educate Atlanta workers on their rights at work through trainings on heat safety, sexual harassment, and more – especially in the service industry. We should work with AFSCME to raise the minimum wage of all city employees to $25/hr, guarantee 8 weeks of paid parental leave, and approve better contracts for sanitation workers who keep our city clean. We should demand that major Atlanta-based employers like Delta and the Atlanta airport respect union drives and cease worker intimidation. Workers deserve more – and our city government has an integral role to play in raising the standard of living for Atlanta workers.
LGBTQ+ & Reproductive Rights
With Donald Trump’s second term beginning, we need to stand up and fight back to defend our LGBTQ+ neighbors, and the right to reproductive justice and bodily autonomy. In 2022, when abortion was overturned in the courts, I worked with community organizations like Amplify Georgia and Feminist Women’s Health Center to support a Reproductive Freedom Act and push City Council to allocate $300,000 to Access Reproductive Care (ARC) Southeast to help Georgians in need of abortion care.
These next four years, we need to continue pushing City Council to stand up for abortion rights, the right to contraception, queer and trans healthcare, and to protect Atlantans from right-wing violence. Healthcare is a human right. This means we should continue investing in essential healthcare initiatives like ARC Southeast, and explore using city services to provide free access to costly menstrual products, Plan-B, and other contraceptives that let us decide when and if to start a family. We should also prepare to leverage city resources to protect the queer and trans community from heightened attacks at the federal and state level, work to prevent anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, and defend access to essential resources and health services for queer Atlantans.
Fighting for Racial Justice
Despite Atlanta’s legacy as a leader in the Civil Rights Movement, our city still has one of the highest racial wealth gaps in the country. Many of the regressive policies we experience in the South today are remnants from the racist Jim Crow era which aimed to keep working people segregated and divided. We need to put in the work to reverse hundreds of years of institutional racism that still shape our City’s policies and practices today.
Atlanta’s early housing and infrastructure policies were shaped by this segregationist agenda, which displaced thousands of Black Atlanta residents in the 1960s to construct the highway that still divides our city. We have a chance now to reverse course on these regressive policies and gentrification initiatives, and invest in housing and infrastructure projects which prevent displacement in historically Black neighborhoods, and keep housing affordable for long-time residents.
Racial justice is inherently intertwined with economic justice. Studies show that union membership increases wages for Black workers by an average of 14.6%, and 17.6% for Hispanic workers, but thanks to countless attacks on unions by Republican lawmakers, less than one in twenty Georgia workers are unionized. To close the racial wealth gap, it’s imperative that our City leaders support local unionization efforts of Black and Brown workers fighting for better wages and quality of life.
Finally, it’s no secret how systemic racism in policing has led to the murder of countless Black and brown Americans across the nation — from Rayshard Brooks to Sandra Bland, and so many others. We need to address the root causes of police violence, stop criminalizing Black Atlantans, and invest in public safety options which keep everyone safe.
Public Health & Safety
In 2022, I spoke out when Wellstar pulled the plug on the Old Fourth Ward’s Atlanta Medical Center and left tens of thousands of low-income Atlantans in need of medical care out to dry. AMC’s closure is proof that we can’t leave major community health initiatives to the free market. It’s time for our government to step up to ensure all Atlanta residents have access to quality, comprehensive health care.
Comprehensive healthcare means investing in public health services and resources for drug addiction, funding after school programs, keeping our air and water clean, and keeping hospitals open and affordable. It means making sure everyone in Atlanta is paid a living wage, and can afford rent and healthy groceries — instead of criminalizing poverty and mental illness. It means marginalized communities feel safe from discrimination and hate crimes. It means kids feel safe from gun violence in schools.
Public safety does not mean heavily militarized police or funneling indiscriminate amounts of money into the police budget or unaccountable projects like Cop City. Atlanta residents experience a whole range of hardships like homelessness, poverty, or health issues that should never be handled with a gun. We should increase funding for Atlanta’s Policing and Diversions Initiative (PAD), so that it can expand its operation around the entire city, hire more staff, and respond to community calls 24/7. We should repurpose the Atlanta City Detention Center into a community space with health resources. We should rebuild our city’s social fabric and public spaces by investing in parks, playgrounds, gyms, and community centers. Together, we can redefine public safety in a way that works for everyone, and take a preventative, proactive approach to building a safer, more welcoming city.
End Homelessness
In the richest country in the world, no one should be homeless. There is more than enough space and funding to house everyone in this city. As the cost of housing spikes, so does homelessness. Estimates show that as of early 2024, approximately 3,000 individuals in Atlanta were homeless, an increase of 7% from the previous year. And the housing crisis is even more far-reaching: 2024 data from the Georgia Department of Education shows that 1,800 Atlanta Public Schools (APS) students are deprived of stable housing. This is beyond unacceptable. Our city must intervene in the housing crisis now to promote a housing-first approach so families can have permanent, safe housing — with no means-testing or strings attached!
The homelessness epidemic is not inevitable – it’s a direct product of city leaders’ policy choices, and tied in large part to our affordable housing crisis. Atlanta’s homeless community doesn’t just need safe housing, they also deserve respect. This past December, City Council nearly unanimously voted to pull the plug on a majority of essential warming and cooling centers across the city. With climate change only bound to worsen in the coming years, this will have disastrous and fatal consequences for homeless Atlantans. In office, I will work to reverse this inhumane decision, push to ensure that houseless individuals are treated with the dignity they deserve, halt violent sweeps of encampments, and push to connect individuals with the housing and health resources they need to improve their lives.
Democratize Atlanta
In the South, we know that democracy is not guaranteed — it must be defended and strengthened. This means that our City officials need to uphold the same democratic principles we demand at the state and federal levels. Working people are busy with work, school, and their families, which makes it hard to participate in the democratic process. We need to make civic engagement more accessible and easier to understand, even if it makes people in power uncomfortable. We must expand transparency around city policy, make City Council meetings easier to attend, and hold city officials and agencies accountable when they act in self-interest instead of upholding the democratic will of voters.
Our city officials failed by repeatedly denying Atlanta voters the right to hold a referendum vote on Cop City, and when they blocked residents from addressing valid concerns about the proposal. In office, I’ll commit to upholding democracy, and empowering everyday people to engage in the democratic process at City Hall.