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 profit-driven 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.
Together, we can fight for affordable housing by:
- Leveraging publicly-owned and vacant land to build permanently affordable housing options like community land trusts and social housing, and use the Affordable Housing Trust fund for land acquisition.
- Expanding inclusionary zoning and updating our city’s definition of affordable to include low income and working class Atlantans. Our current standard of 80% AMI (area median income) leaves far too many workers out of the equation.
- Making it easier to build new housing by abolishing parking minimums, especially near public transit and in walkable neighborhoods. This will lower housing costs and incentivize public transit use.
- Fighting for zoning reforms to allow for more dense, mixed-use multi-family housing for all income types.
- Closing loop-holes which allow developers to pay in-lieu fees to opt out of building affordable units.
- Creating a more transparent and democratic process to determine how the Affordable Housing Trust Fund is spent, and establish a consistent revenue stream to fund it.
- Creating an Office of the Tenant Advocate (similar to D.C. and NYC) which educates renters on their rights and provides legal assistance to those facing eviction.
Green New Deal for ATL
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 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.
Together, we can fight for a green, resilient Atlanta by:
- Reducing Atlanta’s carbon footprint through the planning of more mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods that encourage walking, biking, public transit, and car-free living.
- Building affordable multi-family housing which uses less energy per capita than traditional single-family homes and provides density necessary for transit expansion.
- Disincentivizing car use and poor uses of space through taxes on commercial parking lots, and abolishing parking minimums.
- Preserving our tree canopy by scaling up tree planting on publicly owned land, especially along pedestrian walkways, near bus stops, and other locations where shade is most needed.
- Preventing severe flooding by investing in green infrastructure such as rain gardens, green roofs, and stormwater parks.
- Banning the construction of inefficient, wasteful data centers within city limits.
- Enforcing the ban on single-use plastics from City government buildings and the Atlanta Airport which was approved by City Council in 2019.
- Protecting our most vulnerable residents by expanding geographical reach of warming and cooling centers during extreme weather.
- Funding public pools and splash pads to help families keep cool during hot months.
Fight Inequality, Tax the Rich
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 cost of housing, 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 a city budget that works for us — not just the 1%. Billionaires, developers, and major corporations depends on working people to generate their profit, but don’t come close to paying their fair share back to the community. Luxury developers are given handouts and subsidies just to build housing half the city can’t afford. Trophy commercial properties are significantly undervalued, meaning our city and schools miss out on hundreds of millions of dollars of tax 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 on the ultra-rich to make life easier for working people like you and me.
Together, we can equitably fund public services by:
- Requiring strong community benefits agreements from developers who receive public subsidies. Taxpayers deserve a worthwhile return on public dollars they invest.
- Working with Fulton County to make sure that luxury commercial property owners are paying their fair share in taxes. Right now, our City, County, and public schools are missing out on hundreds of millions of dollars a year in tax revenue because of under-appraised trophy buildings. With Trump cutting millions in federal funding, it has never been more essential to ensure that the ultra-wealthy pay their fair share.
- Exploring new, progressive tax programs to fund essential services, such as a mansion tax for real-estate transfers above a certain price range to fund affordable housing and combat homelessness, or a tax on commercial parking lots to fund transit.
- Fighting food insecurity by investing in publicly-owned grocery stores where the free market refuses to build them. All Atlantans deserve access to healthy, affordable food.
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.
Together, we can build a more connected, transit-oriented city by:
- Carrying out the entirety of the More MARTA program approved overwhelmingly by Atlanta voters in 2016 – including bus rapid transit and the full implementation of Beltline Rail and the Streetcar East Extension.
- Ensuring that MARTA spends our dollars wisely to complete new projects in a timely manner with more frequent progress updates.
- Working with MARTA and community partners to explore ways to increase transit ridership through community events, outreach and education, city-planning initiatives, and offering free rides to APS students.
- Protecting pedestrians by expanding the “no right on red” ordinance, completing Atlanta’s sidewalk grid, prioritizing out most dangerous roads, underserved neighborhoods, and senior communities.
- Fixing our broken sidewalks so they’re more accessible to seniors, strollers, wheel-chairs and walkers. Take the burden of sidewalk repair off of Atlanta residents, and back onto the city. Unusable sidewalks are a public problem which require public solutions.
- Investing in traffic calming mechanisms like raised crosswalks, bulbouts, and tree planting on major roads which incentivize pedestrian safety by slowing traffic.
- Eliminating traffic fatalities by completing a city-wide bike grid, with protected lanes along our most dangerous streets.
- Expanding Atlanta’s e-bike voucher program, as recommended by the Atlanta Regional Commission, especially in communities of concern and within the High-Injury Network.
- Establishing a Transit Trust fund to support implementation of new transit and pedestrian-oriented projects such as protected bike lanes, sidewalk improvement, and city-bike racks.
Workers’ Rights & Good Union Jobs
Atlanta has the highest wealth gap 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.
Just earlier this year, a young worker fell to his death on a non-union construction site in downtown Atlanta at the Gulch. We need to ensure that employers who do business with the city of Atlanta practice worker safety and prioritize union hiring. Workers deserve more – and our city government has an integral role to play in raising the standard of living and increasing on-the-job safety for Atlanta workers.
Together, we can fight for workers’ rights in Atlanta by:
- Introducing a Workers’ Bill of Rights (recently passed by referendum in New Orleans) which creates a registry of model employers in Atlanta that provide health benefits and living wages, exposes exploitative employers, and outlines best practices, standards, and guidelines for Atlanta-based employers.
- Ensuring that City of Atlanta employees are paid a living wage and afforded adequate medical and family leave. While the city is preempted from raising wages for non-employees, raising city employee wages can push private business to push their wages higher to keep them competitive. Right now, it is estimated that a living wage in Atlanta is around $26/hr.
- Urging the City to vocally support workers’ rights struggles and union drives at key Atlanta-based companies – specifically at the Atlanta airport and at Delta – and to bargain good contracts to Atlanta firefighters and employers which do business with the City of Atlanta. Workers deserve a city government that takes strong stances against worker intimidation, workplace harassment, and union busting by major Atlanta employers.
- Using the city’s newly created Department of Labor to host educational trainings for Atlanta-area workers on their rights at work, heat safety, sexual harassment in the workplace, and more.
- Ensuring that new development projects receiving city money use safe employment practices to prevent worker injury, death, and exploitation.
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.
Together, we can defend LGTBQ+ and Reproductive Rights by:
- Fighting to make sure that abortion remains decriminalized in the City of Atlanta, and declining to cooperate with the State or Federal police to prosecute givers or receivers of abortion care.
- Coordinating with Metro-Atlanta counties to continue funding ARC Southeast, an abortion fund which helps individuals in the South receive reproductive care.
- Preparing to defend Atlanta’s LGBTQ+, trans, and gender-nonconforming communities from federal attacks that could revoke their access to health care, state identification cards, employment status, and safety.
- Providing free menstrual products in City-owned bathrooms and at the Atlanta airport.
- Partnering with local community organizations to host free name change clinics for trans and gender-nonconforming 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 zoning 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 everyone.
Finally, it’s no secret how systemic racism in policing has led to the police murder of countless Black and brown Americans across the nation — from Rayshard Brooks to Sandra Bland, and so many others. At the same time, the Trump administration is waging a full-on attack of our immigrant neighbors and deploying ICE into our communities. Instead of militarized policing or criminalization of our Black and brown neighbors, we deserve public safety programs that keep everyone safe.
Together, we can fight for racial justice by:
- Fighting to protect Atlanta’s historically Black neighborhoods like Old Fourth Ward by promoting community-centered, affordable development over gentrification and displacement.
- Ensuring that our public dollars for infrastructure, parks, sidewalks, roads, and transit are spent equitably across our city – not just in already high-income, majority white neighborhoods.
- Promoting connectivity and public transit between Atlanta’s siloed neighborhoods to promote economic mobility and job opportunity.
- Protecting our immigrant neighbors from the Trump administrations’ attacks by using city platforms to educate community members on their rights and how to access legal protection and resources.
- Investing is community-oriented alternatives to policing such as Policing Alternatives & Diversion Initiative (PAD), and increasing police accountability by ensuring the Atlanta Citizens Review Board reviews cases in a timely manner.
- Fighting against the use of facial recognition technology in policing, which is deeply invasive and discriminates against Black and brown Atlantans.
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.
Together, we can build a safer and healthier city by:
- Fully funding Policing Alternatives and Diversion (PAD) to ensure that we have dedicated, trained staff who are fully equipped to de-escalate mental health crises, and ensure our more vulnerable Atlantans have access to the help they need.
- Reducing long wait times by ensuring that 311 and 911 call centers are fully staffed.
- Investing in safe, accessible sidewalks and well-lit streets without an over-reliance on surveillance technology.
- Proactively preventing pedestrian and cyclist deaths by fully implementing the recommendations outlined in the City’s Vision Zero Action Plan, prioritizing our most dangerous roads and intersections.
- Fighting food insecurity by investing in publicly-owned grocery stores where the free market refuses to build them. All Atlantans deserve access to healthy, affordable food.
- Equitably funding parks, gyms, and community centers throughout the city to ensure that all neighborhoods have access to safe public spaces where they can exercise, play, and build community.
- Advocating for affordable health care services at the new development site planned at the old Atlanta Medical Center building.
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 policy choices, and tied in large part to our affordable housing crisis. Atlanta’s houseless community doesn’t just need safe housing, they also deserve respect. Last December, City Council nearly unanimously voted to pull the plug on a multiple essential warming and cooling centers across the city, and just months following the City murdered our neighbor Cornelius Taylor during an encampment sweep downtown. In office, I will work to expand our shelter network, push for housing-first policies that treat our houseless neighbors with the dignity they deserve, and work to halt violent encampment sweeps which upend our neighbors lives.
Together, we can work to end homelessness by:
- Commiting to a truly housing-first policy with no strings attached. We need to remove invasive restrictions on shelters which require individuals to surrender personal belongings like phones.
- Expanding the geographic reach of our current shelter network. Often, shelters are too far from where our houseless neighbors live and require MARTA funds or a car to get there.
- Halting violent encampment sweeps which upend peoples’ lives and make it harder for folks to get back on their feet. We need to fully ban the use of heavy equipment and instead build trust with our houseless neighbors to hold community-centered cleanups.
- Providing robust wraparound services and medical care for all new housing for recently houseless individuals. Homelessness comes with long-term medical issues that require long-term treatment.
- Making better use of vacant buildings and city-owned land to create permanent housing solutions for formerly houseless individuals.
- Preventing homelessness long-term by creating more deeply affordable housing for the lowest income Atlantans, and providing legal protection for tenants at risk of eviction.
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.
Together, we can fight to expand democracy by:
- Holding regular District 2 town halls, Q&As, policy explainers, and office updates to generate community discussion, educate constituents on city policy, and generate constituent feedback on city priorities.
- Empowering Atlanta voters to hold referenda on major city projects and initiatives without obstruction or undemocratic legal challenges from the city.
- Fully reinstating the independence of the Office of Inspector General, and ensure that all city ethics investigations are able to be carried out independently without intervention or retaliation from the city.
- Ensuring that city departments hold regular progress updates on city projects, infrastructure improvements, and more, and keep city web pages up to date so that voters can be fully informed on the state of city initiatives.
- Bringing Atlanta residents in the city’s budget-drafting process. Currently our city budget is set nearly entirely by the executive branch. We need voter buy-in, participatory budgeting, and a more collaborative approach to our budget priorities.
- Committing to follow through on democratic mandates established through voter referenda, such as the More MARTA referenda held in 2016. Voters need to feel like their votes, comments, and democratic input have consequences.