Crystal Hudson: A Bold Fighter for District 35

Crystal Hudson: A Bold Fighter for Dist. 35

BY WWT EDITORIAL STAFF

In an interview with People, Power & Politics, the leading candidate and Democratic nominee for District 35, Ms. Crystal Hudson, addressed is‐sues facing her vision for the district, rollout, and priority areas of interest for the con‐stituency. Below are excerpts from the interview. Ms. Hudson revealed that as a first‐generation American with immigrant ancestry, the difficul‐ties experienced while caring for a family member propelled her into a career in public serv‐ice that has spanned the past years across the city council and the public advocate office. "My mother had Alzheimer's disease for the last eight years until she passed. I was the only child of a single mother. And it was through the caregiving ex‐perience that I got into public service. I spent over ten years working in sports marketing in a completely unrelated field. Still, I saw firsthand how in‐credibly difficult it was for my family to access resources and services and even just basic in‐formation. And that's what pro‐pelled me into my career in public service." During the Democratic candi‐date nomination bid, she ex‐pressed a crucial interest in changing her district in four key areas—COVID‐19 recovery, ed‐ucation, housing, and homeless‐ness.

Issues She intends to tackle the vari‐ous issues by gathering support in addressing the dispropor‐tionate impact of the pandemic, especially on women." Firstly, with COVID‐19, and recovering from that, we have to acknowl‐edge everything that we've been through, not just the pan‐demic, but also the economic crisis, the racial reckoning, you know, everything we've seen in the past year and a half. One of the things we have to do is ad‐dress the fact that black and brown folks, in particular, have been disproportionately im‐pacted by the pandemic, not only from a health perspective but also from an economic per‐spective. Women of color, in particular, have lost the most jobs than any other demo‐graphic. And so we need to start with ensuring we are investing in our public hospital system and health care system, that our communities are getting access to quality, healthcare and cul‐turally competent health care." Secondly, she says creating jobs with good wages will enable people to take care of their fam‐ilies. "We also need to ensure you know that we have job op‐portunities that… have good wages, and aren't, paying peo‐ple less than a living wage, and something that they can actu‐ally support their families on." Pertaining to education, get‐ting full funding for education, especially among the minority communities, remains a crucial tactic. According to Hudson, "I think the pandemic has obviously im‐pacted our school communi‐ties. And we saw early on in the pandemic that students didn't have the devices and the re‐sources they needed to con‐tinue their studies. And so, coming out of everything going into the new year, I think we need to ensure that. We need to work with the administration to make sure that our schools are fully funded, particularly the schools in our black com‐munities, and brown communi‐ties and immigrant communities, and working‐class communities have the full resources that every other school has." When asked about the issue of segregation in the New York City school system, and the op‐tion of open enrollment as a strategy to tackle the endemic problem, she proposed a com‐bination of options including appropriate allocation of funds, investing in educational activi‐

Editorial credit: Katrina Hajagos

ties and after‐school programs that are robust and builds the children and recruiting teachers that look like the students. "We need to invest more in our chil‐dren and our youth. We need to provide after‐school activities and programs, you know, so many of our schools don't have access to dual‐language pro‐grams. For example, we have so many kids who speak multiple languages. And so, we need to make sure we have a curriculum that reflects those students' cur‐riculum that talks about all of our rich histories. So, thinking about funding, the curriculum, and recruiting teachers, more teachers that look like the stu‐dents. All of those are ways that I think we can improve our edu‐cation system." We must also ensure that the schools in the communities be‐come appropriate for learning ‐more accommodating and bet‐ter equipped. "And that's some‐thing that's really stuck with me. You know, our schools don't look like schools in white neigh‐borhoods and white communi‐ties. We don't have access to the same devices, the computer labs, the hydroponic labs, like all of the resources white schools generally tend to have. We don't even have the appro‐priate textbooks. You know, sometimes we don't have air conditioning in the summer or heating in the winter. Our gyms are broken. Our facilities are in‐adequate. And there's no reason why our kids should not have access to the best of everything. The same way white kids gener‐ally tend to have." On housing, homelessness, and gentrification problems in the communities in District 35, Hudson asserts that the focus will be to address existing hous‐ing problems like holding land‐lords accountable, encouraging the building of affordable houses for low‐ and moderate‐income citizens, promoting safety, and maintaining afford‐ability. According to her, "I think our district lacks both low‐in‐come housing and middle‐in‐come housing. We need to create housing that allows those who are already in these com‐munities to stay in these com‐munities. We also need to address the fact that there are so many predatory landlords. We don't hold those landlords accountable. And so thinking about both how we're address‐ing existing housing, making it safe and actually affordable, and maintaining affordability. With new housing, what we're actu‐ally building and building for people who are low and moder‐ate‐income folks so that we can actually keep more people in our neighborhoods."

Black Agenda Addressing her bold recommen‐dations made in the 'Black Agenda for black New Yorkers, Ms. Hudson affirms that she wrote the agenda as a call for all elected City council members to cause a change deliberately. "I wrote the Black Agenda, be‐cause I thought it was important to put something out that actu‐ally calls on everybody else who's also been elected, and, serving in a public role. It's about the full city council, 51 members. We have the ability to actually address and undo all of the really racist, but in particu‐lar, anti‐black policies, practices, laws that we have on the books. And so now that we are in posi‐tions of power, we have the abil‐ity and honestly the responsibility to undo a lot of those laws." A collaboration she intends to promote during the first 100 days in office. According to Ms. Hudson, "Within my first 100 days, I hope to, you know, part‐ner with several other elected officials that we can start to im‐plement some of those bold ideas, some of which don't even require funding. Those are the types of things we're talking about in the black agenda that need to be addressed and need to be undone and need to be re‐versed." Ahead of the November 2 gen‐eral elections, she encouraged all eligible voters to vote again as it is crucial for electing the leadership they want. "It's the next step and ensuring we have the leadership that we want, and the leadership that you know will deliver for our peo‐ple," she adds.t