Ryder Kessler
Climate
Supports stopping backsliding on climate commitments, blocking fossil fuel projects, and implementing cap-and-invest. Advocates for regulating utilities to prevent onerous rate hikes, deploying solar and wind energy, electrifying the grid, and stopping abuse of the grid by big tech data centers and cryptomining.
Campaign Platform ↗Healthcare
Supports passing the New York Health Act to create a single-payer system. Also advocates for lowering medical costs through transparency, reducing waste, preventing corporate consolidation, and protecting critical care from MAGA attempts to ban and defund them.
Campaign Platform ↗Housing
Supports building more homes of all types, including public housing and community-owned social housing, to lower rents. Advocates for strengthening tenant protections, right to counsel in housing court, and ending needless reauthorizations for SCRIE and DRIE. Also aims to lower home ownership costs by cracking down on insurance companies, reforming property taxes, and subsidizing co-op greening.
Campaign Platform ↗Education
Supports funding the Class Size Reduction Act, reducing the student-to-counselor ratio to meet national standards, expanding mental health treatment in schools, and expanding funding for CUNY and SUNY by demanding large private universities contribute more.
Campaign Platform ↗Immigration
Supports passing New York for All to ban collaboration with federal immigration enforcement, stop ICE incarceration in state facilities, require agents to show their faces, ensure legal representation in immigration courts, and allow New Yorkers to sue ICE agents who violate their rights.
Campaign Platform ↗Labor
Supports protecting collective bargaining rights, enforcing Project Labor Agreements to ensure union workers build neighborhoods, and fostering apprenticeships and green jobs programs.
Campaign Platform ↗Reproductive Rights
Supports guaranteeing gender-affirming care for transgender and gender non-conforming youth and adults, expanding access to reproductive care including lowering barriers to birth control prescription and payment, and offering vaccines on data-backed schedules.
Campaign Platform ↗Transportation
Supports fast and free buses through dedicated busways and automated enforcement, and revitalized subways through MTA capital investment, signal modernization, accessibility upgrades, and station right-sizing.
Campaign Platform ↗Voting Rights & Election Reform
Supports legalizing same-day registration, implementing automatic voter registration, and ending cronyism at the Board of Elections.
Campaign Platform ↗AI, Tech & Privacy
Supports banning personalized pricing that uses algorithms to take advantage of consumers, blocking algorithmic discrimination with annual independent audits, regulating AI companies to stop deepfakes and disinformation, protecting privacy, ensuring safety, and making companies responsible for power generation. Also supports creating a dividend to share AI profits with citizens and protecting patient data with the New York Health Information Privacy Act.
Campaign Platform ↗Mental Health Investment
Supports closing insurance loopholes that deny care, banning step therapy, ending prior authorization for mental health medications, and enforcing parity laws. Advocates for restoring and expanding mental health funding for mobile treatment teams, clubhouses, trauma recovery centers, and the 988 crisis lifeline. Also supports expanding the mental health workforce through better pay, faster hiring, and a CUNY/SUNY graduate tuition forgiveness program.
Campaign Platform ↗Public Safety & Criminal Justice Reform
Supports removing scaffolding, adding street lights to reduce crime, cleaning up subway stations, and containerizing all trash and recycling to end rat problems and garbage piles.
Campaign Platform ↗LGBTQ+ Protections
Supports attacking antisemitism, countering Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian animus, fighting anti-AAPI hate, and attacks on LGBTQ+ New Yorkers.
Campaign Platform ↗LGBTQ+ Rights and Gender-Affirming Care
Supports ensuring trans youth can live and learn in accordance with their gender identities, increasing investment in HIV research and outreach, and expanding housing and care for LGBTQ+ young people and queer elders.
Campaign Platform ↗Protect Small Businesses and Cultural Spaces
Supports reducing red tape on small businesses, cracking down on extortionate insurance policies, and rationalizing year-round outdoor dining without unsightly sheds or onerous seasonal rules.
Campaign Platform ↗Thriving Arts and Culture
Supports increasing funding for arts and cultural organizations, ensuring accessibility for low-income residents, creating dedicated worker protections for artists, and experimenting with guaranteed income to enable artistic creation.
Campaign Platform ↗Universal Childcare
Supports creating universal, affordable childcare for all children 6 weeks and older to lower costs for families and grow the economy.
Campaign Platform ↗Justice for All
Supports safely reducing the incarcerated population, strategically approaching prison consolidation to create safer conditions, and investing in data-backed crime prevention programs like making the Summer Youth Employment Program universal.
Campaign Platform ↗A Government that Delivers
Supports a laser focus on delivery by centrally tracking how quickly benefits like housing vouchers and food stamps are delivered, and reforming civil service to allow agencies to hire quickly and effectively.
Campaign Platform ↗Ending Street Homelessness
Supports ending street homelessness by increasing psychiatric beds, supportive housing, Safe Haven shelters, and stabilization beds. Opposes encampment sweeps as a solution. Advocates for stronger pathways to housing and healthcare with coordinated case management, and passing Daniel's Law to send mental health professionals instead of police to people in crisis.
Campaign Platform ↗Preserving Neighborhood Character
Supports slowing or blocking multifamily home combinations, passing a pied-a-terre tax to prevent warehousing of homes, and canceling JLWQA conversion fees.
Campaign Platform ↗Dignity for Aging and Disabled Neighbors
Supports ending needless annual reauthorization of SCRIE and DRIE, offering accessibility bonuses for new housing, and helping seniors age in place by expanding home modification programs for ramps, grab bars, and smart-home safety tech.
Campaign Platform ↗Economic Equality
Supports increasing taxes on the ultra-wealthy through a tiered progressive tax hike on incomes above $5M, cracking down on the 'Buy, Borrow, Die' strategy, and fixing the broken property tax system with a circuit breaker tax credit for middle-class homeowners.
Campaign Platform ↗Solving Traffic Violence
Supports mandating speed limiters for reckless drivers, designing better streets with hardened daylighting and traffic calming, protecting pedestrians from e-bikes by banning certain motorized vehicles and cracking down on app companies, and drastically expanding protected bike lanes.
Campaign Platform ↗No public position yet on Elections, Animal Wellness & Subsidy Reform, Animal Welfare, Arts, Civil Rights, Courts, Disability & Accessibility, Government Transparency & Ethics, Government Transparency, Innovation & Job Creation, LGBTQIA+, Revenue, Protect Seniors, Sexual Violence Prevention, Substance Use Treatment and Public Health
Others running for State Assembly Member - District 66