The rent is too damn high. Housing costs are too damn high. Poverty is too damn high.

More and more people are suffering. It’s harder for people to pay for rent, healthcare, food, or just make ends meet. Children today won’t be better off than their parents.

The greed of corporations, big banks, developers, landlords, bosses, and so-called “non-profits” who function as businesses that don’t give back to our region — like UPMC, has created obscene inequality between the rich and the poor. This is the central issue facing Allegheny County today.

• Between 2010 and 2020:
  • 10,000 Black people were forcibly pushed out of Pittsburgh by gentrification.
  • Over 2,000 Black people were forcibly pushed out of Wilkinsburg by corporate investments.
• Homelessness in Allegheny County increased by 19% this year.
• The poverty rate for Black people in Allegheny County is 28% — double that of the poverty rate for white families.
• 45% of Black children in our region live in poverty.
• Allegheny County’s air consistently ranks among the country’s most polluted
• Children in Allegheny County are 38% more likely to have asthma than the average child nationwide.
• In the past three years, 21 people incarcerated at Allegheny County Jail have died.

The crises we face — from the climate crisis, to housing, to poverty — are public health crises, caused by the rich and powerful’s ever-growing need to extract profit from every aspect of our lives, to horde and protect wealth and power — and to prevent the working class from uniting, building power, and building a world of collective care.

To build an Allegheny County for the poor and working class, we must begin a transition to a truly democratic government and economy.

The long-term solution is a much bigger discussion, one that will require all of us to have a voice in deciding what it truly means to ensure everyone in our communities and in our County can meet their basic needs, have agency in the decisions about their government and their labor, and be able not only to meet basic needs to but to live full, thriving lives.

But Carl has a vision for immediate and long-term steps we can take to build this future, and that’s why he’s running for Allegheny County Council. To learn more about Carl’s stances on the issues, scroll down or click the list below to skip to a particular section.

• Housing for all.
• Clean air, clean water, and a livable climate for all.
• Power to all workers.
• Health and safety for all.
• Justice—not carceral systems—for all.

Housing for all.

Housing is a human right, so we must work towards housing for all. Regardless of the money you have, or whether you are Black, brown, white, queer, disabled, or have the ability to work — you deserve housing.

We need to start by reversing and ending the gentrification process taking place in our region, by advocating for policies that lower the cost of housing, for the unhoused, renters, and homeowners.

We must end the criminalization in our county, of the unhoused, create a pipeline of programming to ensure affordable housing options and transitional housing for the unhoused.

Carl will work toward a future where all our neighbors have a right to housing by working on the following legislative goals:

• To Pass a Tenants’ Bill of Rights: This should include Right-to-Counsel for tenants facing eviction, Just Cause requirements for eviction, ending discrimination in Section 8 rents, tenant organizing as a protected right, and proactive support and education about tenant organizing.
• To Promote common ownership of housing I will advocate for and support Community Land Trusts (CLTs) as the primary path to long-term affordable housing, by proposing legislation to grant Community Land Trusts the first right-of-refusal for any transfer of County property.

Clean air, clean water, and a livable climate for all.

Clean air and clean water are human rights, and so is the right to a future with a livable climate. We must prioritize our environment, health, and future over the profits of corporations.

As a member of County Council, Carl will work toward a future where our right to clean air and water and a livable climate is respected, promoted, and defended by Allegheny County.

We should end all County support for polluting corporations that poison our air and water. They continually treat insufficient fines for clean air violations as just the cost of doing business, and then they keep polluting our air, our water — our home.

We must staff the county health department so that they may follow through on their long-term emissions reductions plan to halt the largest companies emitting pollutants into our air, water and lives.

We must halt all fracking and only support a just transition to a fully fracking-free county.

Power to all workers.

All workers have the right to safe working conditions, livable wages, and the right to easily unionize for the betterment of their lives in and out of the workplace. The county should support unionizing workers in whatever possible way — including voluntarily recognize unions based on card check votes.

We should increase the minimum wage countywide to move ahead of inflationary costs of living. We should introduce a higher minimum wage county-wide despite what is happening at the state level, where Pennsylvania is currently blocking these changes.

Carl is committed to supporting unionization in every way possible, and he will also support the efforts of those who work at UPMC to form a union, as well as the Post Gazette strikers and Starbucks workers organizing stores across our County — and every group of workers organizing for power in and out of their workplace.

That includes supporting workers incarcerated at Allegheny County Jail. ACJ has incarcerated workers who do not receive wage, including people who have not been convicted of a crime, in violation of the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution. As workers for Allegheny County they must be paid the newly raised minimum wage for County employees, both those convicted of a crime and those who have not.

Health and safety for all.

We all deserve to be healthy and safe in our homes and communities. Our County resources should be used to help each other.

By putting people over profits and care over cops, we can do far more to help our County’s most vulnerable populations than we ever will by continuing to prioritize support for developers, corporations, cops, and incarcerating more and more people in a disastrously unsafe County Jail over direct support to our neighbors in need of help.

As a member of Allegheny County Council, Carl will fight for the health and safety of all across our County. That includes using his vote and voice as a legislator to push to invest in resources that keep our most vulnerable populations safe—particularly people facing health crises, emergencies, substance use harm reduction needs, families in domestic crisis, or housing insecurity. By prioritizing help for people in crisis over policing them, we can better keep everyone in our communities safe.

Justice—not carceral systems—for all.

The local carceral system makes the people in our county less safe.

We should make alternatives to incarceration and carceral police structures a priority to develop and fund. We know that over-policing has made our neighbors, particularly Black residents, our homeless, mentally ill and disabled, and substance-dependent people, less safe—not more. Our police function as a local militia.

We need to address the humanitarian crisis occurring at Allegheny County Jail immediately, and move to divest from the prison system and build community alternatives to prison.

We also need to invest in building community alternatives to the current structure of policing.