Why I’m running

This is a campaign blog I decided to start to document my city council run. There are two reasons I'm writing this. First, I want a frank and informal outlet for those people that like to really get into the weeds in city council races. Second, I'd like some kind of record out there that might help someone else running for a City Council seat in the future to refer to. It's a sort of step-by-step guide on how to run for Council with zero political experience.

Why am I running? The main website offers my reasons in a straightforward, concise way. But this is the blog. The blog is for the folks that like long-winded answers.

My dad was a trumpet player in the Navy band, and I grew up in five states — Maryland, Virginia, California, Washington, Virginia again, and North Carolina — before moving to England for a PhD. When I was writing up my thesis towards the end of grad school, I started looking a job. I was an expert in neuroimaging and artificial intelligence, so I had options. I could continue on in academia, which would let me work on projects I wanted to work on — hopefully projects that could contribute to society in a positive way — or I could go to the highest-paid offer I got. I'd told everyone for years in grad school that I would leave academia and get as high a salary as possible. Many PhD students go through existential crises where they think their work has very little real-world impact, and I was tired of that feeling. I got on the phone with a few hedge funds, which would have easily netted me $200,000 or more per year as a quant. But, speaking with the recruiters on the phone, I realized that I just didn't want to do that. I wasn't sure if I wanted to keep on in neuroimaging, but I definitely didn't want to spend my most productive professional years helping a billionaire get richer. So I submitted a few applications to postdoctoral positions and accepted one at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, where I would work on Alzheimer's diagnostics models for neuroimaging.

This position paid less than a third of what a hedge fund would have paid. I moved into a room in South Medford and essentially continued with the same day-to-day working style that I did in grad school.

I realized, after a few months, that I was tired of moving. I liked Medford. I liked living here. I liked the vibe. I wanted to stay. But I didn't want to stay in my living situation forever. I started looking around for a home and got a cold shower from Zillow when I saw that the cheapest were around $600,000. On a postdoc's salary? Nope. I'm a scientist, so I did what scientists do and started researching the problem. I looked into the history, the economics, the legislation, and the activism surrounding housing. Books, Youtube videos, chats with people around town.

This was the pandemic, so I felt pretty isolated upon my initial move to Medford. I had been one of those students in school that was always doing something — student government, committee work, event organizing — and didn't really know what to do with myself for the first several months outside of school. The church I normally went to had a branch out in Somerville, but that was closed for the pandemic. So I ended up walking into the local Unitarian Universalitist church and sitting down for a few services. The Unitarians were pretty good at wrapping me into things. Pretty soon I was on their social justice committee, which also led to a collaboration with Housing Medford, a community group focused on Affordable Housing Activism. Housing Medford led to a seat on the city's Community Preservation Committee. In parallel, I checked on a Facebook group and got involved with the Medford Charter Review Coalition. This led to a seat on the Mayor's Charter Study Committee that was formed a year later. Yay! Committee work!

One of the main projects of Housing Medford was to advocate that Medford City Council pass an Affordable Housing Trust, which is basically a pile of money that could be funneled towards Affordable Housing projects in Medford. We wanted to advocate that some important minutiae on that be changed from the way the Trust was being proposed — the important fine print that would mean the difference between building housing and continued stagnation in the future. In Housing Medford, many of our conversations revolved around speculation on what individual City Councilors were doing, thinking, how they might vote. And City Councilors were often worried about how other City Councilors might vote. For this and other projects, so many of our conversations boiled down to this sort of speculation. That's just politics. So, we committed to emailing and calling the City Council to sway them on these policy points, closely following and guessing what would happen on Tuesday nights.

The day after the 2022 elections, one of the progressive city councilors (that I had spent some time annoying in my lobbying efforts) reached out to me and asked if I would be interested in running. I didn’t really expect this, to be honest, and didn’t commit to anything immediately. But whether or not local issues are solved often boils down to who is willing to run for local office and who is not. I'm young, I was familiar with the ins and outs of local issues, I like public speaking, and I like committee work — what excuse did I have? If I wasn't willing to run and help fix things, I told myself, I lose my right to complain.

That's what got me to think about it. I talked to a lot of people around town prior to making a final decision to run. This was partially because I wanted perspective, partially to network, and partially to educate myself on things unrelated to housing. Being on City Council would mean a good deal of sway in affordable housing efforts, but it also means focusing on twenty other unrelated issues. So I learned as much as I could about Medford's history, economics, budget, current building projects, demographics, environmental efforts, the relationship between the City Council and the state — everything I could.

In the end, I decided to run because I wanted to live in Medford, and, if I’m going to commit to living in a place, I want to do what I can to improve it. It’s as simple as that.