WEMU offered the opportunity for any candidate appearing on a ballot in Washtenaw County in the 2018 general election to submit a campaign message directly to our audience. Ryan Hughes is running for Ann Arbor City Council, Ward 1 as an independent. What follows are the audio and remarks the candidate wanted to share with you.
I'm Ryan Hughes. I'm an Independent running for City Council. I'm a Democratic Socialist.
I'm running because the rent is too damn high.
Ann Arbor is the eigth-most segregated metropolitan area in the country! When I'm knocking on people's doors, I don't hear a lot of people tell me that they love Ann Arbor because it's an exclusive, gated community. We want diversity. We want creativity. We want vitality. But instead, we've become a place where a normal person working a normal job in town cannot afford to live here. That's not what we want. That is a problem.
That problem will not fix itself. The free market will not fix that problem for us. WE have to fix that problem.
In 2015, the county government took a look at the affordable housing situation throughout the county, and recommended that Ann Arbor build 140 new units of affordable housing per year for the next 20 years -- subsidized housing where you shouldn't have to pay more than a third of your income to live there. In the three years since that study, we've only built fifty affordable units total.
We want Ann Arbor to be a welcoming place. But if you're a person that can't afford to buy a condo for half a million dollars, a bunch of people telling you welcoming words isn't going to make you be able to afford it. We need more than welcoming words; we need welcoming action.
We already know what action to take. We have an affordable housing trust fund. We have the Ann Arbor Housing Commission, Avalon Housing, and Habitat for Humanity. They use the money from that fund to provide affordable housing for people. We just need to make sure they have enough money.
I have a bunch of ideas, but let me jump straight to my most ambitious plan, because that's the only one that's going to get us all the way to where we need to be.
Let's create a city income tax for affordable housing. It would be a 1% tax on people who live here, and a half percent on people who commute to work here. But we would only make you pay if you're making a bunch of money and you can afford it. Maybe we exempt the first, I don't know, $60,000 of income. So if you're making $90,000 per year, subtract sixty, multuply by one percent, you would owe three hundred dollars of tax per year. For someone making ninety K, that's not going to break the bank. It's a small lift, but with a big effect!
To me, that sounds like a good investment! An investment in diversity. An investment in keeping Ann Arbor an interesting, vibrant, and creative place to live. An investment in the Ann Arbor that we love.
This is the way I think. These are my priorities. If you like what you hear, vote Ryan Hughes!
Website- https://iheartryan.com/