I never thought that I would run for office. Growing up, my parents, when they first immigrated to the US, worked different jobs. My dad worked as a bookkeeper at a hotel. My mom worked first at the back of an auto dealership and then in retail for minimum wage. Later it felt a little more secure, but we never escaped this feeling that things could fall apart at any point. My dad got laid off when I was in high school, and we didn’t know if I could afford to go to college. It just felt like things were set up for us to fail a lot of the time, even if we did everything we were supposed to.
I moved to DC, and I saw that in my organizing. After the 2016 election, I wanted to get more involved, so I started doing immigrants’ rights work, organizing during the first Trump administration, and working at a food justice organization. Eventually, when I had my own bad experience with my landlord, I moved into tenant organizing. That really showed me there are tenants in DC who are living in horrible conditions.
People are getting priced out of the ward and out of DC entirely. There are people who have to work two or three jobs to get by. There are people who have to choose between groceries or rent or medicine. I started organizing a rent strike with a building in Ward 8, and then I started organizing with a few buildings in Ward 1, like the Woodner Tenants Union and Tivoli Gardens [Tenants’ Association].
I came to DSA because it really spoke to my values at a time when I didn’t see them in a lot of politicians.
In the past couple years, I helped lead the fight to pass Initiative 82 to raise the tipped minimum wage in DC. Then I saw the council repeal the initiative and take away wage increases that tipped workers depended on. I’ve seen our council take away the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) for thousands of renters in DC, a protection that gives tenants power [to control] what happens to their home. I saw the council cut emergency rental…
Auteur: Aparna Raj
