Clyde Williams

• Affordable Housing: The lack of affordable housing in NY-13 has been a growing problem for 30 years, and we are now facing a crisis. Rents in Harlem have increased over 90% in the last decade, over 75% in Manhattan overall and 60% in the Bronx. At this rate, long-term residents’ and their families may not have the ability to stay in this community, which will increase the city’s segregation of middle income and poor families into less affluent neighborhoods.

• Education & Workforce Development: As the son of a public school teacher, I learned first hand about the costs and possibilities of public education. I experienced what education inequality really means. We were under-resourced and under-educated. My mother then paid a woman’s electric bill so that I could attend a top public high school. While I was academically unprepared entering the 9th grade, that experience transformed my life.

• Job Creation & Economic Opportunity: Thousands of people in this community are out of work or looking for work.2 But the lack of employment opportunities has been a problem for decades, not just since the financial crisis in 2008.

• Equality & Access: We have made so much progress as a nation since the Civil Rights movement. Still, everyday, there are elements of our society that labor to roll back the clock.

• Criminal Justice & Gun Law Reform: Communities of color are disproportionately affected by crime – and are alienated from the institutions charged with their protection, so painfully demonstrated in the Eric Garner incident and other recent examples of police brutality.

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