I will work for you in the State Assembly to address California’s core challenges: housing, homelessness, and climate change. As a scientist and neighborhood leader, I will tackle these issues with all my technical training, the urgency they demand, and a commitment to improving your life, your family’s life, and our community.
No one in California today caused the housing crisis. Its origins stretch back to a time when laws were explicitly racist in a way that we wouldn’t tolerate now. Nevertheless, we live with the consequences of those decisions, and we have the opportunity to make new choices that live up to our values. Louis wants to reimagine our built environment because it’s necessary for our future prosperity and is key to our educational, racial, socioeconomic, criminal, and environmental justice priorities. Louis wants to:
Triple home production statewide to reach Gov. Newsom’s 3,000,000 homes goal in 10 years, not 30. If we do this by making sure areas with lots of jobs, buses, and trains also have lots of homes, we will advance many goals as we add more and more affordable housing.
More than 4 out of 5 people who work in AD51 live out of district. Some drive over 50 miles to get here and pay for gas and parking each day. Making it so the people who make our communities vibrant through their labor, energy, and ideas can live near their jobs will cut down on traffic, emissions, and accidents as it furthers socioeconomic justice.
Tackling homelessness involves: preventing people from becoming homeless, building homes for people living on the street, and providing services while people wait for those units to arrive.
We have taken big steps to reduce our emissions from power plants—so much so that transportation is now the #1 source of California’s carbon footprint.
First, it reduces the number of people who have to drive to work. If you live closer to your job, you can choose to commute by bike, bus, train, or walking. Even if you don’t do this every day, this will lower your carbon footprint. With millions of Californians involved, this will create a big carbon reduction.
Second, even if you keep driving to work, you will drive a shorter distance. You’ll save money on gas and maintenance as you save the environment by emitting less CO2.
Increase funding for governmental and non-profit social services, including after school, theater/arts/music, peer mentoring, and vocational programs. For every ten community-building nonprofits in a neigborhood, there is a 9% drop in the murder rate, a 6% drop in violent crimes, and a 4% drop in property crimes on average. We need to fund and promote the creation of such organizations everywhere, particularly in underserved communities.
Encourage law enforcement officers to be hired from within the communities they serve. Communities should be made safe by the people who live in them. The state should financially reward community recruitment and training.
Increase school funding. Public education is the greatest public health intervention and socioeconomic mobility engine ever devised. We should invest in our futures. Public schools are a public good and it is the duty of all of us to ensure they function well.
End child homelessness, which will boost educational equity. According to the LA Times, at least 269,000 K-12 students in CA were experiencing homelessness in 2018-19, enough to fill Dodger Stadium five times—and likely an underestimate. This is not to mention the 20% of LA Community College students that are similarly situated.
Create integrated communities, which have access to transit, stable housing, and robust social services. The best way to break the correlation between the zip code someone was born in and their educational attainment is to ensure that there is no difference between the zip codes of marginalized people and non-marginalized people. Kids should arrive to school swiftly, without stress, well fed, and enriched in all other parts of their lives. Louis’s housing policies will help that happen.
Louis supports all paths to universal coverage of all Californians. This includes a public option and single-payer. Louis is a beneficiary of Covered CA. Louis also believes we should:
Support reproductive justice. We must ensure universal no-barrier access to full reproductive healthcare for all women and trans people––including guaranteeing bodily autonomy and the right to abortion services––and reduce infant and maternal mortality rates among people of color. Black mothers are six times more likely than white mothers to die in the year following childbirth. CA has a higher Black maternal mortality than the nation as a whole, and the situation has worsened in recent years. We need to reverse that trend.
Louis hopes recently passed laws that expand access to and increase the number of culturally competent midwives will help. He will support expansions of such efforts. He will also explore ways of increasing prenatal care in underserved communities—which correlates with better maternal and infant birth outcomes—and for people on Medi-Cal.