Janeese Lewis George

My mom was very involved in the American Postal Workers Union. She started working nights and then worked her way to working during the day. As a single mom raising me, my brother, and my sister, she often needed to make sure she could take leave to care for my brother who had really bad asthma when we were younger. She just needed more accommodation and more benefits, and those things mattered.

I grew up going to her local office. I was there with my mom in late-night meetings and around organizing that was happening. I always tell people I was responsible for probably breaking the copy machine a couple times, but I had the opportunity to really experience that — just how important it was to be able to have a good-paying job and also have the health benefits and supports that go along with it, and to have the leave to care for families and children. As I got older, one of the biggest, most devastating things for me growing up in DC is just seeing how much the city has changed and how black residents have been displaced as a result.

That really struck home for me — when I came back after college and a service year to learn that our family was losing our home. And my mom had this good-paying union job that always has sustained us, right? She raised three kids on it, and it was now not enough for us to be able to afford stay in our home any longer.

It’s really just the conversation around who this city is built for. Who can afford to live here and stay here? And what does that mean for our greater community as a whole? I grew up where a transit worker, a bus driver next door, Mr Taylor, lived, and two seniors next door, Mr and Mrs Wallace, were aging in place, and my seventh grade history teacher lived across the street. For us to then start seeing the displacement that was happening in our neighborhood, and then to be victims of it really centered what my mom really had centered my whole life, which is that we all deserve to be able to afford to live in this city, have our basic needs met, and be able to take care of our families and our children.

Janeese Lewis George

DC experienced mass gentrification more aggressively, and it happened more rapidly than any other city. That’s not just happenstance, right? It wasn’t just attracting new residents to the city — it was the gutting of tenants’ rights across the city that really opened the door to this. We used to have the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA), and those were opportunities for residents who rented homes, who were tenants in buildings. One of the most devastating cuts originated with TOPA, which was just for the single-family residences, and my family happened to be one of those families who were renters in the city. Again, another tale of policies. My mom tried to get mortgages that were declined because of mortgage discrimination — again, another policy that doesn’t help black families be able to stay. Our TOPA rights are something that the city decided to take away from single-family residences all the way back in, I believe, 2016. That allowed for more black residents to be displaced. And utilizing TOPA rights is actually how my family was able to not be displaced from the second home that we found, and the seller said, “Look, the gentrification is hot. I can flip my home, make all this money. You guys gotta go,” which was happening massively across the city. We leveraged our tenants’ rights to keep us here.

And then the DC Council got rid of those rights six months later. And as a result, approximately twelve thousand residents were displaced. So something that I could use as leverage to have an opportunity — that’s the second word of “Tenant Opportunity to Purchase,” right? — to have an opportunity to build and ground a family and build wealth in the city, completely wiped out and taken away because developers and realtors wanted to be able to flip homes really quickly and not have to deal with long-term DC black residents.

One of the reasons I’m running is that we gutted tenants’ rights again. Small family-unit buildings were now taken into account as a result of that. And that’s because we were doing this big development around RFK. And again, they have all the small family-unit buildings around there, and they want to make it easier to flip those properties and make more money and create condos and buildings that people can’t afford.

It’s really important that people understand that when we take away and gut tenants’ rights across the board, and their leverage and opportunity, that leads to massive displacement of DC residents. That’s what it meant for us. We lost DC: we lost housing, we lost small businesses, we lost faith communities, because everybody’s trying to make a buck and profit off this but not realizing that the cost of that profit or making a buck is the loss of DC culture and DC black families. The very heart of DC. And the very heart of what makes DC great. The Lincoln Theater and the home of the arts and Thurgood Marshall, right? This black music, black arts, black culture were all curated right here in DC. My mom’s family grew up on 13th and T Street, and my dad’s generation right in the heart of what was the U Street Corridor. I used to go to flea markets on Saturdays with my grandma, right around the corner from there. At that time, it was all black families. People could afford to live there. When gentrification happened, my grandfather and my grandmother’s house was sold for $51,000. It is now worth, at this moment, $2.3 million.

So property taxes rise. Who can afford those property taxes? Long-term black senior DC residents on fixed incomes can’t afford those things. That’s why when we think about what has happened, we have to understand housing policies like rent stabilization have to be a part of the conversation, where we make a difference in families’ lives and create the stability and the certainty between housing providers and tenants. So expanding rent stabilization is important. It’s why the city has to take on social housing. Because we are in the hole on deeply affordable housing. We’ve spent over $1.4 billion and are now ten years later deeper in the hole in creating deeply affordable housing than we were when we spent those billions of dollars. We can’t rely on a market, because the market is centering profit, but we as a government have the ability to center housing as a public good and a human right. That’s what is important, and that’s what this race means to me, really recognizing how we can do that and preserve DC’s residents and DC’s culture.

Janeese Lewis George

Great question. We pay federal taxes, and we don’t have representation in Congress. Even our sitting congresswoman, Eleanor Holmes Norton, who’s been our warrior on the Hill, does not actually have a real vote in Congress. We don’t have two senators. And it’s personal because my grandfather fought in the wars. I mean, he’s actually buried at Arlington Cemetery and the gravestone says, “ . . . of the District of Columbia.” And guess what his family can’t do? Have representation in Congress. So we pay our taxes. We pay more taxes than in some of our states. We fight in wars. We do everything we’re supposed to do as American citizens. This country was literally founded on the idea that we weren’t colonies, right? That we would have home rule. And so people need to understand.

We’re a very young city. I mean, we’re only about fifty years old, and that is a very small fifty years of a bit of autonomy from the DC Home Rule Act. That was enacted and allowed us to have our own elected mayor and our own elected councilmembers, yet every single budget we pass has to go through Congress. And so Congress takes things out. And this goes back years. This impacts our ability for health and education and so many things. I remember when we were at the height of HIV/AIDS, and we were just trying to do needle exchanges, which we know were working across the country. Congress actually stopped us from being able to do needle exchanges because Republicans didn’t want us to move forward on that, so we couldn’t do it.

So our lack of statehood, our lack of autonomy and this limited home rule that we have leaves us vulnerable as a district in a very real way. We do not get a real say over how we get to govern, how we get to lead, how our taxes are spent, and it has a devastating impact on our ability to move progress forward in our community. And it impacts health and education, transportation, and so many other sectors across our city. And what I need people to understand at this moment, the reason why DC is so vulnerable to Donald Trump is because we lack autonomy through the Home Rule charter and through our lack of statehood. For example, we are the only city where the National Guard doesn’t respond to our mayor like the National Guard responds to other governors in other states. The DC National Guard answers to the president of the United States, not our mayor, not any governorship. We answer to them. We have to give our resources. In the Home Rule statute it says, “The president can request — ” and “the district shall — ”

So we are literally at the whim of whoever the president is at that moment. People didn’t take it too seriously before, when DC had been fighting for statehood, when we had a Democratic president and the House and the Senate and said, “Move DC statehood.” But now people get to see that we have been left vulnerable.

And now we have become a testing ground for the Trump administration’s actions. We were the first to have federal troops lining our streets, and those federal troops are still lining our streets. And we have states from all over the country sending troops to our city because they can. We were one of the first to have ICE agents kidnapping people off our streets. I had an opportunity to witness at least two of my neighbors be kidnapped by ICE while they were leaving their homes just to go to work, or while they were doing work — kidnapped off our streets. So now we are this testing ground for the Trump administration and the spread of fascism, and we don’t get a robust response to that. Our DC Home Rule charter limits our ability to say no, and actually makes us take affirmative actions, and it leaves us vulnerable to be this testing ground, and then they take what they do here and do it in every other city across our country.

We are a capital city left vulnerable by our lack of autonomy and statehood, and that’s why it takes a mayor at this moment to say, “Hey, we are not a free DC right now, and we’re a Democratic stronghold.” The next time we have a Democratic president and a House and a Senate, DC statehood has to be number one on the priority list — or we’re gonna be vulnerable again to whoever is the president of the United States.