I’ve been involved in politics and public service for 20 years, and the reason I’m running is the same reason I got involved in the first place: I learned early that rights only matter if people are willing to fight for them.

My father’s family came from China at a time when Chinese people were barred from becoming citizens in this country. My mother’s parents survived the Holocaust; she was born a displaced person in Europe before immigrating to the United States. My parents then built an interracial family barely a decade after the Supreme Court made that a constitutional right. I grew up understanding that I exist because of rights guaranteed under the Constitution—and that we have to fight for those rights, not just ourselves, but for others.

In 2008, I served as digital director for the Obama campaign in NY. After that, I joined the fight for marriage equality. Since then, I’ve spent two decades working across government, mission-driven tech companies, and grassroots politics to help expand democratic access,  create government transparency, and ensure everyone in our society has the opportunity to reach their potential. I’ve worked in state government, built digital tools to expand education access, and launched a non-profit that’s taught civics to thousands and helped hundreds become leaders.

After two decades of local organizing and mission-driven work, I’m running because at this moment our democracy needs elected leaders who don’t just have big ideas, but equally have an ability to bring people into the democratic process. My vision for the State Assembly is to transform the seat from a person who goes to vote in Albany into one that turns the seat into a hub for civic engagement, and engages people in solving problems with big ideas on affordability, healthcare, transportation, climate resilience, and making government actually accessible.

I am differentiated from my opponents by the combination of the longest track record of progressive reform wins, the broadest governing skill set, and the most forward-looking policy agenda in the race.

For 20 years, I have been the most reliable ally in the fight for a better New York—organizing locally for Obama, marriage equality, healthcare reform, tenant protections, immigrant rights, and good-government reform long before many of the current players in this race were involved. I have spent years forcing closed political institutions to become more transparent and accessible, and no other candidate can point to the same record of actually changing how power works from the inside.

What makes my governing skill set broader than anyone else in this race is that it combines policy design, operational execution, coalition management, and statewide political trust. For the past eight years, I have represented AD 66 on the Democratic State Committee, where I passed more reforms than any member in over a decade through leadership that was often openly hostile to change. I did that by building durable coalitions and deep trust with community and political leaders across every region of New York. That gives me a unique ability to engage legislators, validators, and local influencers far beyond this district to move legislation and solve problems that require statewide alignment. Albany runs on trust and relationships as much as ideas, and I have spent years building both.

My policy agenda is also more forward-looking and more nuanced than the glib ideological boxes. I do not approach issues through simplistic labels like NIMBY or YIMBY. I focus on root causes and incentive design. The clearest example is housing: while others reduce the issue to “build more” versus “stop development,” my framework starts with the actual market distortions that over-incentivize luxury production, underproduce regular homes, and treat land as an investment asset instead of a place for people to live. That leads to policies that rewrite incentives and solve affordability at the systems level rather than replaying the stale arguments of the last decade.

I am also the only candidate treating sexual violence as a prevention and systems-design issue, with a concrete agenda around consent education, emotional regulation, and survivor-centered policy. In the same way, I am the only candidate with a serious plan to rebuild our education system around the human foundations democracy requires: civics, media and tech literacy, consent and relationship education, and the social skills that strengthen community in an AI-mediated world. 

Finally, I am uniquely prepared for the next frontier of state policymaking: AI and emerging technology. I am the only candidate in this race with firsthand private-sector experience building technology products in the AI era. As New York faces urgent questions around algorithmic accountability, labor displacement, privacy, and the future of education, we need legislators who understand how the industry actually works and where regulation fails in practice.

My path to victory is to unite the reform majority in AD 66 while expanding turnout through the civic infrastructure I have spent 20 years building. This is fundamentally a reform district, and the natural coalition here is younger renters, reform-minded club members, highly engaged professionals, insurgent progressives, and voters who want both structural change and competence. 

The decisive advantage I bring is that I already have an organic organizing network no one else can replicate: thousands of people I have personally brought into politics through civic trainings, local organizing, coalition work, and leadership development. Many of today’s neighborhood leaders, club officers, county committee members, and issue advocates in this district got involved through my work. That means my campaign does not need to invent a coalition from scratch—it is activating one that has been built over two decades.

In a split field, the winning path is straightforward: consolidate the reform lane, dominate among voters who want both big structural ideas and proven execution, activate the leaders and networks I have spent years developing, and expand turnout beyond the traditional club electorate. That is the coalition that wins this district and governs effectively on the first day.

Agree

Agree

Agree

SEQRA Reform:

Yes, but the details are critical: SEQRA should focus rigorous review on projects with real ecological or environmental justice risks, while creating fast, predictable pathways for development that prevent abuse of the process for the purpose of delay.

Civil Service Reform:

Yes, with the caveat that temporary appointments are strictly short-term so they address staffing bottlenecks without undermining merit protections or becoming a vehicle for patronage.

Capital Project Procurement Reform:

Yes, I generally support home rule in areas where the State is not at direct financial risk — including giving NYC more procurement flexibility.

Agree

Agree

Agree

Agree

Expanding Housing:

Yes, but the market is distorted in favor of luxury units leading to inefficient overproduction of supply that doesn't meet the need. Expanding housing requires updating the market incentive structure before we can say market-rate units that will deliver what is required.

Transit Oriented Development:

Yes, but it's actually more important for NY to create more mass transit hubs to expand the areas where development makes sense. This unlocks more development opportunities of the type we need than just changing zoning around existing hubs.

Additionally:

Housing, transportation and taxation are intimately linked. For more detail on my approach to addressing the housing crisis, please visit VoteBenYee.nyc/issues

Agree

Agree

Agree

Agree

Automated Camera Expansion:

Yes, NYS should generally provide NYC and other localities much more home rule to address issues locally.

Additionally:

Transportation is one of the most important issues for addressing the housing and affordability crisis, as well as critical investment for NYC's economy. For more detail on my policies on expanding transportation infrastructure, regional planning and funding please visit VoteBenYee.nyc/issues

Agree

Agree

Nuclear Energy Development:

Yes, but the type of reactor is important. I believe small modular reactors can play an important role in augmenting energy production and improving grid resiliency.

A strong example from my record is my work modernizing transparency and digital access in the New York State Senate. At the time, the institution was widely viewed as one of the most dysfunctional legislatures in the country, and basic public access tools that should have been standard—livestreaming hearings, searchable legislative information, machine-readable data, and modern public-facing websites—either did not exist or were severely limited.

The obstacle was not technical feasibility. It was institutional inertia, fragmented ownership, procurement friction, and a culture that treated public access as optional rather than core democratic infrastructure. The challenge was to move a legacy public institution from bespoke, opaque, slow-moving systems toward modern digital infrastructure that could scale.

My role was to help drive the design and implementation of systems that opened the legislative process to the public: livestreaming Senate sessions and hearings, searchable online access to laws and legislative activity, social and digital distribution systems, and one of the country’s earliest machine-readable legislative data portals. The outcome was not just better transparency. It materially expanded civic participation by making it easier for journalists, advocates, researchers, and ordinary New Yorkers to understand and engage with state government.

What makes this aligned with an abundance agenda is that it reflects how I approach bottlenecks: identify where legacy rules, fragmented processes, and institutional risk-aversion are suppressing access to a public good, then redesign the system so it can deliver at scale. Whether the public good is democratic access, housing, transit, or clean energy, the governing principle is the same: remove artificial scarcity created by bad systems while preserving the protections that actually matter.

ISSUE #1: 

Affordable housing Affordable housing is the number one issue facing NYC, and lower Manhattan in particular, for three reasons: 

First, the qualities that make New York an attractive place to live, that drive our economy, that create a streetscape of things you cannot get anywhere else, that make NYC the capital of the world, rely on the city remaining a place where people of all walks of life can come and thrive. The innovation, the energy, the grit, that’s a consequence of people making it in NYC. All of that will be lost if NYC becomes a place where, to live here, you must have already made it.

Second, the crushing pressure of affordability is used as a cudgel against regular New Yorkers to benefit real estate developers, wealthy investors, and increase segregation. Because of a distorted housing market that artificially inflates demand in the luxury market, the “regular home” market that most people occupy is underserved. This leads to large luxury units that are used for investment instead of residence, hollowed-out streetscapes, increasingly segregated neighborhoods built for a wealthy elite that’s overwhelmingly white, sub-optimal population density, and high rents/costs for regular homes due to underproduction. There is nothing wrong with building, but sixty floors of floor-through units is not a solution to the housing crisis. We must build homes, not structures.

Third, the way we currently do development forces communities to fracture over what public goods we want, leaving the wealthy and connected with the most power. Because there is no democratically negotiated plan for development, New Yorkers constantly war with each other over individual plots of land over whether we will get affordable housing or green space, schools or supermarkets, and who will absorb necessities of our society like upzonings, shelters, and addiction treatment centers.

In the Assembly, I will fight for legislation to change this broken system.

1. Pass a Residential and Commercial Vacancy Tax to eliminate the tax advantage of warehousing residential or commercial units.

2. Pass a pied-à-terre tax so that landowners who pay taxes elsewhere give their fair share to NYC, penalize empty towers that lead to empty streets and monoculture communities, and rebalance the housing market, which incentivizes luxury market development over the “homes” market.

3. Require any land in which the State has an interest (i.e., directly owned or controlled via an Authority) that’s used for development to be a minimum of 50% affordable, with incentives for more.

4. Provide funding for rehabbing dilapidated rent stabilized units, rehabbing public housing, and creating new Mitchell-Lama type programs. In particular, by creating a new, dedicated lockbox for funding non-luxury development in New York State for areas within commuting distance of economic hubs.

5. Replace AMI with Cost of Living calculations.

6. Restore Home Rule to NYC and other municipalities so that they can pilot programs that currently require the entire State to agree, like new types of Rent Stabilization or Pied-a-Terre taxes

7a. Fund fast and free buses in NYC and augmented commuter services to drastically reduce rent pressure on the urban core by expanding the commuter area to places where development is cheaper and easier. 

7b. Require the Dept of Transportation, MTA, and Port Authority to develop regional plans to integrate commuter services and fund through-running trains.

8. A program to provide block grants for municipal governments that create comprehensive development plans.

9. Increase mandatory affordable housing for tax breaks to 35%

ISSUE #2:

Quality of Life

Quality of life is something of a catch-all, but there are two interrelated QoL aspects that are absolutely critical to our district: safety and healthcare. I find these to be particularly egregious because of the low-hanging fruit that exists to address these problems at the State level.

While crime hovers at historic lows, the feeling of unease amongst residents downtown is real. A large part of this is visible homelessness and people struggling with mental health or addiction. This has led to calls for ever more draconian policies, like more police and more involuntary confinement for people just trying to survive. On the flip side, for the violent crime that does exist, there are incredibly simple, effective, and cheap ways to reduce it far more than 100, 1,000, or 1,000,000 more police ever could.

** Safety & Healthcare **

1. Fund universal healthcare, including mental health and addiction support. Untreated mental illness and addiction are major drivers of homelessness, public disorder, and repeat interactions with police. Much of what people experience as “disorder” on the street—erratic behavior, public distress, and visible crisis—is rooted in the absence of accessible treatment, not criminal intent. States that expand access to treatment see reductions in emergency room use, incarceration, and repeat offending. The alternative—cycling people through jails, shelters, and emergency departments—is vastly more expensive and less humane.

Though less visible, we have a public safety crisis in the willful elimination of life-saving services as hospitals are shuttered. Whether it’s due to the next climate catastrophe or a heart attack, the lack of hospital infrastructure means lives downtown will be lost. In addition to stringent auditing of hospital finances for proposed closures, funding healthcare means hospitals will no longer take losses, as those without health insurance use emergency rooms as their primary source of care, without the ability to pay for those expensive services.

Finally, good health is the greatest indicator of a high quality of life, yet people avoid receiving care because of the astronomical cost. For many, healthcare is (or would be) the second-highest cost after rent. Stories of a single health emergency wiping out a people’s finances are common. Universal healthcare will improve health outcomes, drastically improve affordability in NYC, and improve stability for millions.

2. Funding for more shelters and better shelter design. Part of the hospital burden is due to a steady flow of unhoused people who use the system as shelter. The same goes for an expensive drain on our police force that’s used to corral people who simply can’t find a place to shelter. Shelters are often treated as a last resort and funded accordingly, producing environments that feel unsafe for residents and surrounding communities alike. SRO-style units with secure storage, lockers, and appropriate staffing reduce conflict, improve outcomes, encourage shelter seeking, and cost less than policing street homelessness, building and operating jails, or using hospital services to keep people out of the cold.

** Better Public safety via cost-effective, proven strategies our government has ignored ** 

1. K-12 Incorporating age-appropriate consent education into the curriculum. The second most common form of crime is unwanted sexual contact through violence or coercion. It’s astronomically prevalent, with 39% of women and 17% of men experiencing sexual violence in their lifetime, and rates are even higher in marginalized communities. This lands it just behind “you will likely be robbed of something at some point in your life”, but we treat it as a fact of life despite the life-altering effects this form of crime has.

For the last decade, Australia piloted K-12 consent education in various states, finally releasing a mandatory, nationwide curriculum in 2020. These programs, as well as various studies in the US, have shown consent education can reduce sexual violence & gender based bullying by 25%-50%, reducing real crime and real harm. If we want to improve the quality of life for a substantial part of the population,  we need to tackle sexual violence in a way we simply are not currently. K-12 consent education is a proven way to bring the issue out of the shadows and substantially move the needle.

2. Social-cognitive skill education in high schools and providing similar education to incarcerated persons. Research shows that courses to teach these skills can reduce violent altercations in schools by 20% and reduce recidivism for violent crimes by 45%. And, compared to the cost of policing and incarceration, it’s virtually free.

3. Funding legal support for people reporting crimes. It is incredibly difficult to report a crime. A large part of this is because reporters have no legal support unless the DA decides to get involved, which is dependent on a successful report. NYC recently started a program to supply any person facing housing court with an attorney, it is a civic imperative to provide this for people reporting crimes.

4. Expanding the court system and making it more flexible to permanently end the shortage of judges. New York’s chronic shortage of judges, especially in New York City, brings the wheels of justice to a slow grind. Long waits for trial create a cascade of serious problems, from violation of the Constitution, to life-altering holding of unconvicted detainees, to a justice system that fails to bring people to justice.

5. Funding auxiliary police and social workers in communities. Studies in urban design and criminology show that “eyes on the street” reduce crime. Simply having someone with the capacity to intervene at the site of an altercation has been shown to reduce violent crime by 20%-30%. Stationing auxiliaries and social workers in neighborhoods creates an environment where trained professionals can recognize problems as they emerge and de-escalate them, or connect people to services without defaulting to arrest. That reduces reliance on emergency response, making public spaces safer for less expense, and in a more humane way.

ISSUE #3:

Protecting Democracy and Civil Rights

Today, the preservation of democracy and civil rights in New York City is not an esoteric idea. As we come under continued assault from a Federal government that is focused on silencing dissent and removing people it finds undesirable, there is a clear and present danger that our rights will be eroded beyond recognition in the future unless we take action today.

Our democracy is only as resilient as the people in it. Trust in our system and our politicians has eroded to the point that millions are voting for any change they can get because they no longer believe that their voices are heard. No matter what policies are enacted in City Hall, Albany, or Washington. The job of an elected official in the post-Trump world needs to be different from what it was pre-Trump. Elected leaders need to be more than representatives in government; they need to be ambassadors of government and democratic decision-making to the people of their districts, and their offices need to provide the go-to place(s) for learning about government, advocating for change, or planning civic projects over a cup of coffee.

As Assemblymember, I will make our district the incubator for democracy resilience, launching new programs to empower voters, new types of district programming, the most successful of which I will work to institutionalize in district offices across the State.

1. District workshops. The way we build power for change is to get people involved, and to get people involved, you have to offer them something. A minority of people show up to community boards, town halls, and long-winded government functions that they feel are designed to give politicians a win. My office will run empowerment workshops, built on the incredibly popular Real Politics 101 curriculum I developed, to create programming around the district and in schools that teach history, politics, and civics to provide concrete service in the form of lessons on how to build power in our democracy.

2. District hubs. One of the great lessons of Occupy Wall Street was that community building happens when meeting your community is easy. The US, and specifically NYC, is dangerously low on public “third-spaces”, places that are safe from the elements where you can be in community. My office will create “District Hubs” that provide regular space around the district for people to engage with government, politics, and activism.

3. Civics hotline. In teaching civic workshops across NYC, I have personally taught and heard from almost eight thousand New Yorkers, nearly all of whom lament how they never learned how government works, the incentives that politicians face, or how institutional players affect policy. Without knowing the system, it’s impossible to know how to make a change. My office will provide a hotline to serve as a one-stop shop about how our system works and how to make an impact.

4. In-house data science. The only way to know if programs and policies are working is by measuring outcomes. My office will employ an in-house data scientist to cut through politics and design everything we do in a way that can be measured for improvements and objective feedback.

I will also fight for legislation that will empower voters and reduce the influence of wealthy interests:

1. Matching funds with a cap for State Races similar to the NYC system

2. Ranked choice voting for State elections 

3. Expanded Vote By Mail and exploring Mobile Voting with paper ballot validation

Bonus: Climate Resiliency

Find out more at VoteBenYee.nyc