I want you to believe a better MA is possible.

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 A Message from Burhan

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Massachusetts is a great place to live that no one can afford. That has been my focus in politics for years. Long before affordability became the defining issue of this moment, I was working on it. Because if you cannot afford to stay in your home or your community, nothing else matters.

My entry into politics began in the pro-housing movement. I co-founded Abundant Housing Massachusetts with Jesse Kanson-Benanav, Molly Goodman, Beyazmin Jiménez, Jonathan Berk, Jacob Oppenheim, and other leaders across the Commonwealth, growing it from a ragtag volunteer effort into a fully staffed organization advancing critical housing policy. We helped push the Affordable Homes Act, the Housing Bond Bill, and the MBTA Communities Act, ensuring that every community does its part to address the housing crisis. But advocacy was not enough.

I ran to serve my community directly, becoming the youngest city councilor elected in our city’s history at that time. Now, three terms later, I have the honor of serving as Vice Mayor and celebrating a long list of victories.
We passed and implemented Universal Pre-K, making early education more accessible and affordable for working families. We pushed forward on climate, creating programs that have cut utility costs and lowered emissions at the same time; the future has to be both greener and cheaper, not one or the other.

And we won historic victories on housing. Over the last half decade, we led the way in eliminating barriers to building more homes and invested in affordable housing, fundamentally changing how our city approaches housing. I was the lead sponsor on legislation that strengthened our Affordable Housing Overlay and legalized triple deckers and multifamily housing. Housing is not inevitably expensive. It is a policy choice, and one that we have the power to change.

Right now, we settle for managing problems instead of solving them. We celebrate an MBTA with no slow zones instead of demanding an MBTA that expands and gets you where you want to go. We aim to keep rents from rising too fast instead of actually solving the housing crisis so people can live where they want, not just where they can barely afford.

We treat having a child like a second mortgage instead of building a system where families are supported from the start. We frame climate action as sacrifice instead of building a clean energy system that is more affordable and reliable than what came before.

In the richest state, in the richest country in the history of the world, we should be able to deliver better than this. And we can.

My record shows that progress is possible. We have already shifted the conversation on housing in ways that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. What once felt politically impossible is now central to the debate in Massachusetts and across the country.

Real policy change requires three things: a bold idea, the ability to build a coalition to pass it, and the discipline to work through the details and implement it well so that it works in practice. My mission in politics is to prove that we can have all three. Because I want to believe, and I want all of us to believe, that a better world is possible.

Join us on February 25th at 6 p.m. at the Armory in Somerville as we kick off this campaign for State Senate in the Second Middlesex.