Representative Ritchie Torres is a fighter from the Bronx who has spent his entire life working for the community he calls home. Like many people in the South Bronx, poverty and struggle have never been abstractions to him, and he governs from a place of lived experience.
Ritchie’s mother single-handedly raised him, his twin brother, and his sister in a public-housing project. She paid the bills working minimum-wage jobs, which in the 1990s paid $4.25 an hour. While Ritchie grew up with mold, lead, leaks, and no reliable heat or hot water in the winter, he watched the government spend over $100 million dollars to build a golf course across the street for Donald Trump. In 2013, at the age of 25, Ritchie became New York City’s youngest elected official and the first openly L.G.B.T.Q. person elected to office in the Bronx.
There is no issue more important to me than expanding access to safe and affordable housing. When I was growing up in the Bronx, public housing was a lifeline for my family. My mother struggled everyday to support her 3 children on $4.25 per hour, the minimum wage in the 1990s. I would not be where I am today without the stability affordable housing gave me and my family. I want to ensure every American, no matter their zip code, can say the same.
We need more affordable housing to tackle the homelessness crisis. Every day, I’m fighting for the development of more affordable housing, a universal housing voucher program, a sweeping reinvestment in our existing public housing infrastructure to address billions of dollars of capital needs, and building back our housing infrastructure better, faster, and cheaper. You can count on me to make sure the Bronx gets its fair share.