Campaign Q&A

ICE was a serious problem during the Midway blitz. If you listen to people within the Department of Defense, it's not a matter of if they come back, but when. As a community, our best defense is standing together. A sign in every window, a hotline to call when things get scary—these are things we can actually do. We have to work on a national level to fix this mess, but that takes time we don't always have. In the meantime, we protect each other with the small actions. A few years ago, my handyman ended up in a holding cell during a sweep. He told me he was an American citizen. It made my blood boil. But screaming at a brick wall won't fix it; keeping our community tightly knit and looking out for each other will.

Honestly? An alderman has very little direct power against ICE. Much like a congressperson, I am not running for the executive branch—in Chicago, that’s the mayor's job. I support Mayor Johnson in a lot of areas, and this is a big one. Giving him the backing to harness his law enforcement arm in CPD to protect our residents is something we should have locked down yesterday. If elected, I'll absolutely vote to make sure we do it next time.

We’ve been dealing with these types of cameras since the Daley days, starting with the red light cameras. Let's be real, they're a money grab. I’ve long been a proponent of the 4-to-5-second yellow light, unlike the 3-second yellow we’ve had in this city for way too long (which I've personally funded through multiple $60 tickets). As an alderwoman, I’ll have the ability to introduce ordinances to restrict their use by CPD and, ultimately, ban them. Policing should be done by people—the beat cops who actually live in our neighborhoods. Not by some weird, apocalyptic robot out of a Terminator movie.

It really depends on the development, and as a council member, I’ll have the opportunity to weigh in on most of them. When my grandma used to visit this ward for the amusement park by the river, the neighborhoods were filled with carnival workers. There’s a saying down in the southern part of the ward: "Keep Roscoe Village Weird." I fully intend to keep it that way. Developers aren't automatically the enemy—another word for developer is "builder." But we have a gentrification problem that has already swallowed Lincoln Park whole and is aggressively creeping west. We need to make sure our ward remains a place for everyone to live, work, play, and just exist without needing a trust fund.

My term is four years, so my goals are long-term. Thinking in a 6-to-12-month timeline kind of defeats the purpose of public office. I often take solace in my Catholic upbringing—the Church thinks in terms of centuries. In government, we should at least be thinking in terms of generations, so our kids can grow up just a little bit better off than we did.

Well, in five years, my first term would be just about over. To quote my dad: I want to leave the ward better than I found it. To me, that means more housing, more ADUs, more block parties, and way fewer vacant storefronts. I have this wild goal to get the storefront vacancy rate under 1%. Can I actually pull that off in four years? Probably not. Am I going to try like hell anyway? Yes.

I’ve been a politics nerd my whole life. I blame my parents for watching way too much West Wing on Wednesday nights, or maybe the lifelong-Democrat grandma who raised me. Honestly, I didn't set out to run for office. My Plan B is literally "become a kindergarten teacher." But I look around at our city and our country, and no one seems to be stepping up with realistic ideas. Everything has devolved into who can yell the loudest on the internet. I used to work on "K Street" in D.C. It gets a bad rap, but back then, it was a place where people actually spoke to one another instead of just performing for a TikTok algorithm. You'd walk into our bullpen, look left and see a bunch of Republicans in cubes, look right and see a bunch of Democrats. They figured it out and wrote the laws we live by. I care because that kind of real debate should be happening out in the open at City Hall, not just behind closed doors. There’s an old Polish saying: if no one else will do it, I’ll just do it myself. So here I am.

Baseball.

My kids. And then baseball.

I moved here in 2015. My mom lives here. I started my family here. A better question is, why not?

I could give you a link to the home page of this website, but I trust you to find the navigation bar yourself.