McDuffie vs. George for D.C Mayor

This year, DC is holding its first mayoral election without Muriel Bowser in quite some time. She announced she would not be running for reelection, and as of now, there are 2 main candidates, Kenyan McDuffie and Janeese Lewis George. In this post, I was going to cover my views on the curfew, but I think I will tackle that next week. Instead, I am going to go over the candidates' views on the big issues (housing, childcare, public safety) and my take on their takes. Note that I am getting almost all of this information from their debate about a month ago as it provides a fairly comprehensive view of their stances. 

Housing: 

George plans to build 72,000 new homes in DC over the next 5 years. She plans to pay for this through federal money that they already have. Janeese recognizes her plan is ambitious but argues that DC needs a leader who is ambitious and can really fix things. McDuffie, on the other hand, is pursuing 12,000 new homes by 2030 and preserving another 20,000. He argues that his plan can actually get done with the money they have at hand. I looked it up and building a house in DC costs between $610,000 to $740,000. I imagine it would be cheaper for the government to do it because they may have pre-existing contracts and stuff, so let's say $500,000 per home.  If you have about 100 million as George claims, that is not even close to what they would need for that number of affordable homes. I am siding with McDuffie on this one. The math is not mathing, it simply cannot be done with the resources we have. He has a plan that is realistic and will still help.  

Childcare: 

George wants to expand childcare to everyone in DC and make sure no family pays more than 7% of their income on childcare. In addition, she also wants to raise the salaries of the people who work in childcare. She plans to pay for this with McDuffie disagrees with scrapping the old programs and actually disagrees with Mayor Muriel Bowser. He wants to expand existing programs and continue with the Pay Equity fund, even though many believe it will raise costs. In my opinion, I like George’s plan the most. Even though it again seems ambitious, and I am not sure how much of that DC’s childcare subsidy could cover, it seems as though she has a real plan and is taking the advice of childcare advocates to move away from the Pay Equity Fund. 

Youth Safety/Curfew: 

I’m not going to go too deep into this because otherwise I will have nothing to say next week, but in short, George is skeptical and worried about how it will be enforced with ICE and the National guard still here. She is pushing for alternatives such as after school programs and things along those lines. McDuffie is proposing temporary use because of the crisis that is going on. He wants it to be enforced until we have addressed staffing and funding shortages and made sure kids can be safe on the streets again. I think McDuffie’s plan is better in the short-term, emphasis on the short-term. I would only support it if I was sure it would be temporary and fairly enforced across all 8 wards. 

My Take: 

I think it is a very, very close race, and both candidates are good. Personally, I am for McDuffie just because I believe that although he is not super ambitious, he can and will get done what he says he’ll get done, while George makes big, extravagant promises that seem incredibly unrealistic in the world we live in.