Yu faces an empty chair in debate at Norfolk/Suffolk district town hall

In what Persis Yu, Democratic party primary candidate for state senate, hoped would be a discussion with incumbent Mike Rush about district issues, turned out to be a presentation of Yu’s affordability plan when Rush did not respond to her invitation to debate and was a no-show for the event. Yu spoke to about 50 attendees at the Aug.13 gathering at the Stratford Street United Church and spoke about her “affordability agenda” which includes addressing costs at the state level through universal free childcare, auditing utility companies and making corporations accountable to drive down costs in housing and strengthening worker’s wages. “I am running because here in Massachusetts, we have a growing affordability crisis, and we have a dangerous rise in authoritarianism, and we need to be talking about these issues together,” said Yu. She described the Trump administration as one that seeks to divide people by blaming immigrants and minorities for all economic problems while enabling corporations and some politicians to benefit from the high prices. She challenged Rush to produce a plan to address the rising prices facing working people and opened the meeting to take questions from the audience. One audience member asked about the link between higher wages and childcare quoting an article in the Boston Globe about Harvard’s plan to increase hourly wages to $20 an hour enabling workers to stay employed and afford childcare. “If we had one silver bullet, it would be to provide universal childcare … it is too expensive to get childcare … we need to have a system where we are subsidizing childcare workers,” said Yu, describing a system where corporations would pay their fair share to provide vital services like childcare for their workers. “With the millionaire’s tax, we saw an increase in universal prepay, or not some universal prepay, but free childcare, free preschool for three-year-olds.” Vivian Wu asked, “How can we better support our small businesses?” “The small businesses are such a vital part of our community,” said Yu. “I think a lot of folks don’t realize that our general consumer protections don’t always apply to small businesses. So, we need to shore up protections and recognize that the laws that make sense for Amazon don’t necessarily make sense for our small businesses down the chain, right?” Yu went on to propose supporting communities so they can afford to support their local small businesses. “A lot of folks are desperate if they go to Amazon because that is the cheaper, more available option. So, we need to make it so that it’s possible for people to shop their local businesses.” Another community member, Gio Valencia, said “The biggest affordability problem that we have is related to housing… As our senator, what could you do with your colleagues to ensure that we keep our workforce here, that we keep our teenagers and college students after they graduate living in Boston? Yu responded, “The housing crisis is out of control, and it stems from really decades of inaction on housing. We do need to be building, and we need to be building and making sure that we’re building affordable units for housing.” Yu cited Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), using land that owners are willing to use to build more housing on their property. She said the idea is to give working people a chance to participate in the housing market that large developers have been beenfitting from for years. She also said she wants to keep potential buyers from being priced out by costs beyond the sticker price of a home. “It’s insurance … and property taxes, I think we need to be looking at all the different ways that housing is unaffordable.” She supports increasing housing stock but also finding ways to reduce prices. Some ways are through affordable energy, investing in longer-term solutions that lower prices and stabilize costs. Yu was also asked whether she favored the auditing of the state legislature. She said that a large percentage of voters asked for a state audit. “What is our legislature doing and who are they listening to when they are not passing the laws that we ask them to pass? So, the very simple answer is I support the audit and I think that we need to hold the legislature accountable to doing the audit in the way that 70 percent of voters asked for. And I think we need to more broadly increase accountability and we need to call them out on the steps that they have taken to try to evade that accountability through court challenges and through passing laws.” Voting is now ongoing with mail-in and absentee voting occurring now. Primary Day, in-person voting takes place on Sept. 1, 2026. For information on how and where to vote, go to https://www.sec.state.ma.us/

Advertisement