Patch posed six questions to candidate Josh Arnon after he officially announced his campaign. Here are his replies.
NEW YORK — Activist Josh Arnon has announced a campaign to run for New York’s Assembly District 74 which will be vacant by Harvey Epstein, who is currently running for a City Council seat in Lower Manhattan.
Before politics, Arnon worked in the film industry and spoke out against Scott Rudin as a part of an article published by the New York Times.
Arnon then worked for Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, the Working Families Party and most recently Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign.
The 29-year-old candidate currently lives in Kips Bay.
The 74th assembly district encompasses the Lower East Side, East Village, Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village, Murray Hill, Kips Bay, Tudor City and the United Nations.
Patch recently asked Arnon six questions about his campaign. See his replies below.
PATCH: Why are you running for the assembly district seat?
ARNON: I’m a lifelong resident of this district with a history of speaking truth to power. I was one of the leaders of the Tax the Rich coalition that successfully fought Andrew Cuomo’s attacks on our vital public services at the height of the COVID pandemic. Now, with Trump’s impending budget cuts, we find ourselves in a similar situation and the state legislature faces a moral choice: raise taxes on the ultra-wealthy or make major cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and SNAP. As Zohran’s decisive win demonstrates, people are hungry for a movement of new leaders that support them rather than the special interests that exploit them for profit.
PATCH: What sets you apart from the other candidates?
ARNON: We have long had politicians come from inside the system advocating for incremental change. In contrast, I have bold ideas and am an unbought voice from outside that exclusive club. For example, I had direct experience making sure our budget in Albany worked for all of us when I stood up to then-Governor Andrew Cuomo’s potentially devastating cuts to hospital funding, mass transit, and public education. Voters can count on me to fight hard for them and not take a cent of corporate money. My entire political career as an activist has been fighting for working people.
PATCH: What are the key issues that you’d tackle in office? How would you tackle them?
ARNON: Affordability and quality of life are the major issues of our time. The costs of housing, healthcare, and higher education are out of control. Building a movement of like-minded politicians who don’t take corporate money and can collectively enact the will of voters is the only way to enact sweeping policy changes to address these issues in a substantive way.
PATCH: List two ways you plan to make the neighborhood more affordable
ARNON: I grew up in formerly Mitchell-Lama housing and am a leader of the progressive organization House the Future, so I have a deep understanding of New York’s successes and where we have fallen short. By studying how other countries have successfully implemented programs that have led to deeply affordable, beautiful housing, we can make New York the best version of itself it can be.
There are many solutions being proposed to tackle our housing crisis, and one I would love to implement with my colleagues is creating a Social Housing Development Authority that would allow New York to function as a developer that can finance, build, acquire, and preserve mixed-income, permanently affordable, democratically controlled housing. All profit would go back into maintenance, and this would be funded directly by New York State, avoiding the pitfalls that have left NYCHA underfunded, under-maintained, and segregated by class.
Another issue that’s close to my heart is the cost of higher education. There are many college and grad students in our community who go into crushing student debt just for seeking a quality education. CUNY was free for residents from 1847 to 1976, and the addition of tuition was supposed to be temporary to address the city’s financial crisis in the 70s. There is no good reason for CUNY or SUNY to continue to charge tuition to residents, especially as New York has a larger budget than many countries do.
PATCH: List two ways you plan to make the neighborhood safer
ARNON: I was on the front line of fighting against the proposed Freedom Plaza casino that would have been right next to the UN. Study after study has demonstrated a strong correlation between the creation of casinos and increase in crime. I was the only candidate to speak out against the casino at its first public hearing, and you can expect me to be proactive against further exploitative proposals that would not benefit our community. I am proud that we won this fight. We stopped the casino and our neighborhood is safer for it.
The recent attempts at addressing transit crime by trying to catch the culprit after the crime is committed have proven ineffective in decreasing crime itself. We’re seeing crime at transit stops, largely caused by the wild inconsistency of mass transit, particularly during weekends and off-peak hours. Increasing service frequency would decrease the need for commuters to wait in the dark for long periods of time, eliminating much of transit crime.
We are finally upgrading the subway’s signal system and starting work on a 34th Street busway, but our leaders have shown themselves to be slow to follow through on promises around transit. I pushed back on Cuomo’s proposed cuts to the subway then and will continue to apply political pressure to ensure that changes actually go through, as they did for congestion pricing.
PATCH: What’s one place in the district you frequent the most?
ARNON: I have had many dates with my partner at Tompkins Square Park, including one that was crashed by my dad when I wasn’t responding to his texts. Now we all laugh about it!