Democratic Socialist Willie Burnley, Jr. carries the torch in bid for Somerville Mayor

“I’m going to be a pro-union, pro-worker mayor”

By Maxine Bouvier

SOMERVILLE, MA – With the backing of DSA, Somerville City Councilor-at-Large and democratic socialist Willie Burnley Jr. is challenging two-term incumbent Mayor Katjana Ballantyne.

Burnley’s campaign comes as Zohran Mamdani’s upset in the New York City mayoral race stunned the world. Mamdani made international headlines on June 24th by defeating a powerful ex-Governor born into a political dynasty and backed by the entire Democratic Party establishment.

Mamdani and Burnley are DSA-endorsed members of their local chapters, and their political styles are similar. They are both self-described organizers. Both have employed creative campaign techniques and developed robust field operations on a scale that addresses the needs of two very different cities, while tackling broadly felt working-class issues. For Zohran, it was freezing the rent, making buses fast and free, and universal childcare. For Burnley, it’s affordable social housing, uplifting union rights and tenants’ rights, and increasing resources for K-12 students. The campaign has hosted creative events like a cannabis-infused fundraiser, and its volunteers are already knocking on doors five days a week.

Working Mass spoke with Willie over video call to ask him about his background, his historic campaign, his work on Somerville City Council so far, and – of course – his views on what is most important for Somerville’s future.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

WM: In 2021, the Boston Globe published a story about the victory of the Democratic Socialist slate in Somerville that year, the moment you became a city councilor. At the time, prominent local labor activist Rand Wilson quipped that “the socialist takeover of Somerville is going to be a little disappointing if nobody runs for mayor.” When did you first start thinking about running for Mayor?

WB: It’s hard to pin it exactly to one moment because as a city councilor, I have a front row seat to the city’s budget, to initiatives that are started and don’t get off the ground, and to the ways in which I think our current administration has mishandled a lot of the demands of the community. I’m thinking particularly about the transformation of public safety, as one.

Five years ago before I was a councilor, I pushed to re-allocate local police funds into public services that address community safety and wellness at the root – rental assistance, food assistance, bilingual youth specialist for public school – and five years later, our current mayor, is actually doubling down on the same broken system of policing that led us to take on that fight in the first place.

So, there’s been a lot of frustration over my time on the council. There have been many times when I’ve thought, If only we had someone who could take on this role and actually steer the city in the direction I know most residents want it to move.’ I feel that now is the time to have that person, and I believe I’m the best person for the job at this moment. 

WM: Tell us about your background. What was growing up like for you?

WB: I grew up in Southern California, in San Diego specifically, in a lower middle-class family – a single-parent family, single-father family. I grew up in a place that’s a lot like Somerville, in some ways: a place where working-class people struggle to survive, with a lot of diversity.

In the case of my part of San Diego, most of the kids that I went to school with were people of color, most of whom were low-income, and, you know, where I grew up, we all had the sense that government was not on our side. The government was not there to protect us. I grew up with undocumented folks who felt like the government was going to tear apart their families. 

For folks like me, who the carceral system has impacted, we felt like the government was there to undermine us, to harm us. That informed a lot of my relationship with politics, frankly. We were underserved, underinvested in, and targeted by the government. And it’s precisely why I think we need to demonstrate that government can be a force for good in people’s lives by actually serving their material needs, helping them deal with the crises of medical debt and housing unaffordability.

I came to Boston for college. I moved to Somerville right after I graduated from college and have been here for about the last nine years. I see so much in this community that is built upon people caring about their neighbors and about the world they live in, and wanting to make it better. And I think we deserve leaders who will fight just as hard as our neighbors are fighting at this moment to secure our safety and our futures. 

WM: What led you to your politics?

WB: There are lots of things that are wrong in the world, lots of things that I feel like have been radicalizing me. Like a lot of people, it took me a bit of time to start identifying as a socialist. I didn’t grow up idolizing money, and I could see the fundamental flaws of capitalism, so my politics could be described as “anti-capitalist.” However, I recall reading an article in 2015 from Jacobin titled “Against Charity.” And it was about how our fundamental human rights, and things that we all need to live – food, water, shelter – will not be guaranteed by capitalism, and fundamentally cannot be guaranteed by capitalism. 

At the time, I was living in Washington, DC, on a program from Emerson College. DC was undergoing some of the most drastic and stark gentrification I’d ever seen. I lived within walking distance of the Capitol, where Congress was meeting, and where some of the most powerful industries in the world were centered to lobby our government. I saw many people who were unhoused, struggling to get by. There was so much poverty. And it was infuriating for me because – I’ve lived in cities all my life and I’ve seen poverty, so much of it, but to see it in our nation’s capital, where some of the richest people in the world were, and some of the wealthiest industries in the world were, was just – infuriating.

The article kind of just locked it all into place for me. I believe in human rights and in doing the things that you need to do to accomplish your values, and capitalism just fundamentally cannot sustain what I’m hoping to create in the world. That pushed me to become a socialist. It was a deep moment of radicalization for me amidst the Black Lives Matter movement. Getting involved with people-powered movements, in protest with thousands of people, really showed me how to view power: built from the ground up.

WM: What inspired you to organize? 

WB: The Black Lives Matter movement was the first time where I felt the true power of people-powered movements – 2014, 2015, 2016, 2020 – each of these years, being part of mass movements in the Boston area. In one of the first Black Lives Matter protests in Boston, we tried to shut down a highway with tens of thousands of people. I specifically say that because there was a call from some organizers at the time that white people should put their bodies on the line, go to the front, be that barrier between the police and people of color. I respected that, but I also wanted to be on that frontline. So, I put myself in that position. 

That was the moment when I realized: I want to be a part of this. There is a difference between supporting a protest and being a part of a movement, and organizing protests and organizing movements. So that was the start.

In 2017, I joined If Not Now, an almost entirely Jewish organization. I’m not Jewish, but I was a part of it. We organized people, primarily young American Jewish people, to call out the support of AIPAC. We protested outside the Boston consulate of Israel. I organized one of those protests because, at the time when Trump was first in office, they were trying to expel all Black immigrants from Israel back to Africa, where they would have been punished for going to Israel. The movement for people of color and for a just foreign policy really motivated me to not only join protests but also help lead the logistics and get people involved myself. 

WM: You have now served for four years as a city councilor in Somerville. How have the political dynamics of the Somerville City Council changed since your election in 2021? Do you think they become more or less favorable to socialist policy? 

WB: Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s a difficult question because I have been, I think, incredibly effective and productive with my time on the council. As far as legislation, I’ve passed thirteen laws in three and a half years on the council. Most other councilors have served in the same number of terms, perhaps two or one. There are not many people who have been around for the same amount of time as I have, because some of those people have already left. And most folks who’ve been around for twice as long have passed four, maybe five laws. So I feel confident in my ability to get things done. 

Some of my colleagues have been less inclined to support more aggressive action. When you can show that clear divide and demonstrate that socialists can be effective at legislating and governing, it sheds a negative light on those establishment elected officials who are not doing as much as they could for the people. It puts them in awkward positions. 

There are a lot of votes that my colleagues, frankly, have not wanted to take.

For example, when Somerville became the first municipality in Massachusetts to pass a ceasefire resolution in January of last year, many colleagues were hesitant to take that vote. They didn’t want to express an opinion or take a stance. Ultimately, we had that vote, and we were successful, but there was a lot of resentment from the elected political class in Somerville for having to take a stance on that issue. That’s frustrating from my standpoint, but it’s one of the kind of drawbacks, frankly, of having that successful insurgency, that all of a sudden the people who might have thought, “Oh, these people, they’re not going to be that effective, they’re harmless, we can just, you know, do whatever,” all of a sudden, when they really see it that you can be effective, they have to take stances to challenge your power.

That is essentially where we are now, and that’s why I think taking on a Mayor’s role in a strong mayor system like Somerville’s is so important. They’ll have a choice of whether to work with me or not, and then we can actually push for the material support that people need.

WM: You have spoken about being displaced from Somerville a decade ago. In what ways has the tenants’ crisis changed in Somerville since then? 

WB: I was displaced from Somerville in 2017, before the city had what we have now, which is the Office of Housing Stability. When I was displaced, I didn’t know who to talk to. And I know, frankly, because I talk to constituents who ask me these questions, a lot of people still don’t know who to talk to. But at the time, I didn’t feel, even as someone who was an organizer, like there was someone in our local government whom I could talk to about how to stay in my apartment when my landlord was drastically raising the rent. 

I felt incredibly isolated, unprotected, and, frankly, afraid of what it would mean to not be able to pay my bills, what it might look like to be evicted, what it might look like to have to end up on the street. Coming from California, if I were going to get kicked out, I didn’t necessarily have somewhere to go long-term in Somerville or the state of Massachusetts. Ultimately, I had to return to California after the landlord displaced me. I decided to come back because I care about this place that much. But, to your question, we now have an Office of Housing Stability, which is one of our most important and vital resources for residents. 

We now also have a fully formed Community Land Trust. It’s now slowly acquiring and proposing to build permanently affordable housing in different parts of the city. 

But, of course, we need to do more. That’s why one of the things I want to do as Mayor is do what former Mayor Curtatone did with the Office of Housing Stability: hire one person to help build out the department, figure out what we need to practically do as a city to stabilize people’s housing, when the city lacks the right or the power to establish rent control. If I’m elected mayor, I’m going to do the same thing with an Office of Social Housing – figure out what Somerville could do to try to build up social housing, by municipally owning housing in the city that’s set as deeply affordable for residents, and, long-term, producing social housing for residents in the city. 

WM: What do you think is the role of labor unions in municipal governance? How about tenants’ unions? How can you involve workers and tenants in Somerville governance?

WB: I’m a former union member. I was a Teamster. Unions play a crucial role, both in helping to clarify issues for elected officials and in advocating for broader solidarity from below. For example, in Somerville, Tufts is currently building a dorm with non-union labor. I’ve been on the picket lines multiple times with some members of SEIU and other trade union members, discussing with the workers why Tufts needs to use union labor to build. That’s important because it’s safer for the workers themselves and the people ultimately living in those buildings. Our labor unions also advocate for other issues. For example, the trades unions are very interested in how cities implement legislation to build resilience around climate change. 

We need to demonstrate to our workers, both municipal workers and those in the city, that the local government has their backs. Somerville needs to be a union town, and I don’t think we can achieve that if we have a mayor who will be hands-off or allow projects that will reshape the city without utilizing union labor.

We have some tenant unions in Somerville, but I think we should have many more. Tenants’ unions are vital for our community, especially in Somerville, which is incredibly dense. It’s the most densely populated municipality in New England, one of the most densely populated municipalities in the world. Knowing your neighbors is not just important for housing stability, but it’s also important for addressing all kinds of issues. When we have neighbors getting snatched off the street by ICE, the people who are best suited to support us are our neighbors, the people who live near us, the people who can keep track of what’s going on in and around our neighborhoods. Often, other tenants.

It’s important, obviously, to negotiate with landlords – that’s something that the Office of Housing Stability has been really helpful with. They’re able to work on getting whole buildings in a position to negotiate rent hikes with landlords collectively. We need more tenants’ unions, and we need them to be in communication with the city, so we can collectively advocate for our rights. People power is real, and it matters even to the slumlords. If they act in a disproportionate or unethical manner towards their tenants, they will have to empty entire buildings in the long term and face negative press about the buildings, which will lead to no tenants signing their leases at all.

WM: How do you plan to support Somerville city employees as Mayor?

WB: That’s a great question, and something I’ve already tried to do as a councilor. I’ll give two examples of things I have done and an example of something I would do. First, Massachusetts has a law called the Paid Family and Medical Leave Act, which offers up to twelve weeks of paid leave to workers when they take medical leave, or when they or someone in their family has a serious medical issue. That’s a law passed years ago that impacts workers across the state. However, one exempt group was municipal workers.

Municipalities can opt into the system and provide workers with twelve weeks of leave. The cities pay some of it, but not all of it. Not a single municipality in the state of Massachusetts has opted into the program. Not a single one. So, one of the things that I did as a councilor was I brought forward that law to Somerville and asked, “Hey, should we adopt this law that would drastically increase our benefits for our municipal workers?” 

Can we afford to do it? Do workers want it? [The Ballantyne administration] obfuscated; they delayed. They even said, “No, well, what we are doing now is better than that.” What they didn’t mention at the time was that they offered two weeks of paid leave for our municipal workers. They claimed that two weeks was better than twelve weeks. I kept pressing them on it for over a year and a half. Finally, they said: You know what? We’re actually creating a municipal version of it – eight weeks. We’re not going to do twelve weeks, but we’ll do eight weeks, which is four times what we were doing previously, which we already said was better than the twelve weeks. They won’t admit it, but the city council could have opted us into a much broader program, and chose not to. But they nonetheless responded to pressure. And now, today, in this part of the fiscal year, workers in Somerville have four times as much paid family medical leave as they did when I became a city councilor.

That’s one win my advocacy contributed to for municipal workers. Another is an ordinance, a year ago, maybe two years ago, to require that when a Somerville municipal worker experiences sexual or domestic violence, they receive paid leave. In the state of Massachusetts, all employers are required to give at least fifteen days of leave for someone who experiences sexual or domestic violence, but employers can choose whether that’s paid or unpaid. Survivors end up brutalized and then also often lose their income for the time that they need to find new housing. They’re losing wages they would otherwise be making. That is fundamentally unjust, to financially punish someone for being subject to violence. 

I brought forward that ordinance. Again, our administration obfuscated and delayed. RESPOND, which is one of the largest anti-violence, anti-domestic abuse, and anti-sexual violence organizations in Massachusetts, wrote a letter supporting the ordinance. However, the administration still isn’t trying to support legislation. As mayor, we will pass that law, and Somerville, as far as I’m aware, will become the first Massachusetts municipality to say by law that anyone who experiences this form of violence deserves paid leave, not just leave. A city in Kentucky passed the law, you know. Somerville should not be behind anywhere in Kentucky on these types of issues.

As mayor, I’ll also ensure that we’re not in a situation similar to the one we recently experienced, where our mayor kept our largest union out of contract for over two years while negotiating with them. During that time, we lost people: “Why would I work for a city that’s not even going to respect my union and give me a contract?” But we also lost people who would have applied to these jobs, but were like, “Why would I apply to a city or a workplace that’s going to treat its workers like this? Or treat its unions like this?” I respect unions enough to negotiate fairly and urgently with them. So, I’m going to be a pro-union, pro-worker mayor of the executive body.

WM: As a city councilor, you led efforts to use ARPA funds to pay off the medical debt of Somerville residents. How much medical debt is held by Somerville residents? What can you do to prioritize this issue as Mayor? 

WB: How much debt is owed is complicated. It’s also not a one-to-one relationship between the amount of debt and the amount we would have to pay, which is part of why I wanted to do this program. The way that buying debt works, at least medical debt in this country, is that you can essentially buy, for one dollar, $100 worth of debt. After a hospital holds a debt for so long, a couple of years, they eventually sell to collectors for pennies on the dollar: “Hey, this person owes $5,000, you give us $50, We’ll give you their portfolio debt, and then you can try to collect it from them.” 

No rule says a city can’t buy that debt and just forgive it. That’s what I was opting to do. We can’t with just direct municipal funds, under current laws, which is why I was pushing for ARPA funds. However, I still believe that there’s a way to build a stabilization fund to alleviate medical debt on a recurring cycle so that, every three years, Somerville residents’ medical debt is wiped away for pennies on the dollar. That’s something I’m very interested in pursuing as mayor. However, since ARPA funding is being phased out, we’ll need a different iteration. Unfortunately, our mayor refused to accept this offer when it was presented to her. 

WM: What’s your plan as Mayor for the troubled Winter Hill PK-8 school?

WB: At the Winter Hill School, in the summer of 2023, a piece of concrete from one of the ceilings fell. Thankfully, it happened while school was not in session, with no one in the building. But it was the result of decades of neglect and a lack of investment in our buildings, which the teachers’ union had warned about literally the year before, during budget season. But even though the union warned the building was falling apart, that it was unsafe and unsanitary, our mayor said, “Hey, we’re doing a buildings study, give us some time, give us a year or two. We’re going to have a plan for the buildings.” And in that time, the buildings fell apart. We had to relocate hundreds of students into existing schools and then effectively convert a building slated for city staff offices into a school for children aged five to thirteen. 

That’s the current status of the Winter Hill School. The actual building itself is unoccupied. Just a month ago, some individuals entered the building and set fires within it. Since it’s in a residential neighborhood of Somerville, that was incredibly dangerous. However, it happened because the city was not focused on keeping the building up to date and safe while it was open, nor on ensuring it was secure enough when it was unoccupied. As mayor, I’ll make sure the city moves urgently to build a new school for Winter Hill. We have to figure out where, a legitimate question because we’re, again, the most densely populated city in New England, but there are a few options on the table.

Another complicating factor: we have other schools that are likely to deteriorate in the near future. The question to answer right now is: will we rebuild the Winter Hill School with enough space for just Winter Hill? Or will we rebuild it with enough space for the children from Brown, another school in the city, currently inaccessible to anyone who has physical disabilities? Will we build a building big enough to accommodate both schools’ worth of children? And if we do, where will it go when we don’t have a massive amount of space in Somerville to begin with? 

I can promise that in my first year, we will make that decision and move with urgency to implement it. In contrast to the current mayor, who has not provided any definitive statement about our direction in two years, we will move quickly. 

Willie Burnley, Jr. has served Somerville as a city councilor-at-large endorsed by Boston DSA since his initial run for office in 2021.

Maxine Bouvier is a member of Boston DSA and a contributing writer to Working Mass.