My name is Mike, though I will also answer to “Sydney and Birdie’s Dad”. I'm a professional housing policy analyst, a tenants' rights advocate, an urban planner, a musician, a former amateur fighter, and a staunch union member.
I’m running for Burbank City Council to start creating opportunities for my girls to one day choose to live here - and to help you stay here.
Burbank needs a majority-working-class Council to protect our progress and continue moving the needle towards a City that works for everybody.
Hey! Welcome.
SO Let’s get to work!
Why am I running?
I just want to walk my kids to school.
Housing insecurity affects over half of all renters in Los Angeles County. Homeowners, especially newcomers to the market like my family, are also at risk. We're more fortunate than most, but like many young families we're one layoff away from being uprooted from the city, the community, and the walking-distance school that we love. We worry that we'll lose our home before our youngest daughter is old enough to join that walk to McKinley Elementary.
Burbank needs this perspective in City Council - the perspective of today's working class, who are constantly aware of how vulnerable our place in our communities can be. The current average rent for a three-bedroom apartment is $4,450, double the national average. The modest "starter homes" of yesteryear are selling for an average of $1.2 million dollars. This City needs a housing policy professional with the lived experience of housing insecurity.
Policy Priorities
1) Rent Control and Tenant Protections
The problem isn’t avocado toast and coffee.
Average rents in LA County went up 12% from 2023 to 2024.
The average home price in Burbank is currently $1.2 million dollars. With today’s interest rates, that’s a mortgage of $10k a month.
Working class Burbankers are being squeezed, subject to the whims of a brutal market and decades of bad housing development priorities.
If you’re one of the half of LA County Renters that are cost burdened, you’re not able to save nearly as much, and also mortgage interest rates are starting at 7%.
And all the while, rents can go up as high as 8.5% in this city every year.
We need tenant protections now - and we need someone on council who will defend those tenant protections from the inevitable corporate backlash.
2) Housing Opportunity and GOOD planning
I’m not a doctor, so I don’t perform surgery on people. But it’s remarkable how often long-term planning decisions are routinely put in the hands of people who know nothing about creating cities and the built environment, or how starving one area of resources creates problems everywhere.
Local politics used to be, and too often still is, a hobby for retirees, lawyers, and used-car impresarios like Ben Gezzara in Road House (the unbeatable Swayze original).
Burbank voters can instead back an actual urban planner, trained in and experienced with affordable housing development, state and local housing policy, and dissecting housing elements. I will put the concerns of working people and families above marginal upgrades to the prestige of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods.
3) Defending Public Educators
Teachers are perhaps the most important public servants in our society.
Somehow in the Greatest* Nation on Earth, we’ve underfunded schools to the point that teachers have to pay for supplies out of their own increasingly meager paychecks.
I’ll ensure that educators and schools get the resources they need.
But not even that is enough in the present moment, because the fringe right-wing has eaten the heart out of ‘compassionate conservativism’ and is physically and institutionally threatening our school boards and teachers.
Win, lose or draw, I’m standing with our educators.
Organizational Endorsements!
California Federation of Interpreters Local 39000Feel the Bern Los Angeles County Democratic ClubFeel the Bern LA County Our Revolution ClubCalifornia Democratic Renters CouncilPilipino American Los Angeles DemocratsCalifornia High School Democrats
California Working Families PartyDemocratic Socialists of America - Los AngelesGround Game LAEast Area Progressive DemocratsEvolve CaliforniaDemocrats for Neighborhood Action
Teamsters Joint Council 42International Union of Painters & Allied Trade DC 36Feel the Bern - SFVBurbank Teachers AssociationDemocrats for the Protection of AnimalsLA County Public Defenders Union Local 148
Individual Endorsements!
Burbank Councilmember Konstantine AnthonyGlendale Councilmember Dan BrotmanGlendale Councilmember Ardy KassakhianCulver City Councilmember Daniel LeeSilverlake Neighborhood Councilmember Maebe A. Girl
Holocaust Speaker David Meyerhof
Pasadena Schoolboard Member (and Former Burbank Teacher!) Tina Wu FredericksAuthor Cory Doctorow
Consumer Protection Attorney Marissa Roy
Housing Policy Analyst Shawn DaninoArtist and Union Organizer Michael NannaAnd my wife and kids, of course
HOw we’ll Win - Canvassing
Some local candidates have luxury developers and AirBnB pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into their campaigns to prop up a broken status quo. Well, grassroots policy priorities don’t usually draw in the ultrawealthy, so I have to counter that with thousands of conversations with actual residents. Hence, putting on my Gravity Falls hat and knocking on doors.
14,000 doors later, I spent a day canvassing with comedian and my new bestie Gareth Reynolds of the Dollop. We talk about regional issues, global issues, guavas and who exactly it is I look like. The answer may surprise you!
