1. Our Shared Values
  2. Accessible and Welcoming City Government
  3. City Budget
  4. Community Safety
  5. Public Schools
  6. Housing Affordability and Stability
  7. Meeting People’s Basic Needs
  8. Climate Resilient City

Our Shared Values

Our Revolution Medford is a group of people who live in Medford and want our city government to improve life for everyone and ensure everyone feels welcome. We believe that a good society is only possible when everyone has their basic needs met, especially those who are struggling the most.

Now, and in the future, we want Medford to:

  • Be safe and welcoming for everyone
  • Have enough money for the City government to pay for what residents need
  • Have affordable housing for everyone
  • Have good schools and school buildings
  • Have safe streets and sidewalks, and make it easy to get around for people who don’t drive
  • Have a variety of free public spaces for people to use at all times, like parks, libraries, and community centers
  • Have a variety of businesses all across the City
  • Be prepared for the effects of climate change 

Candidates for office will be held accountable to this platform through the residents and community groups who have signed on to support the 2025 Medford People’s Platform.

Sign onto the 2025 Medford People’s Platform today! [link]

Accessible & Welcoming City Government

We want every resident to feel that they are welcome in our City. We want it to be easy for any resident to learn more about their City government or get involved at any level.

  1. Accessible City Hall and City – City Hall and other City buildings should all be updated to be fully accessible. The City should complete an ADA transition plan to identify locations throughout the City that need to be updated to meet minimum accessibility standards like curb cuts, wide sidewalks, and more. 
  2. Remove Barriers to Participation – Anybody who lives in Medford and wants to get involved should be able to. Early voting and voting by mail should be permanently available for all elections. All City meetings should be accessible to everyone. This should include interpretation, child care, closed captions for virtual meetings, and CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation) services. 
  3. Protect Our Neighbors – We want to see continued support and protections written into law to protect our most marginalized neighbors. We want more policies, services, and infrastructure that allow Medford residents to age in place.

City Budget

Right now, Medford’s revenues can’t meet the needs of our community. Medford needs more sustainable and consistent sources of revenue to maintain and improve the City for current and future generations. We want to fully fund our schools, parks, library, streets, public safety, natural resources, and help for struggling residents of Medford.

  1. Make Tufts Be a Better Neighbor – Tufts University is a huge landowner in the City that does not pay property taxes. We support state PILOT reform to raise tax revenue. We want Tufts to build enough housing for admitted students to ease the burden on the City’s housing stock.
  2. More Local Business – We want to see the City continue to reduce the permitting burden on local businesses and allow businesses to stay open later. We want to see more mixed-use development and leasing of City land in central locations for development projects rather than permanently selling it off. 
  3. Let Everyone Know – We want the City’s employees to collaborate and let the people who live in Medford know what is going on. We want to make it easier for everyone to know how our City spends their money.

Community Safety

People are safer when the city responds to emergencies in a nonviolent way and when everyone has food, housing, and healthcare support. Government officials should treat all residents the same way, and we must make changes to build trust and accountability.

  1. Better Public Safety Response – We support police accountability policies and civilian review of complaints. We support increasing interactions between residents and unarmed city staff by hiring more code enforcement officers and health and prevention staff. We support creating a civilian traffic enforcement office and an unarmed emergency response team for mental health crises.
  2. Involve People in Safety Decisions – People who live in Medford should be involved in making decisions about how the city keeps people safe and what technologies are used. City data should be shared in transparent community databases like OpenOversight.
  3. Supporting Vulnerable Residents – We cherish our immigrant neighbors. Our schools and police will limit cooperation with ICE to the extent of the law. We will translate all important city web pages and videos into the languages people use in Medford. We will support the state Safe Communities Act. We support more services and shelters for survivors of domestic violence.  
  4. Gun Violence Prevention – We will work with groups supporting statewide reforms on safe storage, gun sales, and permitting to prevent gun violence.

Public Schools

Medford students and families deserve a safe, vibrant, well-funded public school system where all students can learn and thrive.

  1. Pro-Public Schools – Medford’s schools are funded mostly by Medford, not by the state. But state law, Prop 2 1/2, makes it very hard for cities to keep up school funding with inflation. In other words, every year, Medford is forced to spend less on its students. Also, the state’s laws for charter school funding aren’t well-written or fair. We will fight for the state to fix this flawed system and spend more on public schools.
  2. Safe and Supportive Schools – We commit to expanding mental health supports, social and emotional learning, and conflict resolution education. We know that restorative justice (accountability through healing and making amends) often works better than punishment alone.
  3. Supporting Families – School safety and incidents of violence do not start or end in school buildings. To thrive in school, students need to feel safe at home, with food and other resources they need. We also need to expand pre-kindergarten and after-school programs. These aren’t problems that any one of the City, our schools, or the community can solve alone. We commit to working together to solve them.
  4. Educational Equity for All – We should have schools where all students can succeed, regardless of their income, race, gender, disabilities, or anything else. We will give more students free transportation to and from school. We will work to eliminate fees for students in sports and extracurriculars. We will make sure that Medford schools hire and retain educators of all backgrounds and races. We will listen to students, parents, and teachers to identify and address inequities in our schools.
  5. Support Educators and Staff – We value educators and staff as experts and decision-makers. We will pay them fairly for the hard work they do for our students.

Housing Affordability and Stability

The housing crisis is pushing residents out of Medford. Medford must protect working-class residents and welcome more new neighbors of every income level. That requires building more housing and making housing more affordable.

  1. Delivering Subsidized Affordable Housing – We want living in Medford to be affordable to everyone. A city-wide affordable housing waitlist will make access easier for tenants, developers, and landlords.  New zoning must support subsidized housing through incentives and an Affordable Housing Overlay. City funds, including Community Preservation Act funds, should financially support affordable housing development. We support social housing, ground leases, and land trusts. We support efforts to redevelop public housing properties more densely. 
  2. Housing Stability and Preventing Displacement – We support rent stabilization that still makes it easy to build new housing, while preventing unreasonable and sudden rent increases that tenants can’t plan for. We will create an Office of Housing Stability to coordinate the efforts of existing city staff and better protect residents. The office will support tenant unions, ensure tenants know their rights, and increase outreach to the most vulnerable residents in the city.
  3. City Planning for A More Affordable, Inclusive Future – The City must encourage mixed-use, walkable, complete neighborhoods and construction of new housing. We support new zoning to allow every neighborhood to grow moderately taller, denser, and more mixed-use than it is today while allowing innovative living arrangements like co-housing, co-living, and SROs. We will move toward eliminating parking mandates. We support ambitious statewide housing and zoning reforms that build on the Affordable Homes Act and MBTA Communities Act, meaningful tax exemptions for housing units offered at affordable rents by small property owners, and realistic and data-driven inclusionary zoning policies tailored to promote an increasing number of affordable housing units. Erasing the legacy of exclusive, racist, and classist zoning from the past will take all of these tools. 

Meeting People’s Basic Needs

We want to make sure that everyone in Medford has a comfortable and safe place to live and access to healthy, affordable food. We want to make sure that everyone who lives in Medford, especially our neighbors without a lot of money, can stay in Medford.

  1. Mobility Justice: We want everyone to be able to get to where they need and want to go, especially our neighbors without access to a car. We want to make sure that residents who rely on public transportation have access to basic amenities, like benches to sit on, bus shelters to protect from the weather, and real-time information on when the next train or bus arrives. We want the City to maintain sidewalks all year, including snow removal in the winter and fixing or replacing broken sidewalks affected by tree roots and other wear and tear. 
  2. Economic Justice: We will work with local groups to make sure our unhoused neighbors have shelter and those facing hunger have food. We want the City to work towards Food Security for all who live in Medford, towards opening a year-round shelter and seasonal warming centers and cooling centers. We want accessible and affordable after-school programs for every child who needs it. Right now, far too many families can’t get after-school care in Medford.
  3. Workers’ Rights: We support all workers in the City, especially those at City Hall, who are organized in a union or attempting to organize a union. We want to keep public jobs public by removing outsourcing and private contractors whenever possible. We want the City to be the first community in the Commonwealth to enter the State Paid Family and Medical Leave program so that City and school employees can still get paid even when they or a family member are sick.
  4. Public Health and Community Resiliency: We learned from the COVID-19 pandemic that Medford needs to be ready to respond to future public health outbreaks in an equitable and unified way. We want the City to be ready to support residents and businesses in the case of another large public health event with free access to vaccines and treatments and making sure important public health information is accessible to everyone regardless of literacy level or primary language.

Climate Resilient City

Climate change continues to negatively affect Medford. We want Medford to be prepared to respond to extreme weather events and prioritize residents in environmental justice neighborhoods.

  1. Resilient Infrastructure: We want the City to commit to climate resiliency planning, including: creating a net-zero or carbon-neutral requirement for new developers (including City and school projects), expanding solar and renewable energy, phasing out reliance on fossil fuels, promoting green renovations of existing structures, incentivizing residents and landlords to reduce home energy costs, and expanding the Medford Resilience Hubs project. 
  2. Reducing Car Dependency:  We commit to making Medford accessible to everyone, whether they are walking, biking, or using a mobility support device. We commit to maintaining a consistent state of good repair of sidewalks, bike lanes, and transit infrastructure so that the most vulnerable users of our roads are protected. We will strengthen the snow removal ordinance and invest in better sidewalk snow removal on transit and commercial corridors.
  3. Protecting Our Open Space: We will center the effects of the climate crisis in all City initiatives. We will invest in and expand parkland and public meeting space through grants and incentives in new development.