Editor’s Note: Alex Brower is co-chair of the Milwaukee chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. He is running for District 3 of the Milwaukee Common Council. The primary election is on February 18th. He sat down with the Leader to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing Milwaukee.
Let me ask the obvious question first; why you running for the seat? Why do you think you are the right candidate for the seat and what do you think you can bring to the community in this district?
I’m running because I’ve spent my entire career as a movement person. I grew up outside of Madison and in my hometown we had a series of events that occurred where, you know, there was a strike at a pepperoni plant, the Tyson foods plant in Jefferson. And some of those strikers and community groups were also fighting the construction of a Walmart Super Center. So there was a bunch of politics going on in Jefferson, and that just like sparked my engagement, and frankly, I mean, I wouldn’t have called it this then, but it awakened my class consciousness. What we have in DSA is a movement for the economy to be owned of by and for regular people. The working class, the 99%, the proletariat, whatever you want to call it, right? What we want is democracy in the economy. We want to use the laws that are on the books right now to begin the transition of our economy to a worker run and community owned economy. Now, on the common council, we can’t, you know, just legislate socialism or legislate an end to racism or an end to police oppression around this country. But there are things we can do.
Right. It’s about doing what you can with the parameters you’re given on the Council.
Yeah. So, I’ll also just acknowledge, and I think a lot of the readers will know that the passing of Jonathan Brostoff was a really tragic thing. I actually went to his funeral. Even though he and I disagreed on a lot of stuff it was still just really sad. And when they set the special election, we knew right away ‘there’s gonna be a bunch of people are gonna be jumping into this’. and there’s no reason that we shouldn’t have a candidate for our movement running in this election because the common council specifically has so much it could do to further the campaigns that Milwaukee DSA has committed itself to. And so there that’s clearly the primary reason is to further the work that we’ve been doing as a chapter. Not just the specific policy stuff, although there’s many overlaps there, such as our work on tenants protection with the right to council campaign, where people can receive legal help when they’re facing an eviction. That was funded in part by the city just this last year. $250,000, I believe, was chipped in by the city. We should be chipping in more and having more of that resource available to fight back against bann bad landlords. There’s also our Power to the People campaign to get rid of We Energies and replace it with the municipal or cooperative utility. That one directly deals with the common council as well, because they’re the entity that is gonna start the process of replacing that utility. And so we intend to continue to organize for that and hopefully help convince some of my fellow alders of it and help to organize our constituents.
Definitely. So when it comes to working with your fellow alders, working with city hall, we absolutely have to consider what your relationship would look like with the mayor. What are your feelings on Mayor Cavalier Johnson?
I mean, Mayor Johnson, he’s an urbanist, right? He is he is a man who cares about the city functioning well. I But what is nonexistent at City Hall, and what we’re offering, is frankly the left approach to having a city run well and having a city operate functionally. So the mayor is arguably much better than some we’ve had in the recent past. But he’s also not choosing to introduce the boldest possible platform: lower utility bills, standing up to landlords, things like that. I do deeply disagree with his decision to cut a deal with the legislative Republicans [on the Act 12 Shared Revenue and Property Tax legislation –ed.]. I’ve never opposed to having conversations with people. But what Cavalier Johnson did beyond went beyond that. Not just finding common ground, he actually like he actually cut a deal that was not advantageous to Milwaukee. Rather than making a demand of power, he acquiesced to power. Power that demanded that the city lessen the power of the Milwaukee Police and Fire Commission, which was our civilian oversight board for our police and emergency services. I’m glad the mayor was out stumping for Kamala Harris. I endorsed her and I’m glad that he is not, y’know, a Republican.
So, you’ve talked a lot about how you want to be a representative for a movement on the city council. Now, of course, a candidacy for office requires a single person running. We can’t just run Milwaukee DSA for common council. We can’t run collective leadership. But how did it feel to be approached to try again after a few unsuccessful runs?
Wow, you actually gave me the best words for that. Yeah, we can’t run collective leadership.That’s why when some people called me and said “Alex, you should do this,” I was a little embarrassed at first, or nervous. I was, like, “oh my God, I’m not doing this a third time. I can’t run for office a third time, oh my God.” But honestly, this has been the best campaign I’ve run in.
When you when people in the district talk about their concerns or what they’re thinking about, what are the top issues for them that you would be speaking to and working with to try to solve or improve on the council?
There’s a there’s a bunch of different ones. I mean, one of the things that I’ve been hearing more and more over the last few days, just because it’s top of mind right now is doing everything we can to stop the Trump agenda. That is so important and I am arguing to all those constituents who bring that concern that we’re the campaign that is best equipped to do that. Because obviously the mainstream Democratic Party approach that the mayor embodies and some of my opponents embody will not work and has been proven not to work against Trump electorally or procedurally. Right? Other issues include cost of living issues, landlords, price gouging by WE Energies. I’ve heard several times people saying ‘I cannot afford to continue to live like this in Milwaukee. There’s also comments about you know, practical things. Potholes, having more pedestrian friendly roads. And our campaign is very interested in pedestrianization.
To kind of change gears just a bit on on this, I wanted to talk about a couple specific policy issues. I want to start by talking about education. You know, obviously, you’re a former MPS substitute teacher. It’s clear that education is very important to you, to your candidacy. What do you say is the role of the common council in protecting and improving education here in Milwaukee? Because I think everybody in this city for many different reasons is concerned about MPS.
What I’ll say is that the common council’s role is to support our public education and work to bolster it. Specifically, opposing any attempt to eliminate the democratically elected school board. agree with you, there’s a lot of concerns about MPS. I have concerns about MPS. I’ve worked for MPS for like a decade and there are a lot of ways that the operations of that institution need to be reformed, but I can tell you right now that in no way will getting rid of the school board aid in that, it will only make it worse. I’ll say that what happened this last spring with the financial mismanagement of MPS appalled me and there’s gotta be people held accountable; there’s also room for the school board to do better.But that doesn’t mean that the institution itself should be gotten rid of. I do disagree with some of the right wing logic that says that well, if something’s not working, why give it more money? As if it’s just a product, like, oh, that cup of coffee was bad, so I’m never gonna go back to that coffee shop. An educational system is not a coffee shop. I can tell you right now that more funding for MPS will solve some of the educational outcomes, specifically by lowering class sizes, by having more people in the buildings, more support for students. I also want to eliminate further chartering of private schools; the data shows that this has not improved metrics for students and just weakens public education.
So, you know, what is your overall approach, I guess, to trying or what efforts would you be making on the common Council to lower housing costs? Because there I’m sure you’re aware rent in Milwaukee has gone up more in terms of like percentage increase than almost any other metro area in the country over the last couple of years. Milwaukee is not the most expensive city to live in in America, obviously, but it has gotten much more expensive over the last like three or four years. It’s one of the areas that has the highest increases in rent. So I guess my question is what do you see as the common council’s role to try to ameliorate that?
Well, we have to use government to increase the supply of affordable housing. Frankly, we start there, but there’s multiple prongs of approach. Our hands are tied a little bit by the legislature so we cannot institute rent controls in the city. I mean, that would be my first piece of legislation if we were allowed to do that, but that’s not legally possible currently. We will call for that law to be repealed, but given the composition of the current legislature, that’s probably not going to happen. So let’s look at what we can actually do right now today once we’re seated in April, increasing the supply of housing.What that primarily means, in my opinion, is economic development and our support of housing needs to be focused on building more and building or creating more cooperative houses. This city had used to have more cooperative housing than it does right now. Additionally, I want to be calling on the housing authority to use its borrowing authority and to construct more public housing. So here’s an example. The city of Milwaukee owns over 3,000 vacant lots. Now, there’s way more vacant lots than that in the city, but the city itself owns 3,000 of them. Let’s get those in the hands of the housing authority to build duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes, or single family homes. Gosh, if we could get two units on each of those properties, that’s 6000 more units. And then also this idea of like, let’s try to encourage development through the housing cooperative model, which can kind of, I’m not going to say give you the best of both worlds necessarily, but it does help to ensure that if private development is happening, it’s doing it in a way that’s going to benefit the community and become genuinely affordable housing. An ‘all of the above’ approach. Finally, I want to make sure that when community orgs like the Milwaukee Autonomous Tenants Union, which the DSA a co-founder of, calls out a predatory landlord, I wanna be right there with them at City Hall.
I want to talk about public safety a little bit. This is a sincere concern for a lot of people in Milwaukee. and obviously it’s not productive to to fearmonger, but it’s also not productive to pretend like it’s not something people are worried about, right? What does a serious socialist approach to public safety in the city of Milwaukee look like to you? What do you see as an approach to public safety that takes the concerns of the community seriously, but also doesn’t fall into the sort of tired old war on crime mass incarceration rhetoric?
Primarily, getting to the root causes of crime and disorder.,Some of the critics of that may say, oh, well, that doesn’t that doesn’t solve the fact that my car just gotten broken into. But if we can intervene in people’s lives we could have immediate prevention of some of that stuff from happening right if there’s a program that gets launched, that can stop somebody from feeling like they need to break into a car to steal a backpack out of the back seat or if they see a MacBook sitting in the back seat of a car to break a window immediately.And when we look at like crime, not all of it, but a lot of it goes back to economic issues. It also comes down to engagement with the community. Dan Hoan, one of Milwaukee’s Sewer Socialist mayors, said that when you show a person who’s on the cusp of criminality that the community cares about them, they will in turn care about the community. And I know that probably sounds cheesy to some right winger who might read this, but like, if this stuff actually works. These strategies actually worked in the past. So why not replicate it? The crime wave that was projected to hit Milwaukee back in the 1930s by the police and that hit other cities didn’t hit Milwaukee because of the way Hoan engaged young people and engaged people who were at risk of becoming criminals and supporting them. The other thing that I don’t think we’re doing enough enough down at City Hall about is holding the police accountable. You know, during the Black Lives Matter protests, and I heard this anecdotally, I don’t know if there’s been studies on this or not, but I heard this anecdotally all over this district, the police here in Milwaukee and other cities developed an attitude that become ‘oh, if you if you don’t like us, oh, well, you know, I just won’t enforce crimes then’. So we had a low level basically work stoppage. And my message to police is that we need you to do your job. We need you to, if somebody is driving recklessly, we need you to actually pull them over. And that doesn’t necessarily mean you draw your gun right away when you’re walking up to the car. But, you know, you do need to have a conversation with that individual at very at least to give them a warning, if not a citation or an arrest. And I don’t want people to be driven into debt or to jail because they can’t pay these citations. Let’s work with them, but let let’s do have some accountability.
Yeah, I I did want to talk about the driving piece. Because on the one hand, you know, as a progressive socialist candidate, you’re not out here wanting a more carceral system. You don’t want to create a a system where more people are getting locked up. On the other hand, the problem of reckless driving remains something that a lot of people are worried about in the city, you know what I mean? Right outside my house in a couple of months ago, an acquaintance of mine was struck and almost killed on KK by people drag racing down KK. So what does effective response to this problem look like? Because it’s something that is really impacting people’s quality of life.
Oh, totally, totally. First of all, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Why are people engaging in this? We we have almost hopeless economic situation right now where prices keep going up, where a decent life seems impossible, and so people are acting out in all sorts of ways. So then if someone feels that way, and they think someone’s going too slow, you’re gonna do the Milwaukee slide. So we need to address that feeling of hopelessness. The other thing we need to do is changing the built environment in the city, adding the pedestrian curbs, bumpouts, narrower traffic lanes, protected bike lanes, that kind of thing. And we need to ask all the major TV stations and radio stations to participate in this to spread awareness of these initiatives.
Last question: is there any last message you would say to someone who’s on the fence about very progressive or socialist candidates? Some times voters haven a reaction where it feels weird or it feels too much, or it feels radical, and so they flinch away from left wing candidates? Obviously, you’re talking to the Leader. You don’t need to sell me, but what would you say to someone who maybe likes a lot of what they’re hearing from you but feel reluctant to support a socialist?
That’s a really good question. And at points in my life, I probably would have actually shared that exact same concern. So it’s is what I would ask people to do is look at my record and to consider that what we’re proposing to do at City Hall are very practical things that exist in state law already. These are things that can be done. Some of them are difficult, but they actually are avenues that are currently there. For example, chapter 197, I get that a lot about using replacing WE Energies. A lot of people don’t know that there’s a law on the books that allows for the establishment of a municipal electric utility; you’ll pry Manitowoc’s public utility from their cold dead hands! So I guess maybe if you feel like our rhetoric is too over the top, look at what the actual actions that we’re taking are and how those actions have led to real results. And even in my time as an activist, an organizer, and union leader, that’s what I’ve always focused on. When I went on the hunger strike in 2018, I know a lot of people thought that was over the top. But what happened in the end with that effort that is that we compromised and came up with a solution that satisfied the concerns of some of the people on the school board and got people who desperately needed health care, healthcare. So for me, it’s about taking bold action to make sure that when it comes time to compromise, we’re in the best possible situation.
