Stanislav “Stan” Rivkin

Quick Facts

• Current Position: Challenger
• Candidate Status: Required signatures submitted: 90 (77 verified)
• Website: https://www.stanrivkin.com/
• Committee Registration: OCPF ID 19189
• Email: Info@stanrivkin.com
• Phone: 617-383-4239
• Send contributions to: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/stanislav-rivkin or 17 Channing Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
• Cambridge.vote: stanislav-rivkin

Finances

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From the Candidate

I’m running for City Council to improve the lives of low-income and working families in Cambridge, making housing more affordable and reducing inequality.
I’ll pursue real structural reform, rather than Band-Aid solutions, ensuring our government is more accountable, democratic, and responsive for all residents. Our grassroots campaign is powered by people like you. We reject contributions from all lobbyists, developers, and corporate special interests. Please consider joining our movement to change our government and politics. You can volunteer, donate, and sign up for updates.

Background

I’m committed to building a better, more hopeful future for working families in Cambridge—families like the one I grew up in.

I immigrated to the United States from Uzbekistan as a child. During our first years here, my father delivered pizzas for a living and my mother worked as a babysitter. We relied on subsidized housing, food stamps, and Medicaid to get by. I saw firsthand that no matter how hard my parents worked, these programs were the difference between surviving and building a life, getting on our feet, reaching our goals, and eventually giving back to our community.

My experience showed me what’s possible when we invest in our neighbors and our city. Unfortunately, in Cambridge and across the country, too many families have been left behind. That’s why I’m running for City Council: to make sure hope and opportunity remain accessible to everyone.

For the past 15 years, I’ve dedicated my career to this fight. I’ve worked tirelessly to uplift my community, growing programs to support at-risk youth and reduce houselessness, teaching students how to create a fairer future, building the next generation of civic leaders, and designing policy to advance our community’s needs. Along the way, I’ve organized for affordable housing, immigrant rights, racial and environmental justice, and other progressive causes.

Just as importantly, over the years, I’ve received critical education: waiting tables, pouring drinks, cleaning toilets, making sandwiches, stocking shelves, working cash registers, and driving Ubers. I understand firsthand that these jobs are the foundation of our economy, and our workers deserve appreciation, dignity, fair pay, and the opportunity to be optimistic about their futures.

For me, these are not just campaign talking points. They are my motivation for serving my community, and the foundation of my commitment to serve you, my neighbors, on the Cambridge City Council.

Join me in building an ambitious shared future that we can be proud of.

Priorities

Reform Government:

City Council is supposed to provide oversight, ensuring our tax dollars are used efficiently, that residents are well served, and that policies are based on our values of fairness, decency, and opportunity. This is currently impossible because the City Council barely has the resources to engage with constituents, much less serve as a check and balance for how the city is run. The result is a truly unaccountable administration, poorly written legislation, and a failure to imagine an ambitious vision for our city’s future. I will fight to provide City Council with the resources, leverage, and mandate to actually do its job: to ask tough questions, thoroughly evaluates policies, hold officials accountable, and drive a vision for Cambridge that reflects the democratic will of voters.

Most pivotally, I will doggedly pursue public financing for our municipal elections, ensuring that corporate and special interests can no longer run Cambridge politics, and that public office is accessible to all. In keeping with this commitment, I will not accept any funds from lobbyists or developers, nor will I accept endorsements from independent expenditure PACs. I fully believe we can achieve a public campaign financing system in Cambridge, ensuring the government finally serves all residents rather than the wealthiest among us.

I will also strongly pursue term limits in any future charter reform, in order to encourage a greater variety of voices to join our democratic conversation; contribute new energy, ideas, and perspectives; reduce stagnancy in our governance; and provide alternatives to a vision for Cambridge that is often exhausted by the time a councilor seeks a 5th term in office.

Reverse Income Inequality:

As Cambridge’s wealth has grown, its low-and-middle-income families are quickly losing ground, resulting in one of the highest levels of income inequality in the country. I will fight to ensure that the benefits of Cambridge’s wealth are more evenly shared throughout our community, and that all residents have the opportunity to thrive rather than merely fight to survive. This commitment is personal; growing up, subsidized housing and public supports were essential to helping my immigrant family flourish in our country. Now, I am driven to ensure that all Cambridge families have the opportunities and support they deserve. This includes affordable housing, universal childcare, and renewed cash assistance programs for very low-income families.

I’m equally committed to ensuring that our support services are financed primarily by those who have benefited the most from Cambridge’s wealth. I will push to have our wealthiest residents and private equity speculators who drive up prices in Cambridge pay their fair share in taxes. Meanwhile, I’ll work to ensure that most Cambridge residents—including first time homeowners and middle-income retirees–benefit from expanded residential and statutory property tax exemptions, tax deferral programs, and abatements.

Make Housing More Affordable:

The City of Cambridge must lead an ambitious, urgent, and efficient initiative to build abundant affordable housing, rather than merely rely on for-profit developers to do what they’ve never done: make housing more affordable and accessible for low-income folks. This municipal leadership must include smart investments in social housing and community land trusts, which will keep revenue and wealth within the city rather than lining the pockets of out-of-state private equity investors. It must include municipal vouchers that allow low-income residents to afford units that are supposed to be “affordable” but that are still too expensive for many, and the maintenance of shelters that provide critical services for unhoused folks in crisis and transition. And it includes administrative changes to encourage building, lodging, and renting below-market units by streamlining processes and offering necessary incentives. Just as importantly, we must vigorously oppose any attempt to lower inclusionary unit requirements in new constructions!

Improve Transportation Access and Safety:

We must invest in the safety of our community, including upgrades to public transit, cycling infrastructure, and expanded road safety for drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians. This should not be a controversial or divisive issue; users of all major transportation methods have good reason to support these improvements.

We know far too many cyclists who have been killed or seriously injured in car accidents. We’ve seen too often how multiple modes of transport sharing the same lane can create confusion and distraction, jeopardizing everyone’s safety. As pedestrians, we’ve had close calls with being hit by cars, bikes, and scooters at crosswalks. We’ve experienced inconsistency and inconvenience of public transit in our city. And any driver—particularly those transporting family or folks with mobility issues — knows the frustration and paralysis of not being able to find a parking spot near their destination.

Resolving these problems is not rocket science, but it does require us to work together in good faith. I will prioritize bringing people together around the values of improving safety, equity, and opportunity in our transportation infrastructure.

This means building more parking and distributing it most efficiently, separating bikes and cars where feasible, enforcing road safety standards and moderating speeds in thickly settled neighborhoods, and supplementing the MBTA with municipal transit resources.

Stand Up for Cambridge (not just talk about it):

Too often City Council fails to use its platform to fight against the Trump administration, the state legislature, and within the metro region for Cambridge’s priorities. Nearly every council candidate claims to be for affordable housing and resisting federal overreach, but when corporate lobbyists, indifferent legislators, or party colleagues stand in the way, many City Councilors lack the courage to stand up to power. We need fighters that are able to make a compelling case for Cambridge’s needs, including rent stabilization, stopping corporate money from buying Cambridge’s elections, creating a progressive property tax, and permitting support for vital nonprofit organizations; priorities that the vast majority of Cambridge residents support, but will never receive without tougher advocates.

This bio and headshot were provided by the candidate.

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