Meet Steven

I moved to the city after college because I wanted to serve as a teacher in a low-income school. I taught math at a community high school in the city for two years. Just to give you an idea of the my experience, when I was a teacher the students in my school were 99% low-income, 99% racial minorities, 86% chronically absent and 1% proficient in math. My biggest take-away was that the bad educational outcomes are not primarily the student's fault, or the parent's fault, or the teacher's. It's primarily the system that fails these kids. It was really an overwhelming experience for me so I needed to do something else.

I became a lawyer because lawyers have special powers to solve problems that other people can't on their own. I got a full scholarship to University of Baltimore Law. 

For one of my classes, I wrote a paper about heirs' property and how it leads to home loss, an issue that I saw on my own block in a lower-income neighborhood.

Since graduating, I've been working at a local nonprofit to help resolve heirs' property for low-income people so that they don't lose their house. In my work, I run into so many laws that are harmful to low-income people and really don't exist for any good reason. I'm running because we need someone to fix them.

I've lived in lower-income neighborhoods in the city for 10 years. I find needles when I take my kids to the park. There are vacant houses on my block which are home to the rats and are a risk for fires. People have been shot very close to my home. I'm not saying I can fix addiction, vacant housing or gun violence. These are big, complicated problems and the solutions need to be big and complicated. But, these are issues that I am more equipped to solve than other politicians because I live here.