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By: Maxine Bouvier
SOMERVILLE, MA – Since March, 2025, Somerville City Councillor-at-Large Willie Burnley Jr.’s campaign for the city’s highest executive office has been endorsed by Boston DSA. In April, the Somerville branch of the organization also chose electing Willie Burnley, Jr. as its sole external priority. Burnley, a former Teamster, is challenging incumbent Mayor Katjana Ballantyne. The current mayor is seeking a third term.
Willie Burnley, Jr. is running for executive office in Somerville at the same time that another democratic socialist for mayor stunned the world in New York. On June 24, 2025, state lawmaker Zohran Mamdani made international headlines by defeating an ex-Governor born into a political dynasty in the Democratic primary. Already called “the greatest political upset” in the history of New York City, Mamdani’s mayoral run has galvanized huge swathes of working class voters, mobilized small armies of canvassers, changed the cultural trends of the city itself, and created new political constituencies for the socialist movement at local and national levels.
Both Mamdani and Burnley are not only DSA-endorsed members of their local chapters; their political styles are similar. They are both self-described organizers. Both have used creative campaign techniques and developed robust field operations, at the scale of two very different cities, while remaining laser-focused on broadly felt issues. For Zohran, that’s lowering the cost of living by freezing the rent, making buses fast and free, and universal childcare. Willie endorses a longer list of policies but is laser-focused on social housing and expanding workers’, tenants’, and organized communities’ power through city-led reforms. Burnley’s campaign has already been hailed for its creative approach to engaging Somerville community members, including a cannabis-infused fundraiser, and for its rapidly-expanding field presence. Volunteers mobilize to canvass, rain or shine, weekend and weekday, five times a week.
Workers inspired by New York have one looming question: can Willie Burnley, Jr. electrify the Somerville working class in the same way?
Working Mass spoke with Willie over video call to ask him about his background, his historic campaign, his work on Somerville City Council so far, and – of course – his views on what is most important for Somerville’s future.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
WM: In 2021, the Boston Globe published a story about your slate’s victory, the moment you became a city councillor. At the time, Rand Wilson quipped that “the socialist takeover of Somerville is going to be a little disappointing if nobody runs for mayor.” Since when have you been thinking about running for Mayor?
WB Jr.: It’s hard to pin it exactly to one moment because as a city councillor, I have a front row seat to the city’s budget, to initiatives that are started and don’t get off the ground, and to the ways in which I think our current administration has mishandled a lot of the demands of the community. I’m thinking particularly about the transformation of public safety, as one.
Five years ago before I was a councillor, I pushed to move money out of our local police department and into alternative services into life-altering and life- saving services, such as rental assistance, food assistance, bilingual youth specialist for public school – and five years later, our current mayor, is actually doubling down on the same system of policing that led us to take on that fight in the first place, five years ago.
So – there’s been a lot of frustration over my time on the council. There’s been a lot of times where I’ve been like, if only we had someone who could take on this role and actually steer the city in the direction I know that most residents want it to move in. I feel like now is the time that we should have that person, and I feel like I’m the best person for the job at this moment.
WM: Tell us about your background. What was growing up like for you?
WB Jr.: I grew up in Southern California, in San Diego specifically, in a lower middle class family – a single parent family, single father family. I grew up in a place that’s a lot like Somerville, in some ways: a place where working class people struggle to survive, with a lot of diversity.
In the case of my part of San Diego, most of the kids that I went to school with were people of color, most of whom were low income, and, you know, where I grew up, we all had the sense that government was not on our side. Government was not there to protect us. I grew up with undocumented folks who felt like the government was literally going to tear apart their families.
For folks like me, who’ve been impacted by the carceral system – we felt like government was there to undermine us, to harm us. That informed a lot of my relationship with politics, frankly. We were underserved, underinvested in, targeted by government. And it’s so much of why I think we really need to show that government can be a force of good in people’s lives, by actually serving their material needs, helping them deal with the crisis of medical debt, of housing unaffordability.
I actually came to Boston for college. I moved to Somerville right after I graduated from college and have been here for about the last nine years. I see so much in this community that is built upon people caring about their neighbors and about the world they live in and wanting to make it better. And I think we deserve leaders who are gonna fight just as hard as our neighbors are actually fighting at this moment to secure our safety and secure our futures.
WM: You touched on this somewhat with your previous answer, but looking maybe for a particular moment, what is your earliest memory of radicalization?
WB Jr.: Yeah, that’s hard. I mean, there’s lots of things that are wrong in the world, lots of things that I feel like have been radicalizing for me. One of the things that definitely sticks out is the reason I started identifying as a socialist, because I think like a lot of people, it took me a bit of time. I didn’t grow up idolizing money or capital, like some folks did – and I kind of had the politics of what I consider an “anti-capitalist” for a long time. But I remember I read an article in 2015 from Jacobin: Against Charity. And it basically was about how our fundamental human rights, and things that we all need to live – food, water, shelter – will not be guaranteed by capitalism, and fundamentally cannot be guaranteed by capitalism.
At the time, I was living in DC on a program from Emerson College. DC was undergoing some of the most drastic and stark gentrification I’d ever seen. I lived walking distance from the Capitol where Congress was meeting, where some of the most powerful industries in the world were centered to lobby our government, and I saw so many people who were unhoused, who were struggling to get by. There was so much poverty. And it was infuriating for me because – I’ve lived in cities all my life and I’ve seen poverty, so much of it, but to see it in our nation’s capital, where some of the richest people in the world were, and some of the richest industries in the world were, was just – infuriating.
The article kind of just locked it all into place for me. I believe in human rights and in doing the things that you need to do to accomplish your values, and capitalism just fundamentally cannot sustain what I’m hoping to create in the world. That pushed me to become a socialist. It was a deep moment of radicalization for me amidst the Black Lives Matter movement. Getting involved with people-powered movements, in protest with thousands of people, really showed me how to view power: built from the ground up.
WM: What inspired you to organize, the first time you knocked on a door?
WB Jr.: The Black Lives Matter movement was the first time where I felt the true power of people-powered movements – 2014, 2015, 2016, 2020 – each of these years, being part of mass movements in the Boston area, physically clashing with police. In one of the first Black Lives Matter protests in Boston, we tried to take a highway and ran our bodies into lines of police with tens of thousands of people pushing us forward. I specifically say that because there was a call from some organizers at the time that white people should put their bodies on the line, go to the front, be that barrier between the police and people of color. I respected that – but I also wanted to be at that frontline. So, I put myself in that position.
That definitely was the moment where I realized: I want to be a part of this. There is a difference between supporting a protest and being a part of a movement, and organizing movements, and organizing protests. So during that early time – 2014, 2015 – was definitely the start of it.
In 2017, I joined If Not Now, an almost entirely Jewish organization. I’m not Jewish, but I was a part of it. We organized people, primarily young American Jewish people, to really call out the support of AIPAC. We protested outside of the Boston consulate for Israel. I organized one of those protests, because at the time when Trump was first in office, they were trying to expel all Black immigrants from Israel back to Africa, where they would have been punished for going to Israel. The movement for people of color and for a just foreign policy really got me into not only picking up to join protests, but to help lead the logistics and to get people involved myself.
WM: You have now served for four years as a city councillor in Somerville. How have the political dynamics of Somerville City Council have changed since your election in 2021? Do you think they become more or less favorable to socialist policy?
Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s a difficult question because I have been, I think, incredibly effective and productive with my time on the council. My measurement of that is with legislation, primarily. I’ve passed thirteen laws in three and a half years on council. Most other councillors have passed in the same number of terms, maybe two laws, maybe one law. They’re not a lot of other people who have been around the same amount of time as me, because some of those people have left already. And most folks who’ve been around for twice as long have passed four, maybe five laws. So I feel confident with my ability to move forward, but I will also note that we’ve lost socialists on the council since I joined.
I ran on a slate, which prompted some of the takeover language I never personally used. But we had more people in DSA on council in 2022 than we do now. Frankly, the success that I’ve had on the council has prompted some of my colleagues to be less inclined to support more aggressive action. When you can show that clear divide, and show that socialists can be effective at legislating, at governing, it shines a negative light on those establishment elected officials who are not doing as much as they could for people. It puts them in awkward positions.
There are a lot of votes that my colleagues, frankly, have not wanted to take.
For example, when Somerville was the first municipality in Massachusetts to pass a ceasefire resolution in January of last year, many colleagues didn’t want to take that vote. They didn’t want to say an opinion or take a stance. Ultimately, we had that vote and we were successful, but there was a lot of resentment from the elected political class in Somerville for having to take a stance on that issue. That’s frustrating from my standpoint, but it’s one of the kind of drawbacks, frankly, of having that successful insurgency, that all of a sudden the people who might have thought, “Oh, these people, they’re not going to be that effective, they’re harmless, we can just, you know, do whatever,” all of a sudden, when they really see it that you can be effective, they have to take stances to challenge your power.
That is kind of where we are now, and why I think taking on a Mayor’s role in a strong mayor system like Somerville’s, is really important. They’ll have a choice of whether to work with me or not, and then we can actually push for the material support that people need.
WM: You have spoken about how you were displaced from Somerville a decade ago. In what ways has the tenants’ crisis changed in Somerville since your displacement?
I got displaced from Somerville in 2017, but before the city of Somerville had what we have now, which is the Office of Housing Stability. When I was displaced, I didn’t know who to talk to. And I know, frankly, because I talk to constituents who ask me these questions, a lot of people still don’t know who to talk to. But at the time, I didn’t feel, even as someone who was an organizer, like there was someone in our local government who I could talk to about how to stay in my apartment when my landlord was drastically raising the rent.
I felt incredibly isolated, unprotected, and, frankly, afraid of what it would mean to not be able to pay my bills, what it might look like to be evicted, what it might look like to have to end up on the street. Coming from California, if I was going to get kicked out, I didn’t necessarily have somewhere to go long term in Somerville or in the state of Massachusetts. And ultimately, I had to go all the way back to California after the landlord displaced me. I decided to come back because I care about this place that much. But, to your question, we now have an Office of Housing Stability, which is one of our most important and vital resources for residents.
We have a Community Land Trust now that is fully formed. It’s now slowly acquiring and proposing to build permanently affordable housing in different parts of the city.
But, of course, we need to do more. That’s why one of the things I want to do as Mayor is do what former Mayor Curtatone did with the Office of Housing Stability: hire one person to help build out the department, figure out what we need to practically do as a city to stabilize people’s housing, when the city lacks the right or the power to establish rent control. If I’m elected mayor, I’m going to do the same thing with an Office of Social Housing – figure out what Somerville could do to try to build up social housing, by initially owning housing in the city that’s set as deeply affordable for residents, and, long-term, produce social housing for residents in the city.
WM: What do you think is the role of labor unions in municipal governance? How about tenants’ unions? How can you involve tenants and workers in Somerville governance?
WB Jr.: We have some tenants unions in Somerville, but I think we should have many more. Tenants unions are just deeply important for our community, because Somerville is incredibly dense. It’s the most dense municipality in New England, one of the most dense municipalities in the world. Knowing your neighbors is not just important for housing stability, it’s important for all issues. When we have neighbors getting snatched off the street by ICE, the people who are best suited to support us are our neighbors, the people who live near us, the people who can keep track of what’s going on in and around our neighborhoods. Often, other tenants.
It’s important, obviously, to negotiate with landlords – that’s something that the Office of Housing Stability has been really helpful with. They’re able to work to get whole buildings in a position to collectively negotiate down rent hikes with landlords. We need more tenants unions, and we need them to be in communication with the city, so we can collectively intervene. People power is real, and it matters even to the slumlords. If they act in a disproportionate or unethical way towards their tenants, they’re going to have to empty out whole buildings for the long term and have negative press about the buildings that will lead to no tenants signing their lease at all.
I’m a former union member. I was a Teamster. Unions play a really critical role, both from the standpoint of helping to elucidate issues for elected officials and the standpoint of pushing for wider solidarity from below. For example, in Somerville right now, Tufts is building a dorm building without using union labor. I’ve been on the picket lines multiple times with some members of SEIU and some other trade folks, talking with the workers about why Tufts needs to actually use union labor to build. That’s important because it’s safer, for the workers themselves and the people ultimately living in those buildings. And our labor unions also push on other issues. For example, the trades unions are very interested in how cities implement legislation to build resilience around climate change.
We need to be able to show to our workers, both municipal workers and just workers in the city, that local government has the back of labor. Somerville needs to be a union town, and I don’t think we can do that if we have a mayor who’s going to be hands off or allow projects that are going to reshape the city without union labor.
WM: How do you plan to support Somerville city employees as Mayor?
WB Jr.: That’s a great question, and something I’ve already tried to do as a councillor. I’ll give two examples of things I have done and an example of something I would do. First, Massachusetts has a law called the Paid Family Medical Leave Act offering twelve weeks of paid leave to state workers when they take medical leave, when they get sick, when someone in their family gets sick. That’s a law passed years ago that impacts not just state workers but workers across the state. But the one group that was exempted was municipalities.
Municipalities can opt into the system and provide workers with twelve weeks of leave. The cities pay some of it – not all of it. Not a single municipality in the state of Massachusetts has opted into the program. Not a single one. So, one of the things that I did as a councillor was I brought forward that law to Somerville and ask, “Hey, should we adopt this law that would drastically increase our benefits for our municipal workers?”
Can we afford to do it? Do workers want it? [The Ballantyne administration] obfuscated, they delayed. They even said, “no, well, what we are doing now is better than that.” Well, what they didn’t say at the time was that they offered two weeks of paid leave for our municipal workers, but at the time, they said that two weeks was better than the twelve weeks. I kept pressing them on it for over a year, probably a year and a half, I pressed them on it. Finally, they said: you know what? We’re actually creating a municipal version of it – eight weeks. We’re not going to do twelve weeks, but we’ll do eight weeks, which is four times what we were doing previously, which we already said was better than the twelve weeks. They won’t admit it, but the city council could have opted us into a much broader program, and chose to not. But, they nonetheless, responded to pressure. And now, today, in this part of the fiscal year, workers in Somerville have four times as much paid family medical leave as they did when I became a city councillor.
That’s one win my advocacy contributed to for municipal workers. Another is an ordinance a year ago, maybe two years ago, to require that when a Somerville municipal worker experiences sexual or domestic violence, they receive paid leave. In the state of Massachusetts, all employers are required to give at least fifteen days of leave for someone who experiences sexual or domestic violence, but employers can choose whether that’s paid or unpaid. Survivors end up brutalized and then also often lose the income for the times that they need to find new housing. They’re losing wages they would otherwise be making. That is fundamentally unjust, to financially punish someone for being subject to violence.
I brought forward that ordinance. Again, our administration obfuscated and delayed. RESPOND, which is one of the largest anti-violence, anti-domestic abuse, anti-sexual violence organizations in Massachusetts, wrote a letter supporting the ordinance, but the administration still isn’t trying to support legislation. As mayor, we will pass that law and Somerville, as far as I’m aware, will become the first [Massachusetts] municipality to say by law that anyone who experiences this form of violence, deserves paid leave – not just leave. A city in Kentucky passed the law, you know. Somerville should not be behind anywhere in Kentucky on these types of issues.
As mayor, I’ll also make sure we’re not in a situation that we just had recently, where our mayor kept our largest union out of contract for over two years while negotiating with them. During that time, we lost people: “Why would I work for a city that’s not even going to respect my union and give me a contract?” But we also lost people who would have applied to these jobs, but were like, “Why would I apply to a city or a workplace that’s going to treat its workers like this? Or treat its unions like this?” I respect unions enough to negotiate fairly and urgently with them. So, I’m going to be a pro-union, pro-worker mayor of the executive body.
WM: As a city councillor, you led efforts to use ARPA funds to pay off the medical debt of Somerville residents. How much medical debt is held by Somerville residents? What can you do to prioritize this issue as Mayor?
WB Jr.: How much debt is owned is complicated. It’s also not a one-to-one of how much debt is held to how much we would have to pay, which is part of why I wanted to do this program. The way that buying debt works – at least medical debt in this country – is that you can essentially buy, for one dollar, buy $100 worth of debt. After a hospital holds a debt for so long, a couple of years, they eventually sell to collectors for pennies on the dollar: “Hey, this person owes $5,000, you give us $50, We’ll give you their portfolio debt, and then you can try to collect it from them.”
There is no rule that says a city can’t buy that debt and just forgive it. That’s what I was opting to do. We can’t with just direct municipal funds, under current laws, which is why I was pushing for ARPA funds. But I still believe that there’s a way that we could build a stabilization fund to alleviate medical debt on a recurring cycle so that, every three years, Somerville residents’ medical debt is wiped away for pennies on the dollar. That’s something I’m very interested in pursuing as mayor. However, since ARPA funding is going away, we’ll need a different iteration. And it’s unfortunate that our mayor refused to pick up this offer when she had the chance.
WM: Can you describe the situation at the Winter Hill School? What’s your plan as Mayor?
WB Jr.: At the Winter Hill School, in the summer of 2023, a piece of concrete from one of the ceilings fell. Thankfully, it happened while school was not in session with no one in the building. But it was the result of decades of neglect and a lack of investment in our buildings, which the teachers union had warned about literally the year before during budget season. But even though the union warned the building was falling apart, that it was unsafe and unsanitary, our mayor said, “Hey, we’re doing a buildings study, give us some time, give us a year or two. We’re going to have a plan for the buildings.” And in that time, the buildings fell apart. We had to move hundreds of students into existing schools and then effectively change a building that was slated for being an office building for city staff into a school for children from the ages of five to thirteen.
That’s the current status of the Winter Hill School. The actual building itself is unoccupied. Just a months ago, some people got into the building and lit fires in the building. Since it’s in a residential neighborhood of Somerville, that was incredibly dangerous. But it happened because the city was not focused on keeping the building up to date and safe while it was open, and apparently not focused on keeping it secured enough while it was unoccupied. As mayor, I’ll make sure the city moves urgently to build a new school for Winter Hill. We have to figure out where, a legitimate question because we’re, again, the most densely populated city in New England, but there are a few options on the table.
Another complicating factor: we have other schools likely in the near future to deteriorate. The question to answer right now is: will we rebuild the Winter Hill School with enough space for just Winter Hill? Or will we rebuild it with enough space for the children from Brown, another school in the city currently inaccessible for anyone who has physical disabilities? Will we build a building big enough to accommodate both schools’ worth of children? And if we do, where will it go, when we don’t have a massive amount of space in Somerville to begin with?
I can promise that in my first year, we will make that decision, and we will move with urgency to do it. As opposed to the current mayor, who has not given any definitive statement about where we’re going in two years, we will move quickly.
WM: Thank you so much for taking our interview. Take care!
About Willie Burnley Jr: Willie Burnley, Jr. is a former Teamster and has served Somerville as a city councillor-at-large endorsed by Boston DSA since his initial run for office in 2021. He is running for Mayor of Somerville in 2025. You can find his campaign website and canvassing opportunities here.
About the Interviewer: Maxine Bouvier is a member of Boston DSA and a contributing writer to Working Mass.
The post “I’m Going To Be a Pro-Union, Pro-Worker Mayor”: Will Willie Burnley, Jr. Bring Zohran Energy to Somerville? appeared first on Working Mass.
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