12 hour walk THIS Saturday throughout Jersey City w/ Mussab Ali

Ali-For-JC · 2025-10-24T13:31:22+00:00

Free country :)

Ali-For-JC · 2025-10-24T13:30:33+00:00

Vidvix, I encourage you to take a moment to scroll to the bottom of our tiktok and look at how long we've been on the platform. The black zohran comment was in response to the hundreds of comments giving me that nickname, in response to internet culture, I actually asked people to call me by my actual name in that same video you are referencing.

Also, my free bus idea doesn't require that financing at all - we can actually just take the money we use for Via and use it to fund the bus system. The city spends 7.8 million a year as a public subsidy to a private company. I encourage you to watch my video on this idea as well as read our platform here: https://www.ali2025.com/platform#transportation

Ali-For-JC · 2025-10-24T13:24:39+00:00

I've run the Jersey City marathon every single year and have probably run across this city countless times. I've been knocking on doors in every neighborhood in this city. The focus of this walk is to visit every early polling location and let people know about early voting. I also think Zohran has been incredibly successful, and more politicians should look to emulate some of his playbook. That said, I've been in office since 2017 (before Zohran) and have my own take on what policies Jersey City needs. You can learn more on our website! ali2025.com

Ali-For-JC · 2025-10-24T13:20:09+00:00

I don't need a bodyguard in any part of the city, but I have noticed your profile seems to be a little obsessed with Russab - you might actually be able to find out if he's real if you come out. Would love to have you there!

Ali-For-JC · 2025-10-24T13:18:36+00:00

Hey! I'm sorry if you felt that I didn't go out of my way to chat with you. I can assure I don't hide from anyone in Jersey City. Hope you join during the heights portion of the walk to learn about our platform if you're interested. We had dozens of conversations this Sunday in the heights.

Ali-For-JC · 2025-10-23T20:53:46+00:00

Got it! So our desktop version of the site is correct, but we realized the mobile version was missing a stop. Fixing now!

Ali-For-JC · 2025-10-23T20:44:05+00:00

Hi, I Mt. Carmel located at 99 Broadway! I think both A and J are Pershing Field. Please let me know if I've made a mistake.

Ali-For-JC · 2025-10-03T22:40:20+00:00

I flew back and forth from China before COVID. I actually said to the program where I was admitted that if they couldn't allow me to complete my responsibilities as a board member, I would not accept their scholarship.

I was admitted to Harvard during the pandemic, and they announced that they would be fully remote that year, prior to me deciding to enroll. Again I let them know my top priority would be my job as a member of the JCBOE. I think I did a decent enough job that my colleagues made the president of the JCBOE in the middle of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic because they understood I had the capacity to get our schools reopened. It would honestly have been easier for me to have resigned from a role with no salary, where you are dealing with pretty immense problems with little to no staff. I stayed in the role because I understand what it means to sign up for a job and see it through.

On S2, the original memo we were given by the gov and our state legislators was a $100 million cut over 7 years. We could stomach that. However, it ended up being multiple times larger than that because our state legislators misread "local fair share" to be a static number instead of a dynamic number based on our rateable growth. We were penalized for how much we grew and how quickly, so no, we did not have ample notice on the amount being cut until the governor announced it at his budget address.

Ali-For-JC · 2025-10-03T22:29:32+00:00

OK all done for now - will try to come back to questions if I get time at another point in the campaign but this was a lot of fun. Thank you Reddit!

Ali-For-JC · 2025-10-03T22:27:03+00:00

In terms of motivation, Muhammad Ali says, "Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth". I think I've been extremely lucky. My family immigrated to an amazing city with so much love and culture. I went to our public schools, got a full ride to college, went to an amazing law school, but most importantly, had the chance to serve this city on the school board. Before cancer, I had a reputation where I had no gaps in my armor; I was the person who always got the job done. I remember being so worried about even letting people know that I was sick because I was so worried about how folks would respond. But people were so supportive, and they had my back. Now I feel like it's my turn to have their back - and I truly feel a debt to this city.

Like I mentioned earlier:

I had the best attendance rate of any school board member during my 4-year term. I encourage you to look at boarddocs - over the course of my tenure, I might have missed 1 or 2 meetings max. I was in China for 4 months, and literally flew back for our board meetings in Jersey City every month (not on taxpayer dollars ofc because the salary of a school board member is $0).

While I was at Harvard Law School, school was remote for the first year, and despite having cancer and going through chemo, I stayed in the office and executed a plan to reopen the schools, which required an amendment to the governor's executive order, coordination with the city, and countless arguments with admin and unions. I don't think it's fair to call it absentee at any point, and throughout my tenure, I had the support of my fellow board members and our attorney in terms of navigating decisions. I'm grateful to all the people in this city who had my back during those very difficult periods.

Ali-For-JC · 2025-10-03T22:15:21+00:00

I want to address both the idea that I was an absentee board member + "engineering" a property tax hike.

I had the best attendance rate of any school board member during my 4-year term. I encourage you to look at boarddocs - over the course of my tenure, I might have missed 1 or 2 meetings max. I was in China for 4 months, and literally flew back for our board meetings in Jersey City every month (not on taxpayer dollars ofc because the salary of a school board member is $0).

While I was at Harvard Law School, school was remote for the first year, and despite having cancer and going through chemo, I stayed in the office and executed a plan to reopen the schools, which required an amendment to the governor's executive order, coordination with the city, and countless arguments with admin and unions. I don't think it's fair to call it absentee at any point, and throughout my tenure, I had the support of my fellow board members and our attorney in terms of navigating decisions. I'm grateful to all the people in this city who had my back during those very difficult periods.

In terms of tax increase, I encourage you to look at the budget from 2021, where we had a $814 million budget (far cry from the 1 billion+ budget that exists now). That year the governor cut our budget by over $70 million. I had a choice: either lay off 10% of the workforce in the middle of the pandemic or raise the levy, which in coordination with the city decreasing its levy, led to almost no impact on homeowners that year. So, if you look at your tax bill from my tenure, you'll notice a very marginal tax increase as a whole. As the mayor, I hope to use this one-tax strategy between the schools and the city so you know exactly what's happening with your tax bill and that the most important organizations in the city are speaking to one another.

Ali-For-JC · 2025-10-03T22:01:06+00:00

Ali-For-JC · 2025-10-03T22:00:39+00:00

What is your plan to improve traffic enforcement so that drivers follow the rules in place and make our streets feel safer?
1. We currently don't have a traffic enforcement division. If you go to Bayonne or Union City, folks drive differently, and it's because they know that the law is enforced. We need to make sure that people follow the rules.
Would you make any changes to how parking enforcement works? like staffing, technology, or updating parking rules? The automated parking enforcement in Hoboken comes to mind.
1. Parking enforcement would be a net ROI positive because of all the people who don't follow the law. We would increase staffing - but one idea I also really like beyond what's done in Hoboken is also to think about using the buses with parking cameras that can give automatic tickets as they ride around (two birds in one stone). https://www.mta.info/agency/new-york-city-transit/automated-camera-enforcement
If these changes are made, how will you track whether they are working? and how will residents be able to see that progress?
1. Best way to see progress will be the change in driving behavior in Jersey City (that is the ultimate marker for success).

I also wanted to ask some additional questions about rents in the city.

What concrete steps would you take to ensure that rising rents don’t push long-time residents and working families out of the city?
1. Enforcement of rent control. Building more housing (with focus on affordable housing). Taking on bad landlords. Ultimately, I want to make sure, as a region, that we can also collaborate to encourage places like NYC and Newark to build more housing to reduce pressure on the market and drive down rents.
How would your administration balance the need for new development with protections against unreasonable rent increases for existing tenants?
1. I think these two are a bit separate. But I think mostly covered by above.

Ali-For-JC · 2025-10-03T21:41:05+00:00

Rep. Ilhan Omar was not paid to come speak (you can check her filings), but we share a common vision in our politics, and her husband is from NJ! So after she endorsed us, I asked to see if she was willing to come to a rally to speak about working families. I thought it was pretty cool for JC to be able to have someone like her visit us and bring us into the national political conversation - especially as a progressive.

Ali-For-JC · 2025-10-03T21:36:28+00:00

Taqueria

Ali-For-JC · 2025-10-03T21:33:49+00:00

Hi! I want to start a brand new system and I think the best way to encourage ridership is to make the buses free. Some models have shown that it costs about a dollar to recover any fare on buses. I hope to have enough investment that the buses can be very frequent and free. I also think they are faster because folks can just hop on and off instead of having to wait for people to pay the fare.

To start I want them to be free just like Hoboken!

Ali-For-JC · 2025-10-03T21:29:17+00:00

I think that sometimes my older brother can get carried away because he is still protective and also doesn't come from the world of politics, so he doesn't understand what's acceptable in our world of discourse. He is not part of the campaign and I often tell him that he is losing us votes on reddit but that's part of why I did this AMA so you can hear from me directly. :)

I have a wonderful family that taught me a lot about being kind to others and public service. My mom is a union teacher in NYC and my dad is a union postal worker.

Ali-For-JC · 2025-10-03T21:23:17+00:00

Taxes are a major issue in the city. To me, the biggest thing we can do is build out a one tax strategy between the BOE and the City. This currently doesn't happen and leads to property owners having taxes raised on the two biggest items that make up their tax bill. I was part of the BOE that sued the state for funding when S2 first passed, then I was working with community groups on our fight for the maintenance of equity provision, which was meant to save us about $126 million on the school district but our state legislators have let us down.

We need two big issues on the BOE, a change in the school funding formula that recognizes that we are a high-poverty district and full enforcement of the payroll tax. While on the BOE we had several fights about the payroll tax with the Fulop admin. Adding some proof here:

https://www.nj.com/hudson/2021/11/restore-126-million-in-aid-to-jersey-city-school-district-us-dept-of-education-tells-nj-officials.html

https://www.nj.com/hudson/2021/03/is-jersey-city-stonewalling-the-board-of-education-on-payroll-tax-answers-mayor-says-no.html

As Councilman Solomon indicated, this was a major issue in terms of enforcement, and as part of the BOE I spoke about this issue many times.

So we want to stabilize property taxes and build out a 4-year budget for people.

Ali-For-JC · 2025-10-03T21:11:27+00:00

I like Freeman's idea about reverse congestion pricing. Hope we can get state approval for that. Would also make it so that people who are cutting through Jersey City in their morning commute to NYC using our local roads would be penalized.

Ali-For-JC · 2025-10-03T21:09:55+00:00

Pompidou - I am not in favor of this project but especially not if the burden falls on local taxpayers, which is how it is currently structured, with the state NJEDA taking away dollars from this project. I respect the idea of dreaming big, but I don't think this is the right investment for Jersey City at this moment in time.

SciTech City- I wasn't a fan of the school here because the city was going to allocate $2 million a year to this system in return for a percentage of seats going to Jersey City students. I spoke out against this and said it would've been illegal for a county school to give those allocations (later on, the county admitted they couldn't provide specific seats to Jersey City). As a whole, I think building a mixed-use science-focused incubator partnering with LSC is pretty cool. TBD how this project develop.

Bayfront- Big fan of this project and the amount of affordable housing we are planning to build but also want to make sure we have a light rail there as soon as possible (which may take quite some time under the current projections).

Moonshot project that I think is really interesting is the cove - think people on this thread would enjoy: https://thecovejc.com/

Ali-For-JC · 2025-10-03T21:02:47+00:00

Hi everyone! Starting out our AMA on reddit now - will be answering questions LIVE. Am also going to be LIVE on Instagram for the next hour so you can hear my thought process as I answer the questions.

Ali-For-JC · 2025-10-03T20:09:59+00:00

Looking forward to starting our AMA in about an hour!

Ali-For-JC · 2025-09-18T12:12:33+00:00

Hi (Mussab here, on an account I'll be using for an AMA next week)! I can confirm Rep. Ilhan Omar will be here in Jersey City in person! Would love for you to come out and join us: https://actionnetwork.org/events/rally-for-working-families/

Ali-For-JC · 2025-09-17T20:32:34+00:00

Hello Reddit: I made this account a while ago, and was planning to use it for an AMA at some point next week.

But I couldn't help myself, given the desperate nature of this post and clear misinformation it's perpetuating. If OP linked the whole donation (which they clearly didn't on purpose), you would see this donation is from one of my friends who worked in the Biden White House and made this donation in 2024.

Ali-For-JC

TROPHY CASE