Ryder Kessler wants the Assembly seat Deborah Glick has held for 36 years, and he is running for it again. The West Village Democrat is on the ballot for New York State Assembly District 66 ahead of the June 23 primary, his second run at the seat after a 2022 loss, according to a candidate questionnaire published by Tribeca Citizen on June 8.
District 66 covers some of Manhattan’s most storied blocks, from the West Village through parts of Tribeca and Soho, and the pitch Kessler is making to voters there is blunt: the neighborhood is too expensive to keep its promises. He lists three first priorities if he wins. Lowering costs, especially housing. Defending democracy, including getting ICE out of the city. And street safety.
Kessler, 40, grew up near Union Square and has lived in the West Village for close to 20 years. He told Tribeca Citizen that when his parents moved to the Village in 1980, his dad drove a cab and his mom was an artist and a young family could afford it. Now, he said, average rents in Manhattan run over $5,700 a month.
“We must fight for lower rents, more affordable housing, and stronger tenant protections,” Kessler said, “as well as universal healthcare and childcare, so the neighborhoods I played in as a kid don’t end up as a playground for the super-rich.”
The housing plank is the through-line of his whole campaign. Kessler said he was the only candidate in the race who backed the ballot propositions meant to speed affordable housing construction in New York. He pointed to 388 Hudson, a project he said will bring nearly 300 affordable homes to the district, as what he wants more of, faster. He also wants fewer townhouses and small apartment buildings getting combined into single-family mansions for billionaires who, he said, often don’t even move in.
Kessler is Jewish and gay, which he told Tribeca Citizen matters to him in part because Glick was the first openly gay member of the Assembly. “What motivates me as a gay man is we have to lobby for the most underrepresented among us,” he said. His second priority, democracy, is where immigration enforcement comes in. He said ICE is “ravaging our communities,” and named the neighborhood around the Stonewall Inn, where he said his drag queen great-uncle went before the riots, as personal ground.
Kessler co-founded Abundance New York in 2024, which he calls a “political home” for roughly 5,000 members who feel like things aren’t working and don’t know where to go. It pushes for more housing, an end to homelessness, better transit and public spaces, renewable energy, and more efficient government. He was executive director of its fund arm before taking a sabbatical to run.
Kessler laid out the structure. Abundance New York is a 501(c)(4) fiscally sponsored project of Goodnation Action that does policy, advocacy, and political organizing. The Abundance New York Fund is a 501(c)(3) fiscally sponsored project of Goodnation Foundation that does educational and research work. He said the organization is funded by philanthropies including Coefficient Giving and the Leadership Now Project, along with family offices and individual donors.
Before Abundance, Kessler spent close to a decade on Democratic campaigns. He left his tech company, DipJar, to a partner after the 2016 election, “amidst threats to our federal democracy,” as he put it, then helped launch the PAC Flippable, managed a campaign upstate, and built a Democratic program in Maine. He oversaw the northeast for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the 2022 midterms. He was, in his own account, all but dissertation on a PhD in American and English literature at Columbia before he walked away from it. He went to Friends Seminary, then Hunter College High School, then Harvard.
He joined Community Board 2 in 2019 and still serves, working on street homelessness through its Human Services Committee. Last year he started a chapter of Hands Off NYC, a group that organizes rapid response to ICE actions.
Kessler said the affordability fight makes every other value real. “Declaring that we are a haven for abortion seekers, queer Americans in need of gender affirming care, and immigrants seeking a better life is insufficient if it’s too expensive to be here,” he said. He said the first person he would hire is a constituent service director, to chase down the stuff voters actually raise at their doors: suspiciously high ConEd bills, a noisy bar, a housing lottery whose results never came.
When he is not campaigning or organizing, Kessler performs Gilbert and Sullivan operetta with the Blue Hill Troupe, a 102-year-old community theater group. The primary is June 23.
