Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, 43, who grew up a “poor kid” on the south side of Williamsburg, is running in the June 23 Democratic primary for New York’s 7th Congressional District. He’s pitching voters who are sick of what he calls performative politics. In a June 2 interview with the Queens Chronicle, Reynoso said he’s running on his record.
“I just really feel like the American people are tired of talking heads and performative politics, and want people to get into the federal government and do something for them, actually work for them,” he said.
The campaign has drawn endorsements from state Attorney General Letitia James, outgoing Rep. Nydia Velázquez, the Working Families Party, and the Queens Democrats. In May, District Council 37, New York City’s largest municipal union, added its support, as Bushwick Daily previously reported.
Reynoso has been Brooklyn Borough President for four and a half years. Before that he spent eight years representing Ridgewood and parts of Brooklyn on the City Council. He has been legislating in and around NY-7, a district that runs through Williamsburg, Ridgewood, and Sunnyside, for more than a decade. In his first year in Borough Hall, he directed all $45 million of his fiscal 2023 capital funding toward maternal healthcare at Brooklyn’s three public hospitals, citing data that Black women die from pregnancy-related causes at eight times the rate of white women. He called Borough Hall a traditionally “performative office” of parties and flag raisings, and told the Queens Chronicle: “I want to stop all this madness that we’re seeing about a bunch of people just throwing press conferences but getting nothing done.”
Before Borough Hall, Reynoso co-chaired the City Council’s Progressive Caucus, led the Sanitation and Solid Waste Management Committee, and founded the New Kings Democrats to challenge what he described as Brooklyn’s “corrupt” county party organization. His 2018 Waste Equity Law, according to the Queens Chronicle report, cut waste processing capacity in North Brooklyn, the South Bronx, and Southeast Queens by more than 10,000 tons combined.
Housing is his top congressional priority. Reynoso wants to repeal the Faircloth Amendment, a 1990s federal provision that limits the construction of new public housing units, and set up what he calls a “lockbox” maintenance budget for New York City Housing Authority developments. He said Section 8 housing vouchers have been “frozen” for too long, that Mitchell-Lama housing, a state and city program that provides affordable rentals and co-ops to middle-income families, “just doesn’t exist anymore,” and that Section 202 federal funding for senior housing is “gone.” “I want to unlock all these levers,” he told the Queens Chronicle. “Right now, the crisis of our moment is affordable housing, and … we’re not doing enough at the federal level, leaving that responsibility almost exclusively to the state and the city.”
On immigration, Reynoso supports abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, noting the agency did not exist before 2002. As Bushwick Daily covered in May when Reynoso issued a statement on Mayor Mamdani’s ICE response timeline, he believes courts and judges, not an enforcement agency, should have final say over deportation. “ICE is just this overmilitarized force that we don’t need,” he told the Queens Chronicle. He also calls for a clearer path to citizenship for undocumented people who pay taxes, and backs 2021 legislation from Velázquez and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez granting Puerto Ricans a formal vote on statehood.
His other federal priorities include the PRO Act, which would expand workers’ rights to collectively bargain; a wealth-tax policy he says would leave 99.9 percent of taxpayers unaffected; and the Interborough Express, the proposed 14-mile light rail connecting parts of Brooklyn and Queens. He supports free transit but says bridge and tunnel tolls should stay. “Our idea here is that we build a public transportation system that is so good, that is reliable, safe and clean, and on time, that having a car is optional,” he said. He also wants oversight on remediation at Newtown Creek, and for the federal government to follow through on affordable housing commitments at Sunnyside Yard.
Reynoso said he does not take corporate money and raised more in this race than in any of his previous campaigns, though he did not give the Queens Chronicle a specific figure. He said he would support Rep. Hakeem Jeffries as the Democratic leader in Congress while pushing him further left.
His main opponent in the June 23 primary is Assemblymember Claire Valdez (D-Sunnyside), who is backed by Mayor Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America. Reynoso is not a DSA member, though he has backed DSA candidates before, including Mamdani himself. “I have a coalition that is very diverse and broad, and I want them all to have a voice in what the future of this district looks like,” he told the Queens Chronicle, adding that DSA membership would make him “beholden to a smaller group of people that are part of the coalition, but not the entire coalition.”
Featured image: Regional Plan Association / CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
