Representative Ritchie Torres is a fighter from the Bronx who has spent his entire life working for the community he calls home. Like many people in the Bronx, poverty and struggle have never been abstractions to him, and he governs from a place of lived experience.
Ritchie’s mother single-handedly raised him, his twin brother, and his sister in a public housing project. She paid the bills working minimum-wage jobs, which in the 1990s paid $4.25 an hour. In 2013, at the age of 25, Ritchie became New York City’s youngest elected official and the first openly gay person elected to office in the Bronx.
At the City Council, Ritchie stood out, and during his seven-year tenure, he tenaciously tackled problems big and small for the Bronx and New York City. He passed over forty pieces of legislation, including legislation protecting the City’s affordable housing stock and tackling the city’s opioid epidemic. As the Chairman overseeing NYCHA, he held the first committee hearing ever in public housing, which led to a $3 billion FEMA investment, the largest in NYC history. As Chair of the Oversight & Investigations Committee, Ritchie has led investigations into the heating outages and lead poisoning at NYCHA, the Taxi Medallion scandal, the City’s controversial Third-Party Transfer program, and Kushner Companies.
Ritchie currently lives in the Bronx and represents NY-15 in Congress. He is a member of the Committee on Financial Services and the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.
