Community activist Domingos DaRosa said he is running for mayor of Boston, bringing the field of declared challengers vying to unseat Michelle Wu to two, with another candidate said to be mulling a run.
DaRosa, a father of four from Hyde Park, ran unsuccessfully for a city councilor at-large seat in three prior elections, but said the Council didn’t appeal to him this time in his bid for elected office because he “didn’t want to be a rubber stamp.”
“I want the work to actually trickle down to the people,” DaRosa told the Herald Tuesday. “Boston has become … a joke. These seats belong to the people, and we’re allowing people to hand-pick who they want for those seats.”
Mayor Michelle Wu endorsed four city councilors last election, in their bid for a first term on the City Council. Three of those four councilors, Sharon Durkan, Enrique Pepén and Henry Santana, worked for the mayor’s administration or political campaign prior to their November 2023 election to the Council.
DaRosa, 47, emphasized that he is a parent before an activist, but acknowledged his activism in recent years as it relates to his efforts to push for a clean-up of needle-ridden Clifford Park, where unsanitary conditions from Mass and Cass spillover led him to dismantle his Boston Bengals Pop Warner program.
“Because Clifford Park has a special place in my childhood, the program became even more of an emphasis to help clear up Mass and Cass from Clifford Park,” DaRosa said. “After having families witness defecation, open drug use, open dealing, lewd acts … public nudity, it became a political piece because then Mass and Cass became a political piece.
“But we who’ve lived here have always dealt with it before it was a political piece,” he added.
DaRosa formed a campaign committee and fund with the Office of Campaign and Political Finance on Monday. He joins Josh Kraft, son of the billionaire New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and former head of his family’s philanthropic arm, as the other declared candidate challenging first-term Mayor Wu.
More than two mayoral candidates would trigger a preliminary election, on Sept. 9, to whittle down the field to two finalists for the Nov. 4 general election.
Both Kraft and Wu are Democrats. Another candidate said to be mulling a run — Thomas O’Brien, managing partner of the real estate developer HYM Investment Group and Boston Redevelopment Authority chief under former Mayor Thomas Menino — is also expected to run as a Democrat, the Boston Globe reported.
DaRosa said he is registered as an Independent voter, and when asked for his political leanings, he described himself as a “human being.”
“I’m a human being just trying to live a life that my neighbors also want,” DaRosa said. “We want a community where we can come home and we don’t have to worry about how far we park from our door stops — because walking back to my house, walking back to my door, I can get shot. I can get robbed.”
In certain communities in Boston, people may not feel as “on edge” about being victims of violence, he said, but in places like Roxbury, Dorchester, and in certain parts of Mattapan and Hyde Park, “those are the realities for people.”
“And we need to change that,” DaRosa said. “That’s the humanity thing. No grandmother should be sitting on her porch in the middle of summer and lose her life while having a glass of Kool-Aid.”
DaRosa said he worked as a lifeguard for the city, through the Boston Center for Youth and Families, for 23 years. He left his city job in 2014, and now works as an independent contractor through a company he said he started in 2015.
He sees housing affordability as the biggest issue facing Boston, saying that more work needs to be done to close the wealth gap between communities — an issue that he said is preventing residents from growing economically.
“I’m not a politician,” DaRosa said. “I’m a concerned resident … I’m a parent before I’m an activist. I’m only speaking on things that my children are suffering from.”
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