Jordyn Balderas on the Issues | Platform for FL House District 34
Florida House · District 34

From the Streetsto the State House.

Running for change that helps you.

Jordyn Balderas is a 21-year-old community organizer running for State House because working families deserve a representative who has actually lived their fight. He is bringing grit back to politics.

Jordyn Balderas
The Platform

A Platform for the People Who Were Never Supposed to Run

This platform was not written in a boardroom. It was written by someone who has been uninsured, who has been homeless, and who has watched the people in power build their portfolios while his neighbors lost their homes.

Cost of Living 3 Planks

Gifford's roads flood while Grand Harbor's gates gleam. That is not an accident. It is the result of a tax structure that rewards wealth and starves everyone else.

What Jordyn will do
  • Fund sidewalks, drainage, streetlights, and safe housing in neighborhoods that have been neglected since before Jordyn was born.
  • Stop Tallahassee from stealing the revenue that belongs to our hometowns. Every dollar taken from local budgets is a pothole unfilled, a streetlight unlit, a first responder underpaid, and a community left in the dark.

Indian River County keeps building luxury. It keeps losing the people who make it run. Lifelong residents and retirees on fixed incomes get priced out. The county calls this growth. Jordyn calls it displacement.

What Jordyn will do
  • Prioritize restoring and reusing vacant and abandoned properties for affordable homes instead of rubber-stamping high-rent megacomplexes that drive uncontrolled growth.
  • Protect and expand truly affordable options, including workforce housing, so that the people who keep this county running can actually afford to live in it.

Your city council knows your streets better than a committee in Tallahassee. Your county commission understands your coastline better than a lobbyist's spreadsheet.

What Jordyn will do
  • Fight to repeal the Jim Crow-era laws that have prevented small Black communities like Gifford from incorporating as cities.
  • Oppose blanket preemption bills, like the ones authored by Robert Brackett, that strip power from counties and cities trying to protect their residents, especially around growth management, environmental protections, and tenant rights.
  • Put tenants first by fighting for legislation that protects tenant unions and the right of renters to organize.
Water & Land 3 Planks

The Indian River Lagoon is the beating heart of District 34. It is a $28 billion economic engine. It is also dying, and for four years District 34's representative has not filed a single bill to address it.

What Jordyn will do
  • Expand state investment in lagoon restoration through innovative, proven solutions: mangrove planting, living shorelines, and stormwater infrastructure that treats the problem at its source rather than downstream.
  • Protect and restore mangroves and wetlands as natural barriers against storm surge and flooding, and oppose any rollback that makes it easier to rip them out for short-term profit.
  • Hold the state accountable for the promises it has already made, fighting for binding appropriations, transparent timelines, and independent monitoring so that every dollar committed to the lagoon actually reaches the water.

A retiree on a fixed income should not have to choose between connecting to sewer and paying for medication. A working family should not face a $20,000 assessment so that a developer upstream can keep building.

What Jordyn will do
  • Use existing state appropriations to fund septic-to-sewer conversions so that the cost falls on the state budget, not on individual homeowners who had no say in the system that was installed before they moved in.
  • Provide income-scaled assistance so that fixed-income homeowners and working families are protected from assessments that amount to a second mortgage.
  • Publish a clear, public timeline for conversion neighborhoods so that residents know what is coming, when it is coming, and what it will cost, before the bulldozers show up.

When a corporation comes to Indian River County with a project that threatens the lagoon, the question should not be whether we can afford to say no. It should be whether we can afford to say yes.

What Jordyn will do
  • Work with local governments to oppose the use of surveillance technologies and industrial installations that threaten environmental health and civil liberties without meaningful community input or independent oversight.
  • Require that any major industrial or technology project pays its full environmental and infrastructure costs up front, instead of passing the bill to taxpayers after the damage is done.
Schools, Kids & Safety 4 Planks

Public money belongs in public schools, accountable to public oversight.

What Jordyn will do
  • Repeal the Schools of Hope co-location law and block any expansion of charter takeovers that force districts to share buildings and services without full, fair reimbursement.
  • Keep public dollars in public, neighborhood schools instead of subsidizing rent-free facilities and parallel systems for a handful of charter operators whose accountability to parents and taxpayers is an afterthought.
  • Ensure accountability and reasonable standards for tax-subsidized homeschooling.

Florida asks its teachers to do more with less and then wonders why they leave. Jordyn is done wondering.

What Jordyn will do
  • Move toward a future where teaching in Florida is a six-figure profession, because that is the only way to attract and retain the talent our children deserve.
  • Invest in our children's emotional development by funding school counselors, social workers, and mental health professionals who can guide students through the most difficult years of their lives.
  • End partisan interference in classrooms. Teachers are professionals, not propagandists.

Jordyn knows this because he was one of them. A child who acts out is telling you something. The answer is a counselor, not a cop.

What Jordyn will do
  • Invest in after-school programs, mentoring, and summer learning in the communities where kids need it most.
  • Support state policies that dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline, including alternatives to suspension, restorative justice practices, and real access to mental health care.

Eighty-one percent of independent voters in this district want stricter gun laws. The current representative co-sponsored a bill to lower the purchase age. Jordyn stands with the 81 percent. He is not interested in taking anyone's Second Amendment rights away. He is interested in making sure that right comes with the responsibility to keep weapons out of children's hands.

What Jordyn will do
  • Make it unambiguous in Florida law that minors in high school cannot legally purchase or carry firearms. No loopholes. No exceptions crafted by lobbyists.
  • Support legislation requiring adults to safely secure their firearms in the presence of minors, because a child who finds an unsecured weapon is not exercising a right. They are in danger.

This platform was not written by consultants or focus-grouped by pollsters. It was written by a 21-year-old who has been uninsured, homeless, and told that people like him do not run for office. He is running anyway.

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About

Meet Jordyn.

Jordyn Balderas at Humiston Park, Vero Beach

Jordyn Guadalupe Balderas dropped out of high school to keep his family alive. His mother, a nurse who raised six kids on her own, was diagnosed with amyloidosis and denied the disability benefits she had earned. The safety net did not catch them. Balderas spent his teenage years homeless, sleeping in cars, motels, and on friends' couches, working full time and serving as the primary caregiver for his disabled mother before he was old enough to vote.

He is not a career politician. He is not a lawyer or a lobbyist or someone who read about poverty in a textbook. He is a 21-year-old community organizer on Florida's Treasure Coast who has spent the years since getting his family off the streets doing the same thing for everyone else. He has built coalitions across Indian River County, partnered with local Democratic leadership, and shown up consistently for the families and individuals that Florida's government was supposed to help but never did. He is one of roughly 28 million Americans living without health insurance. He does not talk about these issues from a briefing book. He talks about them because he is still living them.

Balderas is running for the Florida House of Representatives in District 34 because he is tired of watching politicians who have never missed a meal decide who deserves help and who does not. He is running on affordable housing, healthcare access, and the basic idea that the people who represent working families should actually be one. His opponent is a landlord who owns more than 60 rental properties, rentals no working family can afford in the economy our representatives' votes have created.

He has been defying expectations since the day he was born, when a collapsed lung and a stay on life support were supposed to be the end of his story. They were not. Neither was homelessness. Neither was being told that people like him do not run for office.

He is bringing grit back to politics because grit is all he has ever had.