When Rae Huang, a pastor and housing advocate, saw that Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was attempting to work out a deal in Sacramento that would weaken L.A.’s ‘mansion tax’ measure, it “was the last straw” that convinced her that Bass should be ousted from office, and that she wanted to be the one to make that happen, she told The LA Reporter this week, ahead of her official campaign launch on Sunday.
“If this is the kind of leader we have in this city, I don’t know if I can take another four years of that,” Huang recalled thinking. As to her decision to put herself up for the job of being mayor, Huang responded, “I am someone who, when I see a problem, I want to fix it. That’s exactly what I’m doing.”
Rae Huang, who filed las month to run for Los Angeles mayor, is being seen as a challenge to mayor Karen Bass from the left. The field of mayoral candidates now includes 13 people. (Photo from the Rae Huang campaign)
Huang is an ordained Presbyterian minister who serves as a deputy director of Housing NOW! She was involved in forming the Healthy LA coalition that secured relief for families in Los Angeles during the pandemic. She later went on to lead efforts in get state legislation passed, including SB 567, which expanded tenant protections, and SB 555, which called for the state study the social housing model aimed at creating affordable housing that’s protected from the speculative housing market. She is also a co-author of Building Our Future: Grassroots Reflections on Social Housing, a report that showcases efforts around the country to change housing policy.
That was the context from which, Huang said, she watched, in horror, as Bass in September, recruited former state legislator Bob Hertzberg to help broker a deal to cap the tax returns on Measure ULA. It was an ultimately unsuccessful effort. The attempted deal was viewed as a way to either get the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association to drop several ballot measures that would limit voters’ ability to raise revenues for government services through tax measures, and also to persuade business groups from supporting those measures, which also would nullify Measure ULA.
What stung the most, Huang told The LA Reporter, was that Bass’s play at making a deal was done behind the backs of advocates and community members who helped craft and push for Measure ULA, which raises money for housing programs and tenant protections, such as a “right to counsel” program that provides lawyers to tenants facing evictions and that would help fund more affordable housing.
“When Mayor Bass tried to cut the arms and legs off of this really important revenue measure, which will bring up to a billion dollars annually into our city, and helps fight our housing crisis from multiple sides, it was so disappointing,” Huang said. “And it's one thing if there was a need for amendments to make sure that it functions even stronger and better, and to work with the community, activists, and organizations who built this. [But] it's another thing to just completely dismiss them, to do it behind closed doors, and to do it through the state legislature, which isn't even her lane, to make that happen.”
She also noted that Measure ULA was approved by voters in greater numbers than those who voted for either of the mayoral candidates in the 2022 runoff election. Those candidates were Bass and Rick Caruso, a billionaire businessman.
Huang also criticized Bass’s progress on creating affordable housing, as well as the mayor’s Inside Safe program. She called that encampment clearing program’s focus on putting people into temporary housing, including motels, a “bandaid,” saying that this program, which Bass has touted as successful, was not getting people into permanent housing, and was “a very expensive and costly program.”
Huang also pointed to the carve-outs that have been made in Bass’s mayoral Executive Directive 1, that speeds up the construction of affordable housing. She said select communities in Los Angeles, usually the wealthier ones, were afforded exceptions to the measure, which allowed multi-unit housing that are 100% affordable to skip past red tape.
Douglas Herman, from Bass’s campaign responded to Huang’s criticisms, saying that “under Mayor Bass’s leadership, there has been unprecedented progress on the issues that matter most to Angelenos.”
“Homelessness has declined for the first time in two consecutive years, neighborhoods are safer with significant drops in crime, and the Palisades fire recovery continues far ahead of pace with the fastest recovery and rebuilding in California history,” Herman said. “In addition, there was no better defender of Los Angeles than Mayor Karen Bass when Trump’s ICE raids started and we won a court ruling to help stop the illegal raids and unconstitutional arrests. That’s what we need to move Los Angeles forward.”
When Huang filed last month to run for mayor, she was seen by many as the left’s, or the progressive’s answer in the mayoral race to challenge Bass. She joins other candidates who have announced, including Austin Beutner, a former LAUSD superintendent, former deputy mayor, and one-time LA Times publisher, who has drawn the most attention of the challengers in the race. There are now 12 candidates in the mayor’s race aiming to unseat Bass, and there is speculation and pushes for more candidates to come.
Although Huang is known in advocacy circles, her wider profile is lower than that of Bass and Beutner’s who have more traditional careers in politics. But when The LA Reporter asked how she would take on such opponents, Huang rejected any narrow definition of what makes someone an “establishment” candidate.
“I think we need to change what it means to be established,” Huang said. “In the way that you're using the term establishment, you're talking about establishment within a Democratic Party or within funded sources, through corporations, and that is not who I am, and that is not the coalition I'm trying to build.”
Huang said her meaning for established comes from “being established within the community.” She pointed to her time over the last decade being “on the ground, working with families, being with my neighbors, just trying to make changes for each other, making sure that we're fed, making sure that we're not being raided by ICE or kidnapped by ICE, making sure that when the fires happened, that we were on the ground, already providing the needs that people have.”
“I think we already are established,” Huang said. “And it's not me. The community is already established. We have coalitions across the city of Los Angeles who have been working together for years, creating these solutions.”
She added that the decision to run for mayor felt natural to her, and it reminded her of other times in her life when she chose to go down a certain path. This was personal, she said, and comes from wanting to protect not only her community, but also her own family. She said she was “realizing that, ‘What do I have to lose?’ in this moment when everything is crumbling down around us? What do we, as a community, have to lose to try and make things better for us?”
She said she had asked herself what value she could add, and she said she felt that her contribution would be “changing the structure of the city. And the things that I'm good at is that I'm good at identifying problems and solving [them],” Huang said. “I'm good at setting up infrastructures to make them functional. And I'm also good at organizing people and building coalitions. And I think that is the role of a mayor.”
The role of mayor, Huang said, is “like any other role in the sense that we all need to be stepping in at this point, we all need to be leaning in, we all need to be putting our best efforts into trying to make this city, this country, a better place for the future of our children.”
“A lot of people are feeling restless, in this moment,” Huang, who is the mother of two children, said. “You want to either run and hide, or you want to fight. And I thought about running and hiding. Where could I move to, or hide under a rock? I realized I’m not someone who hides. That’s just not my personality. I am a fighter.”
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