🐦 The LA Reporter, Issue 11: 'A matter of survival'

Rae Huang, a Los Angeles-area community organizer who is challenging Mayor Karen Bass from a progressive angle, kicked off her campaign kickoff Sunday in an event held at Grand Park, across the street from Los Angeles City Hall.

During her speech, Huang, who is an ordained minister, pointed up at the City Hall building behind her, saying, “For the past three years, residents have been shut out of these doors of City Hall while a climate of fear and political pressure has taken hold — and the mayor locked arms with everyone except the people.”

Huang’s supporters who attended and spoke at her launch included people from Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles and the Poor People’s Campaign. Some were people who are active in organizations like LA Forward. Many worked on successful campaigns by LA progressive campaigns for City Council. The former executive director of Ground Game LA and POWER-LA, Bill Przylucki, was working on Huang’s campaign, and at one point, held up time-keeping cards for the speakers.

Greg Akili, a labor organizer and prominent member of Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles, showed up shortly after the kickoff event closed to talk to Huang. Akili has known LA Mayor Karen Bass for many years, but has had differences with her on the issue of policing. After telling The LA Reporter he supports Huang for mayor, he and Huang quickly fell into a discussion about ways to advocate on an issue with the mayor.

Huang said in an interview after the event that she comes “from the movement here already, working alongside folks fighting for higher wages, for fair contracts, for stable housing, for stronger tenant rights and protections.”

A day later, Huang rolled out a campaign video that uses LA’s car traffic as a metaphor for the city being “stuck.”

Huang, who is a deputy director at Housing NOW!, told The LA Reporter last week that she jumped into the race after Bass tried to weaken LA’s ‘mansion tax,’ Measure ULA, which raises revenue for tenant protections and affordable housing.

Read more at The LA Reporter here.

Hundreds of homeless services workers, many with years of experience, were told in April that they would not have to worry about their job stability when the county pulls its funding from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority — the removal of those funds will essentially gut the agency they currently work for. 

The motion that the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors adopted, at the time, to defund LAHSA had promised to prioritize its workers when hiring for the new county homelessness services department that they were to set up over the coming year.

But in the months since, some LAHSA workers who have stuck around while some of their colleagues moved to more stable positions elsewhere, say they have been left hanging. They’ve gotten mixed messages and little concrete information about how the county would actually prioritize them for jobs there. There is “widespread alarm” about what is happening, a union steward told The LA Reporter this week.

Read the full story by The LA Reporter here.

Los Angeles city departments’ budget proposals for the next fiscal year, beginning July 1, 2026, are due to the mayor’s office on Nov. 21, and are usually then posted to the mayor’s website. The Los Angeles Police Department’s $2.27 billion budget proposal (Stop LAPD Spying’s estimate is that with potential liability costs it could increase to $3.7 billion) is now available on the agenda for today’s Police Commission meeting at 9:30 a.m. The department wants to hire 520 new officers. The sticker prices on some of the requests include:

The Los Angeles Fire Department’s budget proposal was also already submitted to the Board of Fire Commissioners late last month, and can be found here.

Living Wage for All, a group that is pushing to raise the minimum wage in Los Angeles to $30-an-hour, is releasing a report and polling research today aimed at convincing the Board of Supervisors to introduce a motion to raise the wage.

One of the supervisors, Holly Mitchell, had expressed support for an across-the-board, rather than industry-specific wage increase when the campaign initially launched last year to raise the wage to at least $25.

Campaign representatives said that a $30 wage was now more appropriate. The report points to the MIT Living Wage Calculator that sets Los Angeles County’s living wage at $27.81, and it goes up when there are more people in the household. $30 was also the amount that New York’s incoming mayor Zohran Mamdani set in his platform for a wage increase.

Their report argues that rent is high, and many Angelenos are rent burdened. So one way to solve that is to increase people’s wages. The polling research they did also points to 58% of people surveyed supporting an increase of minimum wage to $30.

The MIT Living Wage Calculator shows that a worker in Los Angeles would now require $27.81 an hour if they had no children, and $46.14 an hour if they had two working adults and even one child; given that most working adults have one dependent, it is clear that $30 is the least currently required for a person in Los Angeles to meet the cost of living.7

Kia Dupclay works as an analyst “in the homelessness sector” and describes herself as someone who went from “survivor to thriver.” She is also an alumnus of the Speak Up! program, in which people who have been homeless are paired with mentors to tell their stories — as a way of “combating false narratives,” she says. That program is now seeking mentors and participants with “lived experience” (but are now housed) to join its next cycle starting in January.

Dupclay said she was motivated to take part in this program because, “as somebody who's a survivor of human trafficking, as someone who's a foster youth, who’s juvenile-justice impacted, the stories that were being told did not reflect me at all.” She was paired with a mentor she views as a member of her “chosen family,” and now she sits on the advisory council for the Speak Up! program.

Dupclay encouraged people not to be hesitant about applying to be mentors, saying that “you have so many amazing qualities about yourself, so pour it, share it.” The Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH) runs the program, which lasts 12 weeks, starting in January. They are filling 15 spots for mentors and 15 spots for people with lived experience. The application for participants can be found here. The application for mentors can be found here. The curriculum trains people in advocacy, knowledge about the homelessness system, and storytelling techniques. A factsheet on the program can be found here.

Jessica Vozella, a senior program manager for the organization, explained that “at the heart” of the program is an effort to “prepare folks for positions where they can [have] decision-making power,” which also includes “preparing the [homelessness sector] to allow that.” People who speak about their “lived experience” have often been relegated to just that role, she said, but “we know our Speak Up! graduates have been able to break a lot of those boxes.”

“At the very beginning, folks were really just asking for a seat at any table,” Vozella said. “They were trying to get their voices heard. As things have shifted, it's not enough to just have a panel anymore.”

Dupclay told The LA Reporter that one of the things she wants to shift in the narrative is the idea that homelessness is only the result of a “housing crisis.” She said that she is seeing that there isn’t enough focus on how it’s also being driven by an “economic crisis.”

“When we're talking about homelessness, we're not talking about how rent prices are extremely high, and it's unaffordable,” Dupclay said. “And we're not talking about how there's case managers [working to provide homeless services] out there that are a paycheck away from becoming homeless themselves, but still trying to do the work and helping people.”

Read more about the program in The LA Reporter here.

Two years of organizing by community groups and tenants finally resulted last week in the Los Angeles City Council green-lighting changes to the city’s rent stabilization law that caps the amount landlords can hike rents at 4%, with a floor of 1%. The change, approved at a meeting on Nov. 12, 2025, still need to be drafted into ordinance language, which will be brought back to the City Council for consideration.

The effort to revamp the city’s rent stabilization law, known as the Los Angeles Rent Stabilization Ordinance (or LARSO), kicked off in early 2023, after the council lifted a freeze on rent increases that was put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the return of rent hikes, city leaders promised to update their rent stabilization law’s annual rent hike formula to something that could be more manageable for tenants. The law also hadn’t changed in 40 years – and it included bells and whistles, in terms of the ways landlords could raise rent, such as options to bump up the rent for utilities, and extra tenants.

In May 2024, the Economic Roundtable completed a study and report analyzing the ordinance’s rent hike formula, weighing its effects on tenants and landlords, to determine what would achieve a fair balance between them. That report was not released for several months, and it wasn’t until September 2024, when LAist reporter David Wagner obtained it through a public records request, that it was available to the public to read. 

Still, Los Angeles city leaders seemed hesitant to make any moves on any proposed changes, prompting tenants and organizations on the ground to hold multiple rallies at council offices and inviting council members – who were often no-shows – to town halls to hear the stories of tenants who were struggling with affording their rent stabilized units – all just to get the issue scheduled for a committee hearing.

Meanwhile, tenants and others strategized to get heard by city leaders where determined, because they had no other choice, tenant advocates said.

“You know, the folks who are in these meetings figuring out how we're going to win this thing are simultaneously fighting an eviction because they are no longer able to pay their rent,” said Lena Sullivan, a tenant organizer with the Strategic Actions for a Just Economy said. “And that was really what gave people the motivation to stick with this. Because for many people, it's a matter of survival.”

Sullivan said that what ultimately was approved was not exactly what people had campaigned for – they had asked for a 3% cap with a 0% floor. But she deemed it still “a win for tenants.” She called the new formula a “big improvement from the law that tenants have been living with for the past 40 years.”

Hundreds of people around the city organized to get city leaders to take action, she said, with more than 100 organizations banding together. The LA County Federation of Labor, with their hundreds of thousands of labor union members, also put their support behind the efforts to cap rent hikes, she said. And in an interview with The LA Reporter, LA Fed officials attributed their vocal support for the LARSO changes to the fact that many of their union members were facing housing insecurity and homelessness, raising tenant issues as something they could not ignore.

During their meeting last Wednesday, the City Council debated for about two hours. What came out of it was not everything that tenant advocates wanted. And the job isn’t quite done. The ordinance language still needs to get written up and returned to the council for consideration. The timeline for when it would be key for tenants to get across the finish line is before Feb. 1, when many landlords are expected to be able to hike the rent again. And that is just around the corner.

For now, Sullivan said of this big step forward that they are “proud of this outcome and excited for what it means for what it means for tenants and working class people in the city.”

The Los Angeles County Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission will be doing a training on how to analyze Sheriffs deputy shootings. It’s being conducted virtually TODAY, Tuesday, Nov. 18, from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. The agenda is here.

That commission also has its regular meeting on Thursday, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., during which the commission will take up a lawsuit filed by former LA Times reporter Maya Lau accusing the Sheriffs department of retaliation. The agenda is here. The meeting will be held in-person at St. Anne's Conference Center, 155 N. Occidental Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90026.

Both meetings are streamed on the panel’s YouTube page.

There is an effort to try to improve Los Angeles city’s political and governance structure, through the Los Angeles Charter Reform Commission, but not many Los Angeles residents may be aware of it or know how to feel plugged in enough to participate. 

To help remedy that, a group called RewriteLA is working with the commission to try to give Los Angeles residents the ability to be more directly involved, by holding what are known as “civic assemblies,” a democratic process that dates back to Ancient Athens.

An assembly uses a lottery process to pick participants who then help make important decisions — the idea being that everyday people can have not just the ability to give an opinion, but be able to help make decisions on an issue. People who participate will be given the chance to familiarize themselves with an issue, often by talking to an expert, before making their decisions. Compare that to going to a traditional government meeting, where members of the public who aren’t on the panel are usually only able to watch the proceedings and give public comment.

RewriteLA is now taking applications, which are due today, Nov. 18, from people who want to participate in a civic assembly, in which they will deliberate over one idea that will be chosen based on what people submit to them via this online survey. The lottery will be done on the weekend of Nov. 21, and the assembly will take place on Dec. 13, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. 

The goal, organizers told The LA Reporter, is to try to hold several more assemblies alongside the Charter Reform Commission’s own decision making process— both just before that panel submits their recommendations in March or April, and while the City Council considers those recommendations for the ballot.

And it’s a packed week for charter reform. There will be three Charter Reform Commission committee meetings in a row this week:

Begone, gondola, says LA City Council: The Los Angeles City Council last week, on Nov. 20, 2025, voted 12-1 to urge the Metro board of directors to reject Frank McCourt’s project to build a gondola between Union Station and Dodger Stadium. McCourt is a former owner of the Dodgers, and is now a part-owner of the team’s stadium parking lot. The Los Angeles Aerial Rapid Transit project, also known as LA ART, would ferry people to and from Dodger Stadium over a 1.2-mile route that would fly over Chinatown and Los Angeles State Historic Park. The resolution opposing the gondola project was authored by Council members Eunisses Hernandez (CD1) and Ysabel Jurado (CD14), and seconded by member Hugo Soto-Martinez (CD13). The gondola project would mostly be in Hernandez’s district. The group opposing the project is called Stop the Gondola, while a group called Zero Emissions Transit supports and is spearheading the project. The group Strategic Action for a Just Economy conducted a community discussion in 2024, and in a summary on it noted that McCourt has said he wants to develop the parking lot into a housing and entertainment complex. (LA Times)

Bass’s LA marketing efforts makes people put their palms to their face: Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass unveiled an initiative on Monday with the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation called LA is Open that attempts to reinvigorate business activity in Los Angeles. But the muddy, salmon-pink-hued, mauve-accented, palm-tree logo for the initiative ended up getting more attention, with many reacting in disgust – some toward the odd protruding “antennae” and others in response to the general aesthetic effect of the color palette and typography choices, with one person saying, “wow, I hate it.”

LA Sanitation blames green bin invasion on state composting law: The green food waste bins that Los Angeles city’s Sanitation department has been delivering to neighborhoods, and that are crowding up residential curbs, are supposed to be done to better comply with a 2016 state composting law, Senate Bill 1383, reports The LA Times’s Sandra McDonald and David Zahniser. There’s also a form people can fill out to get smaller containers for compost. The story also says the city’s food waste program is a reason the city adopted higher trash fees earlier this year. The Los Feliz Neighborhood Council has also put out an informative Instagram reel explaining why those bins were delivered and what people can do about them.

LA County’s Solis and Pico Rivera’s Sanchez to run for open seat after Proposition 50 approval: The Los Angeles Daily News’s Linh Tat takes a look at how one of the Congressional races for one of the districts that was redrawn by Proposition 50 is shaping up. Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis and Pico Rivera City Council member Monica Sanchez have thrown their hat into an election to fill the 38th Congressional seat, which opened up because the former seat-holder, Linda Sanchez, was placed under another district, the 41st, by the state ballot measure, which means she would need to run for re-election in that new district. The Public Policy Institute of California put together a set of key takeaways on Proposition 50, including that the “relatively high voter turnout” seems to reflect a “revival for Democratic fortunes.”

CD1 candidates debate: The Lincoln Heights community heard from six of the candidates running for the District 1 seat on the Los Angeles City Council, in a Nov. 13, 2025 town hall organized by the Lincoln Heights Chamber of Commerce and held at Sacred Heart High School’s gym. The candidates were Nelson Grande, Sylvia Robledo, Raul Claros, Jesus Rosas, Rosa Requeno and Maria Lou Calanche. Based on some coverage and video of the townhall, the candidates discussed homelessness, LAMC 41.18, getting LAPD foot patrols, and the availability of parking spaces. This latest debate was held at the Sacred Heart High School’s gym, and organized by the Lincoln Heights Chamber of Commerce. Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who needs to participate in at least one debate if she wants to receive matching funds, citing a schedule conflict for why she could not attend this one. Another candidate, Elaine Alaniz, also did not take part in the forum. The eight candidates in this race also recently increased to nine – with the addition of a candidate, named Joseph Lucey, who is now also listed on the City Ethics website. Some of the coverage for this town hall:

And ICYMI, there was an earlier debate in the Pico Union neighborhood, at Angelica Lutheran Church, on Oct. 28. Part of the debate can be viewed through this archived live-stream taken by Asaad Alnajjar, who is one of the more than a dozen candidates in the mayor’s race.

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