In our City, there are over 41,000 people who are without a stable home, of which 3,907 (though likely more) reside in the 13th District. Homelessness has been a fixture of Los Angeles for decades because of systemic racism, rules that make housing difficult and expensive to build, the continued under-investment in mental and behavioral health services, over-policing and the failed “War on Drugs.” As the City has grown increasingly unaffordable, the number of unhoused Angelenos has skyrocketed, with homelessness nearly doubling since 2011. We are reminded of this grim reality every day, with tents and encampments in virtually every corner of the City.

Even amidst this extraordinary suffering, we know what solves homelessness—permanent housing, supportive services, and financial security—and what does not—criminalization, displacement, and inconsistent outreach that fails to build trust or offer pathways off the streets. Our homelessness crisis is a result of policy failure and inaction from our elected leaders at many levels of government. Now, as the crisis becomes even more acute, our City is doubling down on failed approaches that simply move unhoused folks from sidewalk to sidewalk, wasting taxpayer money and not getting any closer to a real solution. That must change. 

While a political boundary makes no difference to someone who is trying to find a safe place to sleep for the night, solving homelessness requires all levels of government—the City, the County, the State, and the Federal Government, all of which have different roles—to be working collaboratively, transparently, and toward a common goal. All too often we see elected leaders,whether driven by political self-interest, bureaucratic inefficiency, or simply a stubborn unwillingness to work with others, pursue contradictory or separate plans that don’t actually move us closer to a Los Angeles where everyone is housed. 

Permanently re-housing 41,000 Angelenos while preventing hundreds of thousands of our neighbors from falling into homelessness requires real leadership and the ability to establish trust with both housed and unhoused residents alike. As your Councilmember, Kate will confront this crisis head-on while centering the humanity and needs of all Angelenos. From my first day in office, Kate will be laser-focused on three key issues:

1. Keeping more Angelenos housed

Homelessness continues to get worse in Los Angeles because more and more people are being pushed out of their homes and onto the streets. In 2020, over 94,000 people experienced homelessness in Los Angeles County. Thanks to Measure H, Prop HHH, and recent state and federal funding, we are re-housing more people in Los Angeles than ever before—over 60,000 people in the last three years—but the system remains overwhelmed.

The situation is even more dire, as nearly half a million households in L.A. County lack access to an affordable home, while a renter needs to earn over $38 dollars an hour—2.5 times the City’s minimum wage—to afford average monthly rent. And with rent increases outpacing the rise in wages and the continued lack of a robust social safety net, far too many of our neighbors are a lost job or unexpected medical bill away from living on the streets. If we want to ever have a chance to truly end our homelessness crisis, we must act with urgency to keep more of our neighbors financially secure and stably housed.

We need to focus on keeping neighbors housed because it is the right thing to do—homelessness is often caused by trauma, while being a traumatic experience on its own—but it is also much less expensive to keep someone in their homes than helping them off the streets. We can protect people who are on the edge of homelessness from being pushed out of their homes through: 

• Creating a new “Office of Tenant Support” dedicated to help tenants remain housed and to provide technical assistance to tenant coalitions exploring innovative housing solutions such as community land trusts and Tenant Opportunity to Purchase (“TOPA”) programs;
• Instituting and fully funding a uniform right to counsel for renters, with culturally and linguistically competent outreach to immigrant and other vulnerable communities. We can accomplish this by qualifying and then passing the “United to House L.A.” citizens’ initiative this November;
• Utilizing emergency rental assistance to vulnerable tenants, even after the end of the COVID-19 pandemic;
• Proactively identifying those on the brink of housing instability and flooding them with targeted services;
• Expanding the number of the domestic violence (“DV”) shelter beds and resources to ensure survivors don’t need to choose between the streets and returning to an abuser;
• Affirmatively addressing the nexus of houselessness and justice-involvement through criminal justice and re-entry reform;
• Tackling the foster youth to homelessness pipeline by ensuring greater coordination between relevant systems;
• Tracking all affordable rental units in the City to reduce the further loss of any rent-stabilized buildings.
• Addressing and stopping the demolition and “flipping” of the City’s limited rent-stabilized and affordable housing units; and
• Making transparent and addressing corporate ownership of residential housing to move toward the de-commodification of housing.

2. Developing an “all of the above” system for helping people move off the streets and into stable housing

Amidst this crisis, one thing remains clear—permanent housing, coupled with services tailored to an individual’s needs, is what helps people come off the streets, regain personal stability, and stay housed. Simply put, permanent housing ends homelessness. Unfortunately, it is expensive and time-intensive to build, made worse by the City’s bureaucracy and inaction from local politicians. Meanwhile, an average of 4-5 Angelenos die on the streets each day.

In the last few years, several short-term housing solutions have popped up across the City, designed to help folks transition off the streets before entering more stable housing. However, given our continued lack of affordable housing, many of these interventions can be a dead-end, with people staying in them longer than expected or simply falling back onto the streets.

This is why we need to continue developing an “all of the above” system, whose final goal is moving people to permanent housing solutions while creating a pipeline of housing options that can help individuals quickly transition off the streets. “Permanent housing vs. shelter” is the wrong conversation to be having – we need both, and an array of programs and services that address the complex needs of our unhoused neighbors.

To further refine this spectrum of housing solutions, we must:

• Make all affordable and homeless housing projects subject to ministerial approval through City Planning, and free from meddling by councilmembers;
• Create an “Affordable and Supportive Housing” division with both the Housing and Planning departments to exclusively focus on expediting affordable and homeless housing projects;
• Exempt all affordable and homeless housing projects from frivolous lawsuits;
• Accelerate the conversion of formerly commercial and City-owned property into housing through adaptive reuse;
• Pass a “Right to Housing” framework for the City of Los Angeles;
• Strengthen collaboration between the City, the County, and the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (“LAHSA”) to ensure that Angelenos placed in short-term housing options have clear plans to transition into more permanent and stable housing;
• Pass S.B. 679, to create the Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency (“LACAHSA”), to finance the development and preservation of affordable housing across L.A. County;
• Support the “Ending Homelessness Act of 2021” (H.R. 4496) to make housing choice vouchers a universal right;
• Invest in alternative housing models, such as shared housing, social housing, community land trusts, and Tenant Opportunities to Purchase Act programs (TOPAs).
• Create new funding mechanisms for affordable housing, such as the “United to House L.A.” citizens initiative and the creation of a public bank
• Double down on incentives to develop affordable housing and commit to meeting our RHNA targets 

3. Implementing a streets engagement strategy that connects unsheltered Angelenos with services and pathways to permanent housing

One of the most public ways we are confronted with homelessness each day are the tents we see scattered across the City. Since the start of the pandemic, encampments have seemed to grow dramatically. The ugly truth, though, is that these Angelenos were living on our streets well before March 2020. In fact, 70% of all people who are experiencing homelessness in the City of Los Angeles are unsheltered, meaning they live in tents, parks, cars, sidewalks, or some other location not intended for human habitation.

For our 3,194 unsheltered neighbors in CD-13 and the nearly 29,000 Angelenos across the City, we can balance access to public space without resorting to displacement by implementing a comprehensive street engagement strategy that offers trauma-informed service provision tied to pathways to permanent housing. A successful strategy, based off the “Encampment to Home” pilots led by service providers and championed by Councilmembers Bonin and Raman, will set clear guidelines about how we direct resources and programs to encampments while establishing clarity for both housed and unhoused residents, and in a way that is driven by the actual needs of the community.

While some of this work is already underway, there is more to be done. We must:

• Ensure the proposed “Comprehensive Streets Engagement Strategy” is fully and consistently implemented across the entirety of the City;
• Bring together LAHSA and relevant County departments to develop a unified outreach and engagement strategy that coordinates the numerous engagement teams and sets clear measures and objectives;
• Increase the number of specialized outreach teams that can address specific needs, like domestic / intimate partner violence, mental and behavioral health, and substance abuse; 
• Leverage new federal and state dollars to fund housing placements and vouchers for those living in encampments, so they can transition to permanent housing;  
• Build off the efforts of Councilmembers Bonin and Raman to implement voluntary sanitation cleanups, where City workers and outreach teams work with unsheltered residents to ensure encampments are clean and safe;
• Address the continually unmet need of unsheltered residents by expanding hygiene and sanitary infrastructure, scaling the deployment of street medicine teams, and legalizing overdose prevention sites through SB 57 (Wiener);
• Repeal LAMC 41.18 and 56.11, which continue to criminalize poverty and push Angelenos further to the margins;
• Implement a Commission on Lived Experience that can inform the Council on solutions and programs that fully address the needs of unsheltered individuals.

It is no stretch to say that homelessness is the moral, social, economic, and political crisis facing Los Angeles today. The extraordinary scale and depth of the human suffering, in one of the richest cities in the world, can often make the issue seem unsolvable, even as we’ve voted in the last few years to fund new housing and services. And because of failed leadership in City Hall, which has once again decided to rely on the failed and costly practices of criminalization, it also feels like we are moving away from actually solving the underlying issues. 

Even so, the truly herculean and unheralded work done every day by service providers, volunteers, and activists shows us that with sufficient political courage, robust services, and direct pathways to permanent housing, we can in fact bring our neighbors indoors and permanently break the cycle of houselessness. As your Councilmember, Kate will never shy away from making the hard decisions that move our district and our City toward a future where everyone has a place they can call home.

Los Angeles is a city notorious for its gridlocked traffic, potholed streets, and buckled sidewalks. Moreover, our streets are deadlier than any other major city in the United States, our tailpipes emit 40 percent of the region’s greenhouse gas emissions, and our high cost of mobility keeps low-income families from accessing basic services. Los Angeles has voted three times in the past 15 years to raise taxes to fix transportation, yet it’s hard to see improvements on our streets in Council District 13. Los Angeles needs leaders who can break through political gridlock to make getting around safe, accessible, dignified, and sustainable.

Like many other issues in Los Angeles, City government often stands in the way of improving mobility. Los Angeles adopted a forward-looking Mobility Plan in 2015, but has implemented just three percent of it in the seven years since. Individual councilmembers have incredible control over street improvements in their districts, making life-or-death decisions based on political expediency and parochial concerns instead of long-term benefits. As a result, infrastructure that people need to safely move around our neighborhoods can start or stop at a political boundary. As your Councilmember, Kate will invest in safer streets, more options to get around, and cleaner modes of transportation.

1. Make our streets safe

In Los Angeles, 294 people died in traffic collisions on city streets in 2021. That is an almost 50% increase since the incumbent Councilmember was elected in 2013. Victims of traffic collisions are more likely to be people of color, older adults, and children. In fact, traffic collisions are the leading cause of death of children under the age of 14. In Council District 13, almost every major street is on the city’s official list of most dangerous corridors: Sunset, Hollywood, Santa Monica, Vermont, and Western, just to name a few. These are the streets where we live, go to work, go to school, and run errands—making everyday activities unnecessarily dangerous.

Traffic safety is a crisis and we need to treat it like one. We know what works: engineering, engagement, education, and equitable enforcement. We can eliminate traffic violence and save lives by:

• Identifying and accelerating street safety projects on CD 13’s most dangerous streets with quick-build solutions that reduce speeding and other dangerous driving today.
• Supporting proven neighborhood safety improvements like crosswalks, bike lanes, and slow streets.
• Prioritizing safe routes to schools, parks, and other community destinations.
• Engaging neighbors and uplifting community-led safety solutions.
• Deploying effective and equitable alternatives to traditional traffic enforcement that reduce dangerous interactions between community members and law enforcement while holding reckless drivers accountable.
• Advocating for more investment in a citywide traffic safety strategy that doesn’t start and stop at Council District boundaries.

2. Give people real options

Traffic is not a new grievance in Los Angeles. Driving is often miserable, but many people feel like they don’t have another choice. Construction of the Red Line has opened up Hollywood to visitors from around the region, but too many Council District 13 residents don’t have good connections to regional transit. Buses are slow, unreliable, and stuck in traffic. Bike lanes start and stop without connecting to a larger network. Broken, inaccessible, and missing sidewalks make it hazardous to walk or roll around our neighborhoods. The city has ambitious goals to double the share of trips taken by walking, biking, and transit, yet is failing to prioritize the investments needed to make these alternatives actually work for more people in more neighborhoods.

The city needs to deliver real mobility options for its residents. CD 13 is the most transit-rich district in the city. Our streets should look like it. We must provide transportation infrastructure and services that connect people to where they need to go safely, conveniently, and affordably by:

• Working with neighborhood leaders and community-based organizations to identify local barriers to mobility, particularly for community members overlooked by traditional planning processes.
• Prioritizing fast, frequent, and reliable bus service with bus lanes and signal priority on high-ridership corridors like Sunset, Vermont, and La Brea.
• Building a network of safe bike routes connecting all CD 13 neighborhoods, including protected bike lanes and traffic-calmed neighborhood streets and starting with the community-led Sunset For All project.
• Expanding neighborhood shuttles and circulators like DASH and Metro Micro to serve more residents with better hours.
• Reforming the broken Sidewalk Repair Program to fix more sidewalks more quickly.
• Expanding access to shared mobility options, including electric car share, bike share, and micromobility, to give people more flexibility without needing to own their own wheels.
• Supporting Universal Basic Mobility to expand access to affordable and flexible transportation options for low-income families.

3. Plan for people

Transportation planning has long focused on quickly moving white collar commuters from their homes in the suburbs to jobs in the central city. That has come at the expense of urban communities like Council District 13, where our streets have been widened to squeeze ever-more cars through them at rush hour while our sidewalks are too narrow to accommodate basic amenities like street trees and bus shelters. Our streets need to be reoriented around our neighborhoods with greater attention paid to how our neighbors use them. That means more shade, more lighting, more places to sit, and more public bathrooms so that our streets encourage people to stroll and linger, giving everyone a sense of dignity no matter who they are or how they use the street.

Our streets should serve our neighborhoods first and foremost. With different priorities, we can plan for beautiful streets, with all the first-rate amenities that a world-class city should expect. We must:

• Implement the 25 x ‘25 campaign to transform LA’s streets into more accessible, green, healthy, and vibrant public spaces.
• Install shelter and lighting at every bus stop.
• Light every street in our urban neighborhoods.
• Provide seating and trash cans along walkable streets.
• Plant and maintain shade trees on every major boulevard.
• Expand access to public restrooms in public gathering places, like Hollywood Boulevard.
• Support street vendors to enliven sidewalks and public spaces.
• Implement recommendations from the Changing Lanes gender equity study to improve accessibility of public spaces for all residents.
• Coordinate the delivery of Public Works and Transportation projects to build complete streets that are safe, beautiful, and sustainable.

4. Make transportation green

Our transportation is an essential part of our economy—it gets people to work and goods to market—but that comes at a tremendous environmental cost. Transportation is the leading source of greenhouse gas emissions in California, directly accounting for 40 percent of all emissions and rising to more than half once oil refining is included. It also produces a significant share of smog-forming emissions and asthma-causing particulate pollution. We simply cannot meet our region’s climate change goals without transforming the way we get around.

We need a rapid transition to zero emission transportation. Electric cars are a big piece of the solution, but every climate model shows that it’s not enough. We also need a major shift toward shared and active modes of transportation and zero emission goods movement. This crisis is urgent and requires an urgent response. Already, climate change is causing devastating wildfires and exacerbating drought conditions throughout the western United States, including California. Without immediate emissions reductions, we are at risk of passing the tipping point where irreversible climate change will make our neighborhoods hotter, smoggier, and more prone to natural disasters.

To ward off the worst effects of climate change and adapt to a warmer climate, we must:

• Make green transportation choices safe, comfortable, and convenient and prioritize them on city streets.
• Reduce the cost of greener transportation choices, including free transit and low-cost shared mobility.
• Expand BlueLA electric car share into more neighborhoods, including more stations in Hollywood.
• Increase the number of e-bikes in Metro’s bike share fleet.
• Install a network of easily accessible public EV chargers in every neighborhood in CD 13.
• Fully electrify LADOT’s DASH buses and other City vehicles.
• Oppose freeway widening projects that add traffic to our neighborhood streets and reinvest those funds into local mobility improvements.
• Coordinate transportation and land use in community plan updates to encourage new residents to adopt more sustainable transportation habits.