I will fight for an economically and environmentally

sustainable future for Los Angeles.

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I am running to address our homelessness and housing crises, battle traffic and make our streets safe,  and fight for trees and park space in every neighborhood.

 

Housing, transit, and trees will drive our economy forward, creating jobs and new careers, while also taking crucial climate action and supporting social justice for all Angelenos.

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Homelessness

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Homelessness increased 53% in District 4 since last year. This is unacceptable. 

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If a natural disaster displaced 36,000 people, we would mobilize immediately. In fact, we have seen evacuation centers ready in hours in response to our recent fires. I believe we need an equally urgent response to our homelessness crisis today.

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My plan: 

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• Establish safe camping and safe parking sites all over Los Angeles where we can provide bathrooms, mobile showers, mental health and addiction counseling, and connect people to Coordinated Entry Services.

• Enforce our ordinances to help maintain clean and traversable sidewalks. 

• Build supportive housing, which is by right under California State Law, in every community where we currently see tents in our streets.

• Prevent Angelenos from becoming homeless by empowering the Housing and Community Investment Department (HCID) to more robustly protect tenants from bad landlords and spurious Ellis Act evictions. 

• Explore development processes that keep tenants in place, such as: renovating around them, updating the building they are in, and then adding new floors on top, as is practiced in Israel and several other American cities.

• Continue to aggressively increase our housing stock.

• Help those struggling with mental illness and addiction with treatment actions informed by the County’s new pilot program, based on how Trieste, Italy approached their mentally ill homeless population. 

 

I am proud to have the endorsement of Katie Hill former, Congresswoman and executive director of PATH (People Helping the Homeless). 

 

Housing

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Twenty years ago when I moved to Los Angeles, I was able to find a $300 apartment and work as a low-paid assistant at a television network. Today, Los Angeles has the sixth highest rents in the country, with the median one bedroom costing $2300 a month.  

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Housing is the most important issue facing Los Angeles right now. We are more than 500,000 units short of what we need countywide, and every income bracket is facing a housing shortage. Our low inventory has spiked the cost of housing across our city.

 

My Plan:

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• Create more covenanted, deeded affordable housing so more remains on the market.

• Push affordable housing builders to the front of the line. Streamline the permitting process so affordable units can be rapidly and more cost-effectively built. 

• Return to building small wood-frame duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes, which are the most affordable units that can be most quickly delivered to market.

• Simplify our general plans and building rules, so that projects don’t need to constantly be asking for variances -- which in turn foster expensive, time-sucking lawsuits. 

• Eliminate parking minimums on tran, so that housing units can be built for far less money.

• Fight the behested payment system, which essentially holds developers hostage to the expensive whims of elected officials -- it’s legal racketeering, the costs of which are delivered back to the consumer. 

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Traffic, Safe Streets, Transit & Mobility

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When I moved to town, everything was 20 minutes away from everything else. The average Angeleno now spends 3 hours a day in traffic. 

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Our city has spent decades prioritizing car travel by widening our roads and slashing transit services. Rideshare services have rushed to fill the void of a reliable public transportation system. Hundreds of Angelenos are killed in our streets by cars each year because of unsafe street crossings, crumbling sidewalks, and unprotected bike lanes. Meanwhile, our air quality continues to worsen, and the carbon we dump into the atmosphere while idling in traffic hastens climate change.

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The solution to these problems lies in offering Angelenos more choice in how they travel.

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My plan:

 

• Put a DASH route in every community in our district. 

• Provide real-time arrival displays and shade at every bus stop. 

• Prioritize convenient and accessible bus service across our city, by supporting protected bus lanes on streets that were built to accommodate streetcars.

• Shorten headways so that our bus lines are convenient and reliable at all times of day, and on weekends. 

• Encourage more people to take our Metro rail lines, like I do, by advocating that Metro commit more resources to running more convenient and reliable service on existing lines. 

• Improve rail station safety and support vibrant business corridors around them. 

• Create a network of protected, segregated bike lanes. Protected bike lanes protect cyclists and scooter riders, and they keep drivers from the nightmare of injuring or killing someone riding a bike (or scooter). As a mom, I would be thrilled if I felt my kids were safe on their bikes -- bye-bye carpool! 

• As we work to fix our sidewalks, rebuild them to allow for real tree cover, making walking a more appealing option. 

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I am proud to have the endorsement of Deborah Murphy, founder of Los Angeles Walks, CalBike, and The California Bicycle Coalition. Read more about my plan for bike lanes and other mobility upgrades here.

 

Investing in transit and mobility infrastructure will make our streets safer, our commutes shorter, clean our air, and slow climate change. 

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Trees and Parks

 

We need to grow our urban forest to cool our city and clean our air. I will fight to ensure our city follows through on its plans to aggressively reforest Los Angeles. Every family in CD4 -- and across our city -- should be able to access somewhere green within a short walk.

 

My plan:

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• Reimagine our sidewalks by widening them to accommodate tree cover, so that Angelenos feel comfortable walking around our city. 

• Rebuild sidewalks to “meander” around tree roots, when possible, rather than ripping mature trees from the ground. 

• Partner with LAUSD to reforest their campuses. Tree cover will benefit our students, and the surrounding communities will benefit from the double duty trees do -- cleaning our air. 

• Identify parcels of city property and work with private owners to deed pocket parks to our communities wherever possible. 

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Climate Change

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I believe that the most effective action we can take to address climate catastrophe are implicit in my platform of Housing, Transit, and Trees. 

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Denser housing, near transit, will reduce vehicle-miles-traveled, and get more cars off the road, so we dump less carbon into the air.

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Trees will help draw down the carbon that’s already there.

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I would also like to pursue creative solutions such as solar panels on multi-family, mixed-use, and corporate buildings, and gray water recapture, as well as other tools to fight climate change.

 

Supporting Small Businesses

 

Angelenos voted to increase county sales tax to help pay for new transit with Measure M and help solve homelessness with Measure H and HHH. Encouraging people to shop locally will help increase the revenue we can direct to improve transportation and solve our housing crisis. Our city’s budget also relies on a thriving sales tax base to pay for the basic functions of our local government. That’s why we need to support small business in this city. 

 

Right now, small businesses are finding it harder to survive. Throughout this campaign, I have spoken with numerous small businesses who can’t get answers from the city when it comes to ADA compliance, licensing, or permitting. We see thriving business corridors in surrounding cities such as West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Culver City, Burbank, and Glendale. As people from our communities travel to these surrounding communities, the City of Los Angeles is bearing the brunt of our infrastructure without recouping the costs from the sales tax.

 

My Plan:

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• Improve the permitting process for small businesses so they can open faster.

• Create a checklist of compliance needs so business owners can proactively meet them rather than face expensive lawsuits after opening.

• Reboot our cannabis licensing process as soon as possible, and prioritize stamping out the black market.

• Incentivize women, diverse, and/or millennial small business owners to open in the City of Los Angeles.

• Increase opportunities for filming in Los Angeles and work with the entertainment industry to keep those jobs here. 

• Create vibrant neighborhoods around transit, so that small business reaps the benefit of walkable, accessible communities.