Election Day is swiftly approaching on June 2 with Los Angeles Mayoral candidates running. Reverend Rae Huang is a community organizer, ordained Presbyterian minister and a leader who is putting her bid in and spoke exclusively to OurWeekly about what she would do as Mayor.
Huang believes in Los Angeles being a city of co-governance with its people and a community-driven infrastructure rooted in resident participation. For more information about her campaign and policies visit www.raeforla.com.
Q1. You have a two‑decade career in housing justice and organizing, including your role with Housing Now and your own experience living among renters. As mayor, how will you leverage this deep community organizing background and lived experience to implement bold housing policies—like expanding social housing and strengthening tenant protections? And would you say your approach is fundamentally about prioritizing people over profit and fostering long‑term affordability?
Rae Huang:
We’re already using this campaign itself to model the kind of governance I want to bring to City Hall. Our campaign is volunteer‑led and volunteer‑run. We aren’t just asking people to knock doors—we’re inviting them to help build the campaign, shape the policies, and define the platform.
We hold roundtables and listening sessions where volunteers and community members help determine what our platform should be. That’s why one of our core proposals is participatory budgeting, where taxpayers actually have a say in where their money goes. The same way we’re inviting people to co‑create this campaign, I want Angelenos to co‑govern the city.
Underneath all of that is a clear set of values. Yes, I absolutely prioritize people over profit. We say, “Homes are for people, not for profit,” and we mean that. Housing is a basic human right—just like clean water, clean air, the ability to move around the city affordably.
For me, public safety is the number one priority, and real safety begins when people’s basic needs are met. When people have housing, food, mental health support, and stability, we prevent crises before they start. Crime often emerges from survival mode. If we commit as a city to meeting people’s basic needs, we are investing in true public safety.
Right now, too many decisions in Los Angeles are being made to protect corporate wealth and the profiteering off our bodies and our lives. My approach is the opposite: build a city that clearly belongs to its people, not just to the powerful and wealthy who keep buying up our land and controlling where we sleep, work, and eat.
Q2. Drawing from your work with Clergy for Black Lives and the People’s Budget LA, how do you envision reallocating city resources to build an “unarmed model of crisis response” and a new model of public safety—especially in communities that have been both over‑policed and under‑resourced?
Rae Huang:
The reason we’ve even gotten to a place where we’re opening the door to unarmed crisis programs—and where we’ve seen some success—is because Black Lives Matter and a lot of other organizations have pushed us there. They’ve exposed how the over‑policing and criminalization of our communities hasn’t just meant assaults and harassment; it has led to real deaths in our communities.
So we have to seriously ask: is the police actually doing its job to ‘serve and protect’ us? That’s the motto, but the lived reality—especially for Black Angelenos, including many of your readers in South Central and South LA—has been the opposite. Even among Asian community members, I hear this. Just yesterday (Sunday), at a town hall I held, Asian community members said, ‘I don’t feel safe when I see the police. I’m told that I’m supposed to feel this way, that they’re here to protect me, but my lived reality is not that.’
So the question becomes: if the police are not keeping us safe, what do we actually need instead? What kind of programs, departments, and models can the city build that truly move us toward real public safety and actually protect and serve us?
Over and over again, when people talk about when they do feel safe, what they describe is community. They say, ‘I feel safe when my neighbors show up. I feel safe when we organize rapid response efforts to show up when ICE is at our doors and in our neighborhoods. I feel safe when my neighbor knows that I’m sick and helps me get what I need. I feel safe when, during the fires, a neighbor calls and offers me a ride because I don’t have a car, or because I have different abilities and can’t get into a car on my own.’
That is the model of safety we have actually experienced here in Los Angeles—not something led by City Hall, but something led neighbor to neighbor. That’s why I’m running for office: because we have those experiences, we know this deep down in our bones.
The real question for the city is: how do we center that community care—those organizations, that neighbor‑to‑neighbor care taking mutual aid efforts – and center them in the city to create a new way of thinking about public safety for the city of Los Angeles.
Q3. The economy is a major concern right now. You’ve helped launch efforts like the Healthy LA Coalition and have a record of fighting for those without power. As mayor, how would you foster an inclusive economy that supports small businesses, workers’ rights, and the night economy, and ensures that major events actually benefit residents?
Rae Huang:
The real question is: in practice, ‘who are we fighting for, and who do we believe Los Angeles is for? When we pass laws or fund departments, who are they actually serving?’
I’ve been standing with workers for years now. Again and again, even after we fight tooth and nail to increase wages, City Hall still ends up siding with corporations. A clear example is the delay of the living wage increase to $30 an hour. And let’s be honest—that’s not even enough. We need to know the real numbers: you need about $55 an hour to afford a typical two‑bedroom apartment in Los Angeles. So, $30 is already far behind, we call it the Olympic Wage and now it’s being delayed for two years because of threats from corporations. We need moral courage and leadership at this moment.
That’s one side of it—workers’ wages and protections. I’ve marched for years, joined protests, stood up and spoken out, and sat in rooms with CEOs to negotiate so that strikes result in real changes and real contracts that meet workers’ needs.
But another side that gets almost no attention is small businesses. Our small businesses have been completely left out of the conversation. I honestly can’t remember the last time most of the mayoral candidates even mentioned them at all.
I just stood with Red Books who are closing their doors in Northeast LA. My own gym is closing by the end of this month. It’s the second gym to close on me in my neighborhood in the last three years. My favorite café before the pandemic—where I knew the owner, where we checked in on each other’s families—that’s gone too.
These are more than just businesses. These are our third spaces—places where community happens. They’re often the first ones to provide care. I spoke to a taco restaurant owner whose family has been there for two generations. He told me his mother, who has since passed away, used to regularly pay neighbors’ rent when they were facing eviction. That’s the kind of quiet, everyday support our small businesses provide. They are the epicenter of what makes L.A.
Meanwhile, we are as a city cutting the budget of the Economic and Workforce Development Department, the very department that’s supposed to support small businesses. We delay permits for six, eight months and charge extremely high fees. That makes it nearly impossible for small businesses to survive, while big corporations—the Starbucks of the world—can just come in with their resources and take over our commercial industries.
This is exactly the moment when we should be standing with our small businesses. That means things like a vacancy tax to bring in revenue and push back against speculation that’s hollowing out our neighborhoods. It means recognizing that so many Black‑owned businesses, in particular, have been on the brink since the pandemic and are still under threat now.
That’s also why I’m pushing for a public bank—it’s a key part of my platform. We’ve been advocating for this for years. We’re waiting on City Hall to finally move forward on the study we need. There’s also a state bill we’re supporting to build the infrastructure for a public bank in the state [California].
This is a model that we need to be utilizing and restructuring around the people who actually live and work here. We have to ask, every step of the way: is this economy for the people of Los Angeles, or for large corporations that aren’t even from California or from Los Angeles?
Q4. Who are the movement leaders, past or present, whose approaches to governance and community building most inspire you? How would you apply those inspirations to navigating City Hall and building consensus for your vision as mayor?
Rae Huang:
The two that immediately come to mind are Katie Wilson, mayor of Seattle, who comes out of the organizing work of Seattle, and Alexandria Ocasio‑Cortez in Congress.
Katie is someone who worked really deeply on the ground on transit and on social housing. After many years of fighting to try and get social housing off the ground—and not getting there—having her now in that seat allows the city, and all the organizing that’s been happening by the community, to finally make it real.
They can actually provide affordable housing in a place where gentrification and the tech industry have been driving up rents and making it really hard for everyday people—I don’t know what they call themselves, Seattleites—to stay.
Another leader would be Alexandria Ocasio‑Cortez, of course, who is famously known now in Congress. She similarly comes from a background in community organizing. We’ve worked with her office to introduce the Homes Act, which would increase and support social housing and public housing across the country. She’s been really committed—even while in Congress—to working with community organizations on the ground, to prioritize working Angelenos and working people by taxing the rich and putting that revenue into real solutions.
And she does that by actually working with community groups to figure out: what are the solutions you all are already creating? What are the new approaches that regular, everyday working Americans are building to address this crisis of affordability?
Those are the models I look to—leaders who are values‑oriented and who practice co‑governance, who see people as partners in the work of governing. That’s what I want for Los Angeles: an equity‑focused, justice‑minded city that is being led by the people who are actually the backbone of our city.”
Q5. You’ve described yourself as “the most progressive and morally courageous candidate,” and some have compared you to figures like Zohran Mamdani. Beyond specific policies, how do you define progressive leadership for Los Angeles today, and what core principles distinguish you from other candidates?
Rae Huang:
I think what distinguishes me is that I have really shown that I’m someone who is values-oriented and fighting for working Angelenos here in this city. That’s true in my track record and in what I’ve been saying, and in my actual practice.
I am dedicated to continuing to fight and to be morally courageous in this moment, which I think is exactly what we need. If you look at something like Measure ULA, you can see how our elected officials have catered to developers and corporate interests to give them what they want. They say they feel bullied by corporations, and then they don’t do the right thing.
It’s the same thing with the Olympic wage. They’re being threatened again by corporations saying, ‘Oh, we’re going to force the city to go into debt, so you have to give us what we want.’ And then our leaders cater to that and say, ‘Okay, I guess we’ll negotiate, we’ll just give them what they want.’
But we all know—you give a billionaire an inch, they’ll take a mile. So what we need to do right now is trust Angelenos to stand and to fight. And if your leader will not fight, and your leader caves, Los Angeles will cave.
That’s the thing: in this moment, we need real moral courage from our leaders, to say, ‘We will fight for you, and we need you to stand with us to fight.’ That’s how we win. If you have a leader that easily caves, what do you expect of Los Angeles?
Q6. Your campaign says “too many Angelenos feel priced out and left behind.” From your perspective as a community organizer and renter, what is the single most critical systemic failure driving that feeling, and what is the most impactful first step you’d take as mayor to begin reversing it?
Rae Huang:
I think the biggest failure is that our city leaders continue to prioritize profit over people. Full stop. We keep allowing speculators to buy up whatever they want, giving them a free pass, and we’re not putting in place the laws and regulations we need to make sure Angelenos can be safe, feel stably housed, and feel like this city is fighting for them.
One example is the Airbnb TOT proposal right now—to take funding from Airbnb in advance of the Olympics to pay for more sweeps in the city through CARE+. Mayor Bass’s budget proposal is basically using that money to expand sweeps of our unhoused neighbors. That just shows we are giving up our homes to profiteers who are coming in and raping and pillaging our city.
Los Angeles deserves leadership that fights for its people, and that is not happening under this current mayor’s watch. She is already showing us what she prioritizes, which is the Olympics and the corporations that will benefit from the Olympics over the people of Los Angeles, over and over again. And if she’s already exposing and showing those priorities now, I don’t understand how we’re going to ensure that Los Angeles remains for its people.
One of the first things I’ll do in office is ask the question of whether we should even be having the Olympics here in Los Angeles right now. We already know we’re going to incur a ton of debt. It’s been well over six months since we were promised a full, line‑item budget so taxpayers could see we’re not going to be paying out billions of dollars after the Olympics are here. We’re already seeing our leaders sell out our homes by giving Airbnb an open opportunity to buy up more housing while we’re unable to keep our residents housed. We’ve lost the Olympic wage.
We’re seeing more surveillance in our communities. We’re seeing more threats from federal agents—ICE is still picking up our residents week by week—and that’s going to increase. The militarization of our communities is going to increase over the next couple of years leading up to the Olympics. We need to be asking, right now: What does it mean to truly be a Los Angeles for its working people?
Editor’s Note: All quotes have been edited and/or cut down for brevity with accuracy and meaning of statements maintained. For any errors or corrections please contact kstarks@ourweekly.com.