This single mom is squeezed by LA’s cost of living. Now she’s running for mayor.

This story was reported in partnership with LA Public Press, an independent nonprofit newsroom advocating for a better Los Angeles through journalism that interrogates systems of power.

The video introducing Rae Huang’s candidacy for mayor of Los Angeles evokes arthouse cinema in dry tungsten hues. It opens with jump cuts between frustrated Angelenos honking their cars, caught in the gridlock of rush hour traffic. Huang, a bespectacled Asian-American woman, steps out of her car, onto the sidewalk and turns to the camera. “LA is stuck,” the 43-year-old declares. “I’m running to make Los Angeles affordable and healthy.” 

The Hollywood-esque trailer is how Huang, a single mother of two and affordable housing advocate, announced her campaign online November 15. If elected, she would be the city’s first Asian-American woman mayor — a progressive challenging Karen Bass, Los Angeles’ first woman mayor, from the left.

Huang is an ordained minister with Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), one of the few Protestant denominations that ordains women and LGBTQ+ clergy and includes performing marriage for same-sex couples. Religious faith is a deep part of Huang’s pursuit of social justice and her campaign beliefs. 

“I became a minister to advocate for the vulnerable and to fight for social change,” Huang said, citing Martin Luther King Jr. as one of her role models. “We need to fight poverty, not the poor,” she said. 

Huang, who grew up on the East Coast, is the daughter of Taiwanese American immigrants. Asian Americans make up 11.7 percent of LA’s population, the third largest racial group after Latino and White residents.

Having never held elected office, Huang would chart a less conventional path to the mayor’s office. Bass served in the House and California Assembly before she was elected mayor, and her predecessor, Eric Garcetti, was a former member of the Los Angeles City Council.  

What are Huang’s policies?

Many of Huang’s policies are based on her experience as a single mom in LA. 

“When I became a single mother, I couldn’t afford my mortgage. I was extremely fortunate to have family support that allowed me to stay housed while I got back on my feet,” Huang said. 

She purchased her Sawtelle apartment a decade ago, but still felt squeezed by living costs. She credits her “village” of neighbors with helping her juggle work and child-rearing as a single parent. 

Her platform calls for free public transit, more government-owned affordable housing, the creation of the city’s first nonprofit public bank and community intervention models over policing. She did not specify whether she would cut funding for the LAPD overseeing the city’s budget as mayor.

Sha also wants to make child care more accessible. That would include, “policies that lead to healthier families, including paid family leave, reproductive rights, and programs to improve maternal and infant health outcomes.”

“I could talk your ear off for hours about policy,” she said, grinning, in an interview with LA Public Press. “I’m a little bit nerdy about it.”

If the core tenets of Huang’s campaign promises sound familiar, it’s because they echo Zohran Mamdani’s platform. Mamdani, a Democratic socialist state assemblyman, defeated former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to become New York City’s first Muslim mayor in November.

Unlike Mamdani, however, Huang is not endorsed by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. The mayor position here is also much weaker than the city of New York’s, and it’s unclear whether Huang could practically execute on the policies she’s championing. 

“The main reason I’m running is because LA is completely unaffordable and unattainable for myself and my kids,” Huang said. She promised that her campaign won’t take corporate donations and that she’s building a grassroots coalition led by Angelenos. 

For the past six years, Huang has worked as the deputy director of Housing Now California, a coalition of affordable housing activists, where she helped pass state legislation expanding tenant protections. She was a leading organizer behind the passing of Senate Bill 567, which bars landlords from evicting tenants without just cause, and Senate Bill 555, which directed the state housing department to study social housing solutions.

During the pandemic, Huang was also part of the Healthy LA coalition that pushed through rent relief for tenants.

Huang, who sits on the board of the Skid Row nonprofit Creating Justice LA, said she’s also looking to stop the criminalization of homelessness in LA. 

“We need to be able to come up with a strategy that is not just sweeping our unhoused residents from street to street,” Huang said. “We need to create a long-term solution, and that is creating permanent supportive housing for our communities, which provides the mental health support that they need.”

Huang criticized Bass’s Inside Safe program, an initiative to help people living on the street to move into temporary and motel housing, saying unhoused residents were slipping through the cracks and losing touch with their social workers. “We do need to implement a better system that tracks where folks are going,” she said. 

Inside Safe has faced scrutiny over low permanent housing placement rates and reports of residents being transferred between motels without adequate case management.

Doug Herman, a spokesperson for the Bass campaign, rejected those critiques. 

“For the first time, homelessness has declined for two consecutive years,” he said. Herman called Inside Safe a “solution to an emergency problem.”

Would Huang’s policies solve LA’s affordability crisis?

Mamdani, who ran on the promise of free and faster buses, is now hitting some road blocks to eliminating fares for the Metro Transit Agency as it is Gov. Kathy Hochul who nominates and appoints MTA leadership. Likewise, Huang would not be able to control fares for Metro, a countywide agency. As mayor, Huang would appoint three members and chair the 13-person LA County Metropolitan Transportation Agency, having significant sway. The mayor also appoints the general manager that directs the city’s transportation department, which includes DASH and the commuter express. The LA City Council has the final say on the fare structure of the LA Department of Transportation based on recommendations from the agency.

Last year through the GoPass Program, Bass made ridership free for over 1.15 million eligible K-12 and college students in LA County that transportation advocates have praised as reducing absenteeism and addressing poverty. 

As mayor, Huang could streamline housing approvals and appoint affordable housing commissioners, but city council controls budgets and most affordable housing funding comes from the federal government.

Huang’s statewide advocacy for public housing has not yet resulted in commitments to build new social housing.

The idea of social housing that Huang is championing is not new, said Jessica Bremner, a professor of urban geography at Cal State LA. 

Under social housing, the government operates housing at below-market rates for low- to moderate-income renters. Unlike affordable units in private buildings — which eventually convert to market rates — social housing remains “affordable in perpetuity,” Bremner said. The success of mixed-income public housing in Montgomery County, Maryland has inspired other locales to pursue similar investments.

But it’s not so easy to tackle the issue of homelessness and affordability by aggressively building new social housing, Bremner said. As mayor, Bass has pushed to build temporary housing for her Inside Safe program in the form of tiny homes made of shipping containers. She has also streamlined approvals for more than 13,700 affordable housing units—many privately funded — by issuing executive orders that cut red tape. According to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority cited by Bass, street homelessness declined 17 percent over two years, though encampments remain persistent across the city.

“Long-term, permanent housing solutions, those are multi-year projects,” Bremner said. She said Huang’s promise to invest in government-owned buildings won’t materialize overnight. “It takes a long time to build housing, even if you have the money for it.” 

Huang supports Measure ULA, the so-called mansion tax on high-end property sales worth more than $5.3 million, that could help fund her social housing plans. Bass faced criticism from affordable housing advocates for trying to weaken the measure but ultimately withdrew the legislation.

Herman said Bass is fully committing to protecting Measure ULA’s core mission as a “vital tool for building affordable housing.”

Shane Phillips, an affordable housing researcher at the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, said Huang would face barriers if she were to try to push through her progressive housing policies. 

“Los Angeles, despite its reputation, is not an extremely liberal city. It has long had conservative tendencies, and I think the urban design of it contributes to that,” Phillips said. “If you bought your home decades ago, you’re very insulated from the challenges that younger people and renters are facing today.”

As mayor, Huang would also have to find a way to balance the disparate interests of stakeholders in the private housing market. 

One of Huang’s critics is Daniel Yukelson, the executive director of the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles, a lobbying organization that represents over 10,000 landlords and property owners. His concerns reflect opposition Huang is likely to face from the real estate industry.

Yukelson said certain laws designed to protect renters can put further pressure on the mom-and-pop owners of residential buildings who have to navigate the complex web of regulations with less legal support than larger corporate landlords. 

“Owners today are really struggling to understand how they’re being impacted by these regulations,” Yukelson said. 

As those pressures prompt mom-and-pop landlords to sell, they’re often replaced by corporate owners, he added, which concentrates power and wealth to a smaller number of companies.

Does Huang have what it takes to win and govern?

Michael Kazin, a professor of history at Georgetown University who studies American social movements, said economic concerns are fueling populism in the Democratic and Republican parties. He said Mamdani’s win in New York City has spurred a wave of progressive candidates to run for other offices across the country. 

“This is a perpetual rule in politics, that success breeds imitators, and failure drives them away,” Kazin said. 

So far, part of Huang’s left-wing populist appeal seems to be gaining some traction online. Her glossy campaign video has been viewed more than 109,000 times on Instagram, but her Instagram page has just over 5,000 followers — only a fraction of the 500,000 voters that elected Bass to office in 2022.

A week after announcing her candidacy, Huang said support has been flooding in. “Over 200 volunteers have already signed up to begin supporting my campaign,” Huang said when she spoke to LA Public Press last month. “I’m getting messages from literally all over the world.” 

But Huang faces a long road to victory ahead of the June primaries. 

Bass, an established Democrat with a long tenure in statewide politics and local grassroots organizing, has her fair share of critics from her handling of the LA wildfires and homelessness, but she isn’t embroiled in scandal.

“She’s had a tough year politically, it doesn’t remotely compare to the kind of year that Eric Adams had in New York before Mamdami’s race,” said Raphael Sonenshein, a scholar on Los Angeles politics and executive director of the public policy research institution the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation. “Incumbents usually win re-election for mayor.”

A dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s LA chapter, Huang was unable to secure the 50 signatures needed to put a vote to the general body on whether to endorse her campaign, according to Claire Palmer, the communications director of DSA-LA. Since announcing her candidacy, Huang has yet to receive a major endorsement from any unions or political organizations.

Kazin, a DSA member himself, said an endorsement from the local chapter “is only really important at all if it turns out people [volunteer] for the candidate DSA endorses.” DSA’s work this election has gone to city council races, with members phone banking for Faizah Malik in District 11 and Estuardo Mazariegos in District 9. Palmer said the organization views city council members as the real powerbrokers in Los Angeles, making those races a higher priority than the mayoral contest.

But Palmer said the lack of DSA’s endorsement doesn’t mean Huang is out of the running yet. 

“It’s very exciting to see a leftist candidate challenging a status quo Democrat,” Palmer said. She said Huang’s campaign will elevate the cost-of-living issues in this mayoral race that concern so many people in LA.

“These are really perilous times for incumbents everywhere in the country,” Sonenshein said of the state of the economy and the general unhappiness people have with the government. 

When constituents are unsatisfied by their elected officials, he said it opens up an opportunity for a political upset. Sonenshein tries to not hedge any bets before all the ballots are cast.  “After all these years of studying this, you never know who’s going to emerge, who’s going to fade and why,” Sonenshein said.

Huang’s nonprofit colleagues said they believe she has what it takes to lead and carve a path from nonrecognition forward to city hall. Shanti Singh, the legislative and communications director at Tenants Together, has worked closely with Huang in statewide advocacy efforts on housing affordability and joked that Huang has been her “work wife.”

“Nobody understands the failures, flaws and things that need improvement in government and governance [better] than a tenant advocate,” Singh said. She described Huang as a “real diplomat” able to build momentum and support across the aisle in their lobbying efforts.

John Yi, a Koreatown-based housing activist, said he believes Huang has what it takes to win and push through her policies in the behemoth of LA’s bureaucracy.  Yi, who ran unsuccessfully for state assembly office to represent the 54th district last year, credited Huang for influencing his own housing policies during his campaign. 

“I’m confident that if and when we win, it’s not going to be just Rae, but she’s going to bring in smart people with experience,” Yi said. “This is about her building a movement and bringing people together into city hall.”