Cancel COVID-19 Rent Debt: Thousands of Angelenos are now facing dire eviction threats since local officials ended the eviction moratorium that protected tenants who owed back-due rent from the pandemic. While our communities have mostly returned to work, our wages have remained stagnant and unlivable. Families working full time jobs, often several at a time, still cannot pay back their rent debt because they can barely afford keeping up with their current rent. We must cancel back-due rent debt and ban violent evictions that only exacerbate our homelessness crisis.

End Homelessness: There are tens of thousands of empty housing units across the city of Los Angeles. The working class built these housing units, but it's the banks, developers, and landlords who own them and get to decide who occupies them. Instead of giving a house or apartment to everyone who needs one, capitalist society allows housing units to be sold or rented as a source of profit. Meanwhile the millions of human beings who cannot afford housing are left to face indignity, hardship, and insecurity. We propose using eminent domain to take ownership of empty housing units to permanently house the homeless and other residents displaced by rising rents.

Stop the Sweeps (Repeal 41.18): LAMC 41.18 is an inhumane city ordinance that criminalizes homelessness and gives authority for council districts to schedule sweeps of encampments with LAPD and Sanitation. We would fight to repeal 41.18 and create community neighborhood access centers in high-need areas staffed by caseworkers, mental health specialists, job development, document preparers, from city agencies along with community organizers to get unhoused people into a space as an effective ‘one-stop shop’ on the path to housing.

Ban on Luxury Developments: Gentrification drives up rents as developers build luxury apartments, and the availability of decent and affordable apartments declines. We propose a complete ban on luxury developments to stop gentrification and prevent developers from pillaging our communities for profit.

Stronger Restrictions and Enforcement on Landlords & Developers: Due to state laws like the Ellis Act, landlords and developers are allowed to flip their units out of rent control if they meet certain legal criteria. However, the state rarely enforces this criteria, empowering landlords to illegally demolish buildings and evict tenants. We propose a major overhaul of the Housing Department and the Department of Building and Safety so that these institutions regularly communicate with one another and apply heavy regulatory scrutiny, inspection, and law enforcement upon landlords and developers. We also propose increasing penalties of illegal landlord activity up to and including the complete seizure of their property by the city.

Collective Bargaining Rights for Tenant Associations: In many apartment complexes across the city tenants are expressing their collective power by forming tenant associations and pressuring their landlords to address their concerns. Just as how unionized workers have the right to negotiate wages with their employer, tenants belonging to a tenant association should have the legal right to negotiate rents and living conditions with their landlords. We propose codifying tenant associations as the sole bargaining unit for their respective housing complex, enshrining the right to collective bargaining over rents and living conditions. This process of codification must also include harsh penalties on landlords who refuse to recognize, negotiate, meet, or harass tenant associations.

Stronger Rent Control Laws and Tenant Protections: Seven out of ten Los Angeles tenants live in rent controlled housing units. We propose overhauling the city’s Rent Stabilization Ordinance (RSO) to vastly reduce rental rates increases, streamline the process for repairs, and limit the excuses for evictions.

The names of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tyre Nichols, Trayvon Martin, and countless others have come to represent more than individual acts of injustice. They signify the wider unjust system and deeply rooted phenomenon of police terror. The mass anti-racist movement of the last decade has revived a wide-spread social discussion about building alternatives to policing. The existing police, courts, and prisons only retain a thin layer of legitimacy because they are also the only institutions tasked with responding to the problems that people naturally do care about, such as violent crimes. But the truth is that the police do not prevent or reduce such violent crimes, and often aggravate existing problems when they intervene. Crimes of poverty can only be eradicated under socialism - where access to food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, and other social needs are guaranteed.

Fund People's Needs, Not the Police: The Los Angeles Police Department currently receives $3.2 billion of the total city budget - that’s an entire quarter of our city resources funding a police force with a long legacy of unaccountability, corruption, and abuses of power. Imagine how these billions of dollars could drastically transform our communities suffering from sprawling food deserts, inaccessible medical care, and crumbling educational institutions. Workers create all the profit that Los Angeles enjoys, so workers must determine how to use our resources to best serve community goals of crime reduction and public safety. The only way to accomplish these goals is to fundamentally reimagine our system of policing and in its abolition create an alternative that truly serves and defends working class interests instead of private property.

No New Jails: Los Angeles is home to the world’s largest jail system, the Twin Towers Correctional Facility, notorious for human rights violations due to poor conditions, overcrowding, and utter failures to provide necessary healthcare and mental health services. We cannot continue pouring money into building new prisons and carceral institutions that lack any sufficient oversight. Los Angeles jails, like those across the country, are not fit places to confine human beings. We must halt all development of new jails until ongoing issues at all of the city’s institutions are addressed, while simultaneously envisioning community alternatives to incarceration.

Violence Interruption Programs: Instead of sending out heavily armed officers who specialize in harassment and brutality to resolve conflicts, teams of trained community leaders and formerly incarcerated people will be deployed to promote public safety. Violence interruption programs require sustainable community outreach and engagement by the neighborhood’s own residents who know best how to handle ongoing issues. These programs would be a significant priority for reallocated funding taken from the bloated police department budget. Police officers do not belong in centers of public activities such as transit stations or school campuses, and must further be removed from traffic enforcement duties; many cities are already taking the lead on such initiatives and we must work to strengthen local victories while pushing forward. Los Angeles will be a safer place to live, especially for black and brown communities, when police are banned from traffic enforcement and civilians take charge of ordinary traffic stops and speeding infractions.

End the War on Drugs: Our system treats poor and working people as disposable. Drug addiction is treated as a crime by individuals instead of a systemic failure imposed against vulnerable communities. Drug rehabilitation programs are more often than not severely underfunded, under-resourced, and thus essentially set up to fail because they are not profitable for the system. This is an unfortunate remnant from the nationwide War on Drugs that militarized local law enforcement agencies to brutalize victims of drug addiction instead of targeting the actual criminals - corporate profiteers and Big Pharma unleashing massive drug epidemics across the country. Thousands of unhoused people in Los Angeles died during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic with drug overdoses serving as the leading cause of death. Fentanyl fills streets across the nation as a deadly drug accounting for hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, all at the hands of government leaders incapable and unwilling to effectively respond to such crises.

Justice for the Families: We must use all measures available to us under our current system to hold officers accountable for their actions and jail killer cops so that they are restrained from being present in the communities they terrorize. So many individuals across Los Angeles have been impacted by police brutality in one way or another, and many working class Angelenos are directly connected to family members or loved ones that lost their lives at the hands of violent escalation by law enforcement. We honor all those who have had to suffer the loss of someone close to them while failing to be given any justice by those responsible.

These projects will not be achieved overnight. Some of them cannot be achieved under our current political system where, at the end of the day, profit is all that matters. Our campaign sets forth this vision because we know our communities and we know that they want to believe that a better world is possible, that we don’t have to choose between false binaries, and that there is real power behind building a people’s movement to challenge the status quo. If you also believe this is possible, then we urge you to join our campaign and fight for that better world that we all deserve.

A livable minimum wage for Angelenos: The current minimum wage in the city of Los Angeles is far too low for anyone to afford all their basic necessities of shelter, food, transportation, medical expenses, educational expenses, and personal costs. This past summer, I supported thousands of workers on the picket lines striking to demand higher wages, better employment benefits, and increased workplace safety. From SEIU 99 education workers, Unite Here hospitality workers, and Teamsters, to the Hollywood solidarity strikes led by the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA, Los Angeles was fired up in a hot labor summer. All across the country, workplace struggles and organized resistance to exploitation drew in massive amounts of workers organized across different sectors of industry. We must demand a higher minimum wage so Angelenos can actually afford to remain working in our city and not have to live in constant fear of forced displacement as the cost of living skyrockets while wages remain stagnant.

Free universal childcare and domestic care: The cost of care continues to become more expensive as the responsibility continues to fall on the burden of working families. According to recent studies, costs of care rival skyrocketing rent in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco where families are spending upwards of $2,450 per month on childcare. Care workers and family relatives that perform this work for their loved ones are severely underpaid for their essential labor. We must ensure an expanded local budget allocated towards providing free subsidized and accessible care for working families as well as significantly increased wages, benefits, and labor protections for care workers.

Strengthen strike protections and the right to form unions: Every worker must enjoy the right to strike and picket without facing illegal retaliation from their employers. We support the Picket Line Protection Bill (AB504) which would protect the rights of all California public sector employees to respect a picket line in solidarity.

Stronger enforcement against employers engaging in unfair and illegal labor practices: Employers must be held accountable for anti-worker actions that detrimentally harm the labor movement at large, including but not limited to union busting, wage theft, discrimination, retaliation, wrongful terminations, etc. We propose stronger civil and criminal enforcement mechanisms for employers engaging in bad faith behavior against their workers.

Informal labor force protections: Not all workplaces look the same. Many workers operate outside of formal employment structures and, as a result, often lack similar protections. We must ensure that all workers are able to access the same benefits and conditions free from employer intimidation and exploitation. We affirm our Sanctuary City status and our commitment to protecting undocumented Angelenos from harassment and empowering their contributions in every aspect of our society. We wish to eliminate immigration checkpoints and raids at workplaces, and we additionally support full enfranchisement and equal benefits for formerly incarcerated workers.

To deal with the disastrous effects of the climate crisis, society must urgently transform the way we produce energy, grow food and move around the world. The main obstacle standing in our way is private profit, and the system that values quarterly revenue over the survival of human civilization. We can only take action at the scale and speed necessary to save the planet if the unplanned, capitalist economic system is replaced by socialist economic planning.

- Claudia and Karina 2024

We know that we cannot combat the climate crisis on our own. The scale of the threat of environmental destruction that we are faced with is far beyond mere incremental reforms. In order to effectuate tangible change, the foundation of our society must be radically transformed to favor human life and vitality over endless profit margins.

Here in Los Angeles, this requires a radical shift in the centralized planning of our infrastructure developments and maintenance. We must pause all freeway expansions as we fight for a prioritization of free and accessible public transit. Angelenos must drop the collective delusion that our transportation issues will resolve on their own - it will take concerted efforts and community-centered mobilization to develop transit routes with working class lives in mind. We must coordinate a widespread transition to renewable energy sources and eliminate our reliance on fossil fuels.

In order to protect the air we breathe and the water we drink every day, we must enhance monitoring and enforcement of agencies city-wide and create more protected public green spaces for recreation and community use. We must clean brownfields that cause potential risks from dangerous abandoned industrial waste and eliminate idle and active oil drilling in our neighborhoods.

Families in Boyle Heights and across the district continue to face devastating effects of soil, air, and water contamination from exposure to lead and other pollutants by Exide and other industrial plants in the area. We must shut down all industrial facilities that are a proven danger to public health after multiple instances of erroneous reporting and equipment failures, including Aliso Canyon’s SoCal Gas in Porter Ranch and Quemetco/Ecobat Battery Recycling in the City of Industry. Low-income communities face a disproportionate impact of environmental racism, while the harmful consequences of industrial polluters leave an often permanent mark on the well-being of workers and families. We can no longer accept this imbalance in one of the richest cities in the country - no worker should be forced to live nor work in uninhabitable conditions.

The only answer to ensuring a genuine environmental justice for all people is socialism.

Fight for free and mass localized public transit: Transportation is the lifeline of our lives, dictating how we move between our homes to work and back, how we pick up our children from school, how we shop for groceries, and all the time we sacrifice getting to and from places. Our city’s transportation system is internationally renowned for favoring long stretches of highways instead of plentiful and streamlined subway lines, which has directly resulted in some of the worst traffic congestion and air pollution in the country. Rush hour doesn’t ever seem to stop for a working class Angeleno’s day-to-day transportation. A socialist transportation policy would prioritize the public interest above private profit, ensuring free and mass public transit as a fundamental social necessity for a city with millions of people needing to get around. We must invest infrastructure funds away from new highway constructions and into a crumbling, extremely insufficient public transit system in the 2nd most populous city in the country. We will work to assess localized transit needs for communities to identify where improvements must be made and prioritize easily accessible routes between workplaces, housing, schools, healthcare centers, and food sources.

End fare evasion and the war against the poor: Black Angelenos make up under a quarter of Los Angeles Metro ridership yet they make up over half of fare evasion arrests. Fare evasion arrests disproportionately impact poor black and brown communities who rely on public transit as a means of survival. It is cruel and unjust to impose punitive fines on transit riders and allocate increased funding to police patrols at bus stops and Metro stations. The City instead needs to focus its resources and energy on improving current transit lines, integrating working class community needs into developing new lines, protecting existing neighborhoods from displacement by new construction, and restructuring the entire framework of Los Angeles transportation policy priorities.

Safe streets for working families: Poor and working class communities deserve the same level of attention to increasing pedestrian mobility and safety that wealthier neighborhoods across Los Angeles have seen in recent years. We deserve healthy streets that incorporate alternatives to personal vehicle transit such as bus and bike lanes that will additionally contribute to cleaner air and decreased traffic. Our children deserve to feel safe playing in residential neighborhoods, parks, and other recreational areas. This can only be done if the voices and authority of working class residents of the district are prioritized in governmental discussions about transportation policy and implementation.