They clashed over police funding. One repeatedly accused the other of lying. Rumors about an illegitimate COVID-19 diagnosis drew hisses from the audience.
But the 300 residents who crammed Dolores Mission Church Wednesday weren’t there to listen to Kevin de León and Ysabel Jurado quarrel. For them, it was one of their last chances to hear how the candidates running for L.A. City Council District 14 would address key issues in their neighborhood and why they should vote for them in the high-stakes November election.
Candidates at the forum hosted by Boyle Heights Beat and Proyecto Pastoral were presented with questions based on nearly 500 responses from a community survey led by The Beat, which asked residents in CD 14 to share the biggest concerns in their community. Residents identified affordable housing, crime and safety, and homelessness as the top three issues.
When it came to write-in questions in the survey, nearly half were about government accountability, likely to call attention to the corruption and scandals that have plagued the district for decades.
Here’s how the candidates responded to questions about those topics at this week’s forum.
Read a full recap of the forum and watch a livestream here.
MAKING AFFORDABLE HOUSING WORK
The candidates were urged to lay out their plans to support affordable housing developments that reflect the unique needs of the neighborhood.
A question surrounding the approval of an affordable housing development on Wabash and Evergreen avenues sparked different responses from each of the CD 14 hopefuls. The development does not include parking for residents, something neighbors say will exacerbate the tension in the community over parking availability.
De León admitted to not learning about the development, approved under a Mayoral directive that expedites the permitting processes for affordable housing builds, until demolition began. He pointed to his recent approval of the updated Boyle Heights Community Plan as his response to the growing housing crisis in the Eastside community. The plan mandates affordable housing to be built along the L.A. River and will work in tandem with a lower threshold of income limits for renters.
“It’s the first of its kind in the entire city of L.A. Now, we use a priority for Boyle Heights residents for low-income housing. We use exclusively your annual average salary for Boyle Heights, not the county average,” De León proudly said. “It is going to be a giant step for the good of the tenants, particularly the seniors here in Boyle Heights. Those are concrete facts.”
Housing targeted for acutely and extremely low-income renters would better reflect the mostly working-class community with an average income far less than the county average if actualized.
Jurado’s response to the development on Wabash focused more on the lack of parking availability rather than on the building itself, saying she understands the challenge Boyle Heights residents face when they look for a space to park when they get off work. She then argued the recently approved plan to expand USC’s Health Sciences Campus in Boyle Heights would further limit the availability of parking spaces in the neighborhood, claiming that no new parking would be developed for the influx of students and employees.
However, the Planning and Land Use Management (PLUM) committee concluded in September that although the incoming center will not build additional parking space, the existing parking structure can accommodate the incoming staff without forcing employees to park in the neighboring communities.
Jurado’s experience as a tenants’ rights attorney allowed her to work in spaces where the lack of affordable housing affected residents with evictions and displacement. She retold a story of a senior citizen who was evicted during the height of the pandemic after his wife passed away. Her focus on the intersectionality of those who need housing support before they are displaced is critical to her campaign, she said.
“When I say I’m for renters rights, I mean it,” Jurado said, also sharing her status as a board member of Fideicomiso Comunitario Tierra Libre, a group that works with the Boyle Heights community “to buy back real estate in their neighborhood to keep it affordable.”
The CD 14 hopeful also called the struggle to build affordable housing representative of the district’s needs ineffective, arguing that the district’s money spent on things like campaign mailers could have been better spent on more affordable housing projects.
“How much do you think half a million can do to build housing for our communities and to do it now? We shouldn’t be begging for a better future,” Jurado argued.
ADDRESSING COMMUNITY SAFETY
When it came to crime and safety, the candidates’ positions on were more different than alike.
De León was recently backed by several Los Angeles police groups, including the L.A. Police Protective League (LAPPL) and the L.A. Airport Peace Officers Associations (LAAPOA), and wrote in a recent press release that he has worked to increase foot patrols in communities to combat crime like smash-and-grabs and catalytic converter thefts.
The councilman again hammered on the success and reinvestment of his Heavy Metal Task Force, a district-specific collaboration with the LAPD to investigate and prosecute those found guilty of copper wire theft that has plagued communities like Boyle Heights for months, leaving several streets in the dark.
In Spanish, De León told the audience that his track record showed his commitment to community safety while taking a political swing at his opponent.
“My opponent to date has never ever done a single thing for the good of our people. I support more police for the safety of our community. My opponent wants to abolish the police altogether… I’m not going to put the lives of our people in danger here in the Boyle Heights neighborhood,” De León said.
After the second request to elaborate on whether she supported defunding the police, Jurado finally clarified her position, something many audience members shouted at her from the crowd to do.
“I just want to be clear that I’ve never said that,” Jurado said, arguing that the inflated police budget with limited staff is “overburdened with too many duties that are not within the purview of what they’re assigned to do,” referencing the LAPD’s role as homelessness outreach and mental health workers.
“That shouldn’t be the case. We should be creating good union jobs in the city and the county and working together to make sure that our first responders are folks that are equipped with that so that the police can focus on the most violent crime, which we know in this community, is gang violence,” Jurado said, calling the prevalence of gangs in the district a deep-seated issue.
The candidate expressed investment in parks and youth programs to keep young people from falling into a life of crime associated with gangs. Jurado pointed to her work with LAUSD board member Rocio Rivas to develop a student-to-union job pipeline.
“When you arm a kid with a job… you’re arming them with something that can serve their community and make them safe,” Jurado said.
GRAPPLING WITH HOMELESSNESS
When Boyle Heights Beat asked how the candidates would work to alleviate the homelessness crisis ahead of the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, De León took it as an opportunity to share his progress in building the most interim housing in all of Los Angeles.
The district leader praised the newly opened tiny home village on Mission Road that offers more than 70 beds to people experiencing homelessness, including multiple mariachis who often work at fiestas and quinceñeras throughout the Eastside community.
Jurado argued that the structures don’t satisfy the needs of people on the streets, nodding to L.A. County Supervisor Hilda Solis’ interim housing plan with 200 units that “aren’t just sheds.”
“They have bathrooms [and] they have support services. And that’s what our community needs. It’s tried, tested and true,” Jurado said. “Why haven’t we gotten something better than these tiny homes, when we can give people a place with a bathroom and dignity and not just the next photo op?”
Regarding the removal of more than two dozen RVs around Evergreen Cemetery, De León said his office housed some of the people experiencing homelessness there, claiming that his opponent would do nothing to help those suffering on the streets.
“We have led the entire city of Los Angeles, and we will continue to progress… My opponent will leave the homeless on the streets, and that is the difference between her and I,” De León claimed.
While not discussed at this week’s forum, when it comes to anti-camping laws, Jurado does not support the use of arrests for homeless encampment enforcement, calling it “expensive and ineffective,” while De León believes anti-camping laws are part of a “balanced strategy” to solve homelessness.
MAINTAINING AN ACCOUNTABLE GOVERNMENT
The forum’s date marked the two-year anniversary of the leaked audio tapes that shook L.A. politics and threatened to end De León’s political career. The event’s moderators did not shy away from pressing the councilman about his involvement in the meeting that upended the careers of several L.A. leaders minus his own.
Although De León did not explicitly apologize to the audience, he reiterated his work to regain the trust of his constituents through park renovation projects, community clean-ups and food giveaways, and said he’d rather focus on moving forward and not be stuck in the past.
“I believe that a good leader always recognizes his mistakes and when he recognizes his mistakes, he asks for forgiveness. But what we have done in the last two years is something very incredible,” De León said, touting the millions he’s poured into the district in the last two years. “I choose to move forward to heal and to do everything possible for our people here in the Boyle Heights neighborhood.”
De León told the audience that through his outreach to Black and Oaxacan community members in CD 14, he’s found spaces of healing and of love. Those who worked with him, according to the politician, weren’t the kind to see the “scab” of his scandal and wanted “to continue to scratch it, and scratch it, and scratch it for political purposes,” the councilman said.
Jurado argued that even though the embattled politician has distanced himself from the controversy he was mired in over the past two years, he’s still accepting donations from corporate landlords and right-wing politicians who go against the work De León stands for.
“Who you get money from and how you run campaigns is how you are going to govern,” Jurado said.
To dive deeper on into where the candidates stand, see how they responded to a questionnaire by LAist here.
