On Sunday, Council District 11 incumbent Traci Park faced off against running opponents Faizah Malik and Jeremy Wineberg in a candidate forum ahead of the local elections on Jun. 2, inside a Venice church with pews crowded with community members. The tense atmosphere gave way to frequent interruptions, with passionate cries of discontent from the crowd, leading to the forcible removal of numerous attendees.
Park, the incumbent, has remained in power as the district’s representative since 2022 following Mike Bonin’s retirement. Park’s primary competitor, Malik, is a local civil rights and housing attorney, supported by the Democratic Socialists of Los Angeles and various grassroots organizations. The third candidate, Jeremy Wineberg, is an entrepreneur and resident of the Westside who entered the race after losing his home in the Palisades fire, presenting himself as a non-politician “builder,” motivated by a lack of action and progress from current leadership.
Throughout the debate, all agreed that homelessness and housing are among the most pressing issues for the district, but drastically disagreed over the approach to effective change. The disagreements included topics surrounding enforcement tactics, social services, temporary housing, and building more housing, all as potential solutions.
In recent years, there has been much debate and disagreement over the correct way to address the local homelessness crisis, with encampments consistently scattered throughout the city, and mental health issues that tie individuals to the streets.
One solution led by Mayor Karen Bass in 2022 is the $250 million Inside Safe initiative, originally intended to temporarily move people from tents and encampments into hotels and motels until affordable housing is built. According to L.A.’s City Controller as of September 2025, the program has spent over $323 million and has permanently housed around 1,200 people. During the debate, Malik challenged the effectiveness and efficiency of this program. The civil rights lawyer called hotel housing too costly for L.A.’s “bloated homelessness budget,” noting that people will continue to “cycle in and out of homelessness in these shelters” with no real pathway to permanent residence.
Park, a long-time supporter of the Mayor’s program, doubled down on support for temporary housing needs and denounced the traditional “brick and mortar” approaches to building more affordable housing.
“We don’t have hundreds of billions of dollars,” said Park. “So increasing our supply of interim housing was absolutely essential.”
A notable cause of the homelessness crisis is the untreated mental illness and drug addiction issues that individualsstruggle with, despite Los Angeles County’s operation with the nation’s largest public mental health department with an annual budget of over $4.4 billion.
“What people are being offered, the shelter and the services people are being offered, is not necessarily what they need,” Malik said, condemning the “service-resistant” label for unhoused individuals who decline service. “What we really need to do is make sure we are offering our unhoused neighbors on the streets the right services.”
Malik continued to call out the City’s unreliability on the question of fiscal responsibility, “We have a problem of mistrust in our local government right now… we lack oversight and accountability and transparency,” she stated.
Skeptical of the large budget for Inside Safe, Malik calls for greater transparency in budgeting processes and for audits, particularly for homeless programs, stating that all people“deserve to know what we are doing with our mental health dollars, our services, to ensure that we are getting people housed.”
“There’s been audit after audit after audit,” Park said in agreement for more transparency. “And literally nobody can explain where the money went.” The councilwoman then described recent homeless projects as “one boondoggle after another” after she claimed projects continued to fail year after year.
Another subject the candidates disagreed on was the enforcement against unhoused individuals. Specifically, Los Angeles Municipal Code 41.18, an ordinance that prohibits encampments, sitting, or lying down in designated sensitive areas and public right-of-way, became a focus of the debate, with Park in full support and Malik challenging its impact in practice.
Park defended 41.18 as a necessary tool to keep public spaces clear, especially around “critical infrastructure”, “very high fire severity zones”, and “environmentally sensitive habitat areas.” She promised to expand where the ordinance is used, arguing that “there is no scenario on no planet where kids should have to step over drug camps to get to school.”
On the contrary, Malik argued that 41.18 is costly and doesn’t solve homelessness, claiming, “it is merely pushing [homelessness] off, criminalizing folks, so as a policy, it does not solve homelessness.”
That split carried into public safety—councilwoman Park argued LAPD staffing is “dangerously, critically low” and supported increasing LAPD’s budget, while Malik proposed allocating more resources into non-police safety responses to alleviate pressure on the LAPD.
“They are tasked with things like homelessness that they are not equipped for,” said Malik, while advocating for reinvestment in social programs and services, “the things that lift people out of poverty.”
Following the closing statements from the candidates, Malik and Wineberg stayed around to meet and talk with audience members, as Park seemingly disappeared from the Church moments after the debate concluded.
