What We Stand For

 

Housing Justice & Homelessness

We work to ensure that every person in Los Angeles has access to safe, accessible, sustainable, and permanently-affordable housing.

Our Principles:

  • Protect renters & low-income homeowners: We must strengthen renters’ rights and eliminate loopholes that unscrupulous landlords frequently exploit to drive up rents, harass & unjustly evict tenants, and remove affordable units from the market.

  • Prevent people from displacement: We support the empowerment of racially & economically marginalized communities to shape the planning of the neighborhoods they inhabit. We must remove the speculation that places housing’s value as a commodity above its value as a home.

  • Preserve existing affordable housing: We must institute programs that prioritize Tenant and Community Opportunity to Purchase, disincentivize the corporate redevelopment of existing multifamily housing, and use government resources to permanently extend affordability for units whose convents are expiring.

  • Produce new permanently affordable housing in every neighborhood: We must focus on the creation of, and conversion to, non-commodified types of housing, including Community Land Trusts and Social Housing. We must produce more housing overall, but we need to create new units at the lower-end of the market. For far too long, production has been mostly expensive and located in working class areas.

  • Permanently house people experiencing homelessness: We need services and supportive housing in every community and to fight against the criminalization of our unhoused neighbors.

Climate & environmental justice

We focus on building solidarity with historically marginalized low-income communities of color on the frontline of the climate crises and emphasize the intersections of climate with housing, transportation, racial, and economic justice. We seek to ensure climate solutions don’t burden working class communities and communities of color, including the loss of good jobs, over-concentration of polluting industries, and the cost of energy and efficiency upgrades.


Our Principles:

  • End fossil fuel extraction including a complete phase out oil and gas drilling in Los Angeles and cleaning up drilling sites and brownfields.

  • Achieve a Renewable Energy future, including support for the LA 100 study, which outlines several paths to 100% renewable energy in Los Angeles.

  • Work for a Just Transition and Green New Deal for Los Angeles and the United States.

  • Establish a Public Bank as a means to stop subsidizing polluting industries and finance a clean energy infrastructure.

  • Create a Circular Economy where no resources are wasted as we seek to fight climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution.

  • Support Sustainable Transportation systems, including multimodal infrastructure that enables people to quickly get around without the need for single-occupancy vehicles -- walk/bike infrastructure; clean, free and accessible public transit; and intercity high-speed rail as well as bolstering the the use of zero-emission vehicles.

  • Encourage-climate friendly housing and land-use patterns by preventing displacement of working-class people who live near transit/jobs and encouraging the development of housing, especially permanently affordable housing near transit/jobs, and working against sprawl.

Transportation Justice

The mission of the LA Forward Transportation Justice team is to work toward a Los Angeles where everyone has access to safe and effective mobility. This includes the ability to move freely around one's environment, including on foot, on a bicycle, or via bus and train. We consider opportunities to fight for such policies broadly, but focus special effort on the LA Metro, the largest transportation provider in the region. This also means fighting for more just planning and decision making moving forward.

Our Principles:

  • Provide usable and effective public transportation service: We must provide Los Angeles residents with an effective transportation system that provides reliable service users can depend on without undue burden.

  • Provide fare-free access to such systems: Ensure that public transportation systems be made accessible to those who need them, without complex means testing limiting usability or cutting out those who need transportation most desperately.

  • Reassess how we consider safety on public transportation: We must re-examine what we consider safety in transportation, including citations for fare-evasion and jaywalking, and examine the role played by police and the disproportionate harm caused in transportation-dependent communities.

  • Build a city designed for mobility: Pursue policies that make Los Angeles a safe and functional environment that supports walking, biking, driving, and public transportation, while acknowledging and taking into account the unequal distribution of such safe infrastructure in the past. 

  • Move to eliminate pollution in transportation: Cease the construction of new highways and the expansion of existing highway infrastructure, noting the legacy of racist highway construction and the impact, spatial and environmental, they have had on marginalized communities.

  • Advocate for prioritization in policymaking of public transportation-dependent communities, including vulnerable residents previously overlooked and/or exploited in Los Angeles’s history of rapid growth and sprawl. Push for more consideration of communities who have suffered previous harm in land use decision-making related to transportation at city and state level that have had a detrimental effect on their ability to have a safe, healthy and prosperous quality of life.

Transforming the Criminal Justice sysyem

We support a transformed justice system that stops criminalizing people of color and prioritizes care, not incarceration.

The City and County of Los Angeles spend more on police and incarceration than any other single category on their respective budgets, with the amounts having increased year over year. Yet many communities do not feel the safety and security that is promised by our politicians. It is far past time to reallocate these funds to resources like community-based drug and mental health treatment, education, housing, jobs, small business development, public transportation, child care and other social institutions that can actually make communities safer while improving quality of life for all.

Economic Justice

We support a fair economy that guarantees worker rights and dignity, and provides everyone with access to the necessities they need to survive and thrive.

We’re proud of:

  • Mobilizing our community to help decriminalize and legalize street vending.

  • Working for many years close corporate property loopholes, including gathering signatures and getting out the vote for Prop 15 in 2020.

  • Backing the Fair Workweek LA Coalition.

  • Supporting the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively.

We support many different paths to create an economy rooted in solidarity and back policies such as paid parental and sick leave, affordable high quality child care, as well as programs to support for small- and micro-businesses such as street vendors, corner markets, at-home childcare businesses, and other businesses often run by people marginalized groups and especially people who may have not have an ITIN or SSN.

Strengthening Democracy

We support measures to make local politics and government accessible to everyday Angelenos.

We were proud to be part of the leadership of the coalition that passed the City of LA’s expanded matching funds program for grassroots campaigns and advocated to make it even stronger.

We support increasing public financing for city elections (such as the democracy voucher system that’s been implemented in Seattle), creating a truly independent redistricting commission for LA City and LAUSD which removal of redistricting powers from elected officials, and expanding the size of LA City Council.

We support measures to make it easier for non-English speakers to participate in public comment by increasing the quality and quality of translation equipment and improvements in access to city information and services (including how to go through permitting processes) to Angelenos who don’t speak English.