Meet Rae
A seasoned community organizer and ordained Presbyterian minister, Reverend Rae Huang has spent two decades bringing people together across faiths, neighborhoods, and movements to fight for dignity, fairness, and a city where everyone has a place to call home. As Deputy Director at Housing NOW! California, Rae directed statewide campaigns to make housing affordable and end the displacement of working-class communities of color. She led efforts behind major legislative and budget wins, like expanding tenant protections under SB 567, and supporting the passage and implementation of California’s groundbreaking social housing study bill, SB 555. She has been an organizer with Clergy for Black Lives and the People’s Budget LA, fought for economic justice alongside hotel and service workers at Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE), and initiated the launch of the Healthy LA Coalition, which won critical pandemic relief for families who otherwise would have been left behind. Rae also played a critical role in organizing fire recovery efforts in Los Angeles. As mayor, Rae will strengthen and expand community-driven solutions to make our city more affordable, sustainable, and safe for every neighbor.
Solidarity Statements
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We believe that Los Angeles cannot be the City it promises to be until it honestly confronts what it has been. The racial wealth gap, the segregation of our neighborhoods, the disparities in who gets policed and who gets protected, who gets housed and who gets swept, who gets opportunity and who gets left behind: these are not the residue of a distant past. They are the product of policy choices, made and remade across generations, that this City has never fully reckoned with.
Racial justice is not a lane. It is not a demographic concern or a political calculation. It is the animating question of whether Los Angeles will be a City that works for all of its people or only some of them. We believe the answer has to be all of them, and we believe that getting there requires more than good intentions. It requires naming what has been done, understanding who benefits from the status quo, and being willing to spend real political capital to change it.
For Rae, this is both a moral commitment and a practical one. A City where Black and brown Angelenos face shorter lives, less wealth, worse schools, and more exposure to the violence of the state is a City that is failing. Not just for them, but for all of us. The energy, creativity, and possibility that get extinguished by structural racism belong to everyone. We are all diminished by it.
Together, we are committed to building a Los Angeles where race no longer predicts your access to housing, healthcare, education, safety, or justice. That work will not be finished in a single administration. But it has to be central to this one.
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We believe every Angeleno deserves to live with freedom, dignity, and authenticity. For Rae, this commitment is personal. She left her childhood tradition specifically because of the exclusionary practices she witnessed there and the impact it had on people she loved. Today, she belongs to the Presbyterian Church because it is the only denomination that ordains women and LGBTQIA+ clergy in addition to celebrating same-sex marriages.
We know that transgender, gender nonconforming, and intersex people are currently facing a coordinated campaign of scapegoating both in the United States and abroad. Across the country, legislatures are banning gender-affirming care, stripping trans people of legal recognition, and weaponizing public institutions against some of the most vulnerable members of our community. People are fleeing their home states and coming to cities like Los Angeles not because they want to, but because they have no other choice. They are arriving in need of healthcare, legal protection, stable housing, and community.
Los Angeles has the resources and the moral obligation to welcome them. That means funding community organizations that provide gender-affirming medical care regardless of insurance status or immigration status. It means supporting legal services that help trans people update their documents, fight discrimination, and navigate a federal government that has made itself their adversary. It means investing in housing programs that specifically serve TGI individuals, who face disproportionate rates of family rejection, job discrimination, and homelessness. And it means saying plainly, from the mayor's office, that this City sees trans people, values them, and will spend real money to protect them.
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We believe that every Angeleno deserves full participation in the life of this City, and that disability is not a personal limitation to be accommodated but a dimension of human diversity that our public life must be designed to include. For too long, disabled people have been treated as an afterthought in how we build our streets, our buildings, our transit systems, and our institutions. In a city as large and as unequal as Los Angeles, that neglect is not an accident. It is a choice, and we can make a different one.
Disability rights are civil rights. The fight for accessible infrastructure, for employment protections, for healthcare that does not treat disabled people as less deserving of dignity and autonomy, is part of the same fight for justice that animates everything we are working toward. We reject the idea that these are niche concerns. When we build a City that works for disabled Angelenos, we build a City that works better for everyone.
Rae knows that City government has a direct role to play. Los Angeles controls its streets, its public buildings, its transit connections, its hiring, and its social services. We can choose to enforce accessibility standards with real teeth rather than treating them as aspirational. We can choose to include disabled voices at every level of City decision-making, not as a gesture but as a structural commitment. And we can choose to resist, at every turn, the national movement to strip disabled people of the supports and protections they have fought decades to win. That fight is our fight too.
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Los Angeles is a city of immigrants. Always has been. Those who cook our food, teach our children, build our homes, staff our hospitals, design our infrastructure, and make this City run every single day include over a million people who were born somewhere else. They are our neighbors, our coworkers, our friends, and our family. They belong here.
Right now, families are being torn apart. People are being taken from their homes, their jobs, and their communities by federal agents operating with increasing aggression and decreasing accountability. Children are watching their parents disappear. Workers are afraid to go to the grocery store. People who have lived here for decades, who have built lives and raised families and paid taxes and contributed everything to this City, are being treated like criminals for the crime of being here.Immigrant justice is not a side issue. It is foundational to our understanding of who we are and what we stand for as a City.
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Los Angeles is home to some of the largest diaspora communities in the world. We are a city shaped by people who fled atrocity, who rebuilt their lives here, who raised children and grandchildren here, and carry in their families the memory of genocide. The Armenian community, the Jewish community, the Cambodian community, the Rwandan community, the Indigenous communities of this continent and beyond: these are our neighbors. Their histories are part of our City's history. We do not look away. We do not trade the acknowledgment of one people's suffering for another's. Every genocide is a crime against humanity, and every community that has known one deserves to have that survival recognized without qualification.
We believe that acknowledging the past is inseparable from confronting the present. When we see mass atrocity being committed, we do not have the luxury of silence in the name of diplomacy or political convenience. A City that honors the memory of those lost to genocide owes it to that memory to speak clearly when it is happening again, wherever it is happening, to whomever it is happening. And it is happening now.
Protecting human dignity is not a position that bends to political winds. Free Palestine! Free Sudan! Free Myanmar, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq!
Rae carries this conviction as a matter of both faith and conscience: never again means never for anyone.
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Los Angeles is home to a remarkable community of species, human and nonhuman alike. Companion animals provide comfort and stability to some of our most vulnerable neighbors. Coyotes, hawks, possums, and yes, even rodents, have adapted to this urban environment and made it their own. We believe that all of us, across species, have a right to this city, and that right deserves to be protected.
Caring for our nonhuman neighbors begins with caring for our human ones. Pet owners facing housing instability are often forced to surrender animals they love because shelters won't accept them and landlords won't allow them. Keeping multispecies families together requires the kind of housing security and pet-inclusive policies that let people stay housed without leaving anyone behind.
We also know that in order to keep our city’s wildlife safe, we need to protect them from human practices that degrade their food sources and biosphere. Habitat loss pushes wildlife into conflict with communities in ways that are harmful to everyone. A city that takes its nonhuman residents seriously invests in habitat protection, restricts the most destructive practices, and treats biodiversity as part of what makes Los Angeles worth living in.
We believe that Los Angeles must be a city where all residents can thrive, regardless of their species.
Rae’s Values
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We are living through a democratic crisis. Across the country, the right to vote is being narrowed, institutions are being captured by concentrated wealth and political power, and the basic premise that the government should answer to the people is under open assault. Los Angeles is not immune to these forces. We have watched our own City government make decisions behind closed doors, draw district lines in back rooms, and treat public participation as a formality rather than a foundation.
We believe democracy is not just a system of elections. It is a practice, and it has to be tended. It lives in whether your City Council Member actually represents your neighborhood, rather than being spread so thin across 265,000 people that they can’t address everyone’s needs. It lives in whether the charter that governs your City was written with you or handed down to you. It lives in whether the budget that determines what your streets look like and whether your kid has an after-school program was shaped by your priorities or by the ones who showed up to the meeting you never heard about.
Rae believes that democracy has to be built everywhere it is needed, at every level, in every process, and for every Angeleno. That means a City government that invites participation before decisions are made, not after. It means electoral reforms that give voters real choices and make every vote count. It means transparency as a default rather than an exception, and accountability that has real consequences when it fails.
We are not waiting for election day to get to work. Right now, we are turning people out to teach-ins, hosting community forums across the city, and gathering signatures for the Overpaid CEO Tax. We are embedded in the coalitions and organizations whose work fills these pages. Many of the people who wrote this platform are members of those organizations. We were in those rooms before this campaign existed, and we will be in them long after. This is not a campaign that is asking Angelenos to trust us and step back. It is a movement asking Angelenos to step forward, because we believe a government that is truly by the people requires the people to be in it, before the election, during it, and every day after. The work of this campaign is itself an expression of that belief.
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At a time of immense pressure around the country to shape education and curtail rights along religious lines, Rae believes in protecting our core constitutional value of the separation of church and state. This is a fundamental principle designed to protect both our religious freedom and our democratic governance. As a member of the clergy, Rae embraces the diversity of religious and secular communities in our City. By keeping our public policies rooted in the common good and – for the religious, our faith traditions rooted in the heart – we protect the sanctity of both. Together, we can ensure that religiosity is never co-opted for partisan agendas or used as a tool for exclusion, but remains a source of personal inspiration that enriches our collective life without dictating it.
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As states across the country move to criminalize abortion and restrict access to contraception, Los Angeles must be unambiguous: we will not participate in that project, and we will actively resist it.
We believe reproductive care is healthcare, and that the barriers to accessing it, including cost, distance, time off work, and childcare, fall hardest on the people who already have the least. A City that takes seriously its commitment to equity cannot be neutral on this question.
For Rae, this commitment is also a matter of faith. She does not believe that any religious tradition has the right to impose its view of when life begins on those who hold a different one. A City that honors both religious freedom and constitutional rights must hold space for moral diversity and ensure that no Angeleno is denied care because someone else's conscience was written into law.