When the Los Angeles City Council voted on August 20 to move forward with reforms allowing single-staircase apartment buildings up to six stories, the measure passed overwhelmingly. Thirteen members supported the plan, which was pitched as a way to make larger apartments more feasible on infill lots and to address the city’s shortage of family housing. Fire officials had reviewed the proposal earlier in the year and registered no objections. Other cities, including New York and Seattle, have long allowed similar designs.
The only councilmember to oppose the measure was Traci Park. She said the reform was premature, citing concerns about fire safety and pointing to a State Fire Marshal report due in 2026. She argued that with the Los Angeles Fire Department already stretched thin, the city should not move ahead until it had more certainty about safety standards.
Her colleagues emphasized that LAFD had already vetted the concept and raised no objections. Councilmember Bob Blumenfield reminded the council that the ordinance still requires consultation with the State Fire Marshal before final adoption, ensuring fire authorities will remain at the table. He also argued that delaying would push off an important housing reform for years, even as the city struggles with a shortage of affordable units.
Park’s position has raised eyebrows because of how far it diverges from her political profile. She consistently aligns with police and firefighter unions, both of which spent heavily to support her 2022 campaign. She opposed the Healthy Streets LA initiative in 2024, repeating the firefighters’ dubious argument that redesigning streets would slow emergency response. Given that history, many expected her vote on stairwell reform to reflect LAFD’s position. But this time, fire leadership had no objections, and her decision to break with them raises questions about her real motivation.
The councilmember has frequently invoked fire in her political rhetoric, often in ways that critics say are meant to stoke fear rather than address policy. Earlier this week, she opposed SB 79, the state bill to allow more housing near transit, and raised the specter of January’s Palisades wildfire and gridlocked canyon roads. In reality, the law would not apply to the Palisades, since it is limited to sites near major bus and rail lines. Yet Park leaned on disaster imagery to argue against housing growth, and she has repeatedly deployed fire safety as a reason to reject reforms, even when the factual basis is weak.
That pattern comes into sharper focus when set against her record on Barrington Plaza. The 712 unit complex on Wilshire has a tragic history of fires. A blaze in 2013 displaced residents. Another in 2020 killed a 19 year old man and injured 21 others, including a baby and toddler. Despite this, the owner, Douglas Emmett Inc., refused to install sprinklers. When pressed by then councilmember Mike Bonin, the company floated a plan to evict tenants, retrofit the building, and re-rent the units. Bonin rejected the plan, insisting they make safety upgrades without mass displacement. Shortly afterward the company became a major spender in local elections, pouring more than a million dollars into city races, including over half a million to support Park’s campaign.
Once Park and City Attorney Heidi Feldstein Soto, also backed by Douglas Emmett’s money, were in office, the company moved to evict more than 500 households under the Ellis Act. The Ellis Act is supposed to allow landlords to leave the rental business, but Douglas Emmett admitted it planned to re-rent the units after renovations. The justification was fire safety, but the city’s own housing department later confirmed that no agency had ever ordered the installation of sprinklers. It was a voluntary choice by the landlord, used as a pretext to displace tenants.
Park’s only official move was to direct the Housing Department to report on the status of relocations and the right-to-return process. She never challenged whether the evictions were legal. Tenants described harassment by relocation contractors and pleaded with her to intervene, but she argued that the matter was in the City Attorney’s hands. The City Attorney, also a Douglas Emmett beneficiary, took no action to stop the evictions, and it fell to tenants to sue. A court eventually ruled the eviction scheme unlawful.
The juxtaposition is striking. At Barrington Plaza, where fire had already killed and injured residents, Park downplayed safety and allowed a landlord donor to use it as a justification for the largest mass eviction in city history. At City Hall, when the fire department itself had signed off on a modest reform that would allow more housing, she invoked fire safety to block it. On SB 79, she used images of the Palisades fire to argue against a transit-housing bill that would not even apply in fire-prone canyons. Taken together, these decisions suggest her lone opposition to the stairwell resolution reflects the priorities of her district’s more conservative constituents more than concerns about public safety.