Community organizer and housing advocate Rae Huang formally entered the 2026 Los Angeles mayor’s race on Sunday with a launch speech that blended personal history, movement experience, and a direct challenge to the city’s political status quo. Speaking to press and supporters across the street from City Hall, Huang said Los Angeles was at a turning point after years of rising housing costs, climate disasters, federal immigration raids, and economic instability. She argued that the city has the tools to address these crises but lacks the political will to use them. Within four days of the launch and the release of her campaign video, the campaign reached 183 volunteers, signaling significant early momentum for her campaign. Huang also noted in a recent Instagram post that a grassroots campaign like hers is only possible because of the city’s matching funds program, which matches contributions of up to $257 at a six-to-one rate.
“My fellow Angelenos, I’m standing in front of you today because I believe this city is finally ready to leap into the 21st century,” she said. “For too long, we’ve been stuck, held back by unaffordability, corruption, and greed. But today we find ourselves in a unique moment. This moment is filled with possibility, and I am filled with hope.”
Huang serves as deputy director of Housing NOW California, a coalition focused on tenant protections and affordable housing. She has spent the last two decades organizing in labor, housing, faith, and economic justice movements and said her decision to run grew out of the crises she has witnessed up close, from pandemic-era displacement to recent wildfires and immigration raids. In her speech she referenced the Palisades and Eaton fires, mutual aid efforts for families affected by ICE raids, and the work of tenants who fought for emergency protections during COVID. She also gestured to her own family history, noting that immigration laws in earlier eras would have barred her from ever setting foot in the country she now hopes to lead.
She positioned Los Angeles as a place defined by diversity, migration, and struggle, saying the city should remain a refuge for people of all backgrounds. “This is LA. This is us,” she said, before describing the region’s long history of Black, Indigenous, Asian, queer, trans, immigrant, and faith communities who make the city what it is.
Huang spoke at length about her work organizing alongside unions, faith groups, and tenant organizations, including the launch of the Healthy LA coalition during the pandemic and campaigns that pushed for emergency protections to keep families housed. She pointed to efforts that helped cap rent increases, secure a citywide eviction moratorium, and recently lower LA’s rent stabilization cap, calling it “a moral imperative” to keep people in their homes. At the same time, she tied those fights to broader concerns about transparency, public trust, and accountability in city government.
“We need a mayor who sees Angelenos as co-owners of our city,” she said. “Instead, over the past three years, residents have been shut out of City Hall while a climate of fear and political pressure has taken hold. We have been kept in the dark, with little transparency or oversight into what happens behind closed doors.”
Her speech repeatedly returned to the city’s challenges around housing, transit, economic instability, and safety. She described these issues as solvable, saying the city is home to people and organizations who have developed community-driven solutions over the last decade. She named long-term housing strategies, support for working families, crisis response models for public safety, and measures to help small businesses weather rising costs, arguing that Los Angeles has the expertise it needs but lacks leadership willing to act.
“Our challenges may feel impossible, but the truth is we have solutions,” she said. “Now we just need the political will and leadership required to see these solutions through.”
Huang enters the race at a time when Mayor Karen Bass is seeking a second term but faces plumeting public confidence over slow progress on homelessness, mismanagement of the Palisades fire, and controversies surrounding transparency at City Hall. Former LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner is also competing for the job, running a traditional centrist campaign that resembles past mayoral bids many Angelenos have grown weary of as the city’s affordability crisis deepens. Under the city’s election rules, a candidate must win more than half the vote in June to avoid a November runoff. Huang has not previously run for office, and her candidacy has the potential to shift the field dramatically if she attracts progressive voters looking for an alternative to the status quo and familiar establishment playbook.
She concluded her speech by appealing to collective action rather than individual leadership. “This campaign is not about me, it is about us,” she said. “It is about the future we will build together, and a new season for our city, when housing is affordable for all, transit is free, safe and fast, and wages and work are dignified and enough to live a full life, not just survive.”
Huang closed with a quote from civil rights leader Rev. James Lawson, whose teachings she said continue to guide her. “Change does not come by accident; it comes by the work of people who refuse to give up.” Then she added her own call to the crowd. “This is our city. This is our home. This is our Los Angeles. And it’s time for change.”