Faizah Malik, Los Angeles City Council District 11 candidate, 2026 primary election questionnaire – Daily News

Ahead of the June primary election, the Southern California News Group compiled a list of questions to pose to the candidates who wish to represent you. You can find the full questionnaire below. Questionnaires may have been edited for spelling, grammar, length and, in some instances, to remove hate speech and offensive language.

Name: Faizah Malik

Current job title: Managing Attorney for Housing Justice at Public Counsel

Age: 41

Incumbent: No

Other political positions held: None

City where you reside: Venice

Campaign website or social media: faizahforla.com

What are the top issues facing your district, and what would be your top priorities if elected/reelected? (Please answer in 200 words or less.)

First and foremost, our district is dealing with an affordability crisis, and everything that comes with it, including housing affordability and availability and homelessness. We also are facing a massive disaster recovery and rebuilding project in the Pacific Palisades. Meanwhile, a budget crisis and lack of accountability at City Hall continue to impact basic services for residents. To respond to these challenges, my priorities are as follows:

• Making the Westside affordable for all by advocating for renter protection policies that reduce evictions and promote stability and security for working-class Westsiders and supporting the production of housing for workers at all income levels, including and especially social housing and affordable and permanent supportive housing.

• Promoting more robust public investment in the Westside to restore basic services, deliver a connected transportation network, fund the Palisades recovery effort and prepare the city for potential future disasters, including climate resiliency.

• Cooperatively building transparent models of co-governance with community members and organizations to create opportunities for all Angelenos to access and engage their government, rather than just the wealthy and connected, as has been the status quo.

How would you approach addressing homelessness and housing affordability in Los Angeles? (Please answer in 200 words or less.)

In order to meaningfully address homelessness, we have to get people housed and keep people housed, which means we must protect tenants and also make serious strides in housing affordability. I encourage people to review my detailed policies on both of these issues. Those are available on our campaign website, faizahforla.com.

The main driver of homelessness is the outrageous cost of housing in our city. If we were able to prevent all people from falling into homelessness in Los Angeles, and our homelessness system continued to house people at its current rate, we would be on track to end homelessness in LA in less than five years. Therefore, I am a strong advocate for strong rent stabilization and tenant protections to keep rents affordable and help people stay housed.

I will work to open more shelters in our district and build more of the types of housing that people need to successfully transition out of homelessness.

To address housing affordability, we need to focus on both preserving existing affordable housing and building a lot more housing. I will immediately unlock housing production when in office, which includes the Venice Dell project, which has been repeatedly stalled at great cost to the taxpayers. On housing production, I will advocate for zoning and land use policies to increase housing opportunities for all income levels, including rezoning single-family areas for more dense housing. I will fight for the maximum allowable number of affordable units in every new development where the council office has discretion and pursue policies to streamline more housing development.

I will also fight to prioritize the preservation of existing affordable housing in CD 11 to prevent the displacement of communities in the district.

What steps would you take to improve transparency and accountability at City Hall? (Please answer in 200 words or less.)

There are many valid reasons for residents to feel skeptical of their government, and I will work diligently to build a transparent, accountable CD 11 office that serves all Westsiders. I am proud to have been endorsed by Controller Kenneth Mejia, whose work in office has created sorely needed transparency for Angelenos.

In terms of transparency, residents should be able to submit requests for neighborhood work directly online and track it in real time. The city should produce public dashboards that allow people to track infrastructure requests and see where those requests are in the process. Residents and community groups alike should be able to confirm with ease when a much-needed project is slipping off the city’s radar.

We also deserve a city that is connected with community members and dedicated to weighing voices with equity. It shouldn’t take a Herculean effort to reach a council office or to give public comment at important hearings or meetings. I will work to expand opportunities for constituents to share their perspectives with City Hall. I will bring residents into the budgeting process through participatory budgeting, enshrine remote comment opportunities, increase language access and create digital platforms that make it easier for residents to communicate their needs to their councilmembers.

What role should neighborhood councils and other community groups play in shaping local policy decisions, and how would you work with them if elected? (Please answer in 200 words or less.)

Elected officials have an obligation to be available to their constituents and make sure that community input is incorporated into the decision-making process. Too often, we have seen City Hall work for the wealthy and well-connected rather than for every resident, frequently with disastrous consequences. This is why transparency and accountability are one of my main priorities. I want to work closely with neighborhood councils and community organizations to ensure no corner of CD 11 is overlooked.

I will also create pathways for youth, people of color, renters, immigrants, seniors, people with disabilities and low-income residents to serve on advisory boards and represent communities that are too often excluded from civic decision-making. I will reopen district offices that the incumbent councilmember has closed, restoring a physical space where residents can be heard and helped.

In addition to increasing access to City Hall, as outlined above, I will hold regular rotating town hall meetings so that residents have an opportunity to bring their concerns to my attention directly. I will create public programming around civic education, digital literacy and civil rights to provide constituents with the opportunity to learn more about how our government currently works and what improvements might be possible in the future.

Public safety remains a major concern for many residents. What policies would you support to improve safety while addressing community needs such as mental health and prevention services? (Please limit your answer to 200 words or less.)

Despite low crime rates and spending 46% of our discretionary budget on policing, residents report that they don’t feel like their communities are safe. In order to create real community safety, we have to change our approach and learn from what has worked in other cities. Safe streets; robust and well-maintained infrastructure; and programs for youth, adults and seniors are great examples of public investments that increase community safety, and these are also all areas that have been underfunded in our recent city budgets.

As a councilmember, I will commit to a strategic framework for public safety that includes upstream harm prevention, community violence intervention and support services for survivors of harm. Upstream harm prevention means housing, economic and food security, quality jobs that pay living wages, healthy built environments, youth development programs and access to quality education. Community violence intervention includes gang intervention, mentoring, trusted messengers and wraparound services.

For example, I would expand the long-standing Gang Reduction Youth Development (GRYD) program, which has contributed to a major decrease in homicides in the neighborhoods where it operates. I will also continue to build out our unarmed community safety workforce through programs like CIRCLE and UMCR, which divert non-urgent calls and resolve most incidents without police involvement. Investing in programs that allow our sworn police officers to focus on the most violent crimes will improve the efficiency of our response systems and ensure that people in crisis are receiving the specific kinds of support that they need.

In the aftermath of the Palisades fire, many residents and businesses in the district are facing rebuilding and recovery challenges. What steps would you take to support community recovery while improving wildfire preparedness for the future? (Please limit your answer to 200 words or less.)

First of all, if I win the election, I will ensure that Palisades residents who have found support with the CD 11 office will have no interruption in that support. As a councilmember, I will fight to make sure that all residents, whether renters or homeowners, can rebuild safely, affordably and sustainably while remaining in their communities. I will fight for better government coordination and department responsiveness to residents seeking permits to rebuild their homes, dealing with insurance companies and other administrative needs. I will prevent further displacement of lower- and middle-income families and seniors by fighting for direct financial assistance to help them rebuild.

I will make sure that affordable housing options, like ADUs, are included in the rebuilding effort so that renters and seniors can afford to return to the Palisades, and I will advocate for state-wide insurance reforms that reward resilient and sustainable construction.

Finally, climate resiliency shouldn’t be forgotten. I will incentivize an electric rebuild by adopting updated building codes that support all-electric homes, solar and storage, heat pumps, induction stoves, electric water heaters and high-MERV air filters, alongside local rebates, fee waivers and fast-tracked permits.

And I will fight for a robust climate-resilient emergency response plan for CD 11. Having such a plan in place is not just necessary to protect residents from future disasters; we must have such a plan so that insurance companies will be willing to come back to the Palisades.