Two years ago, Heather Hutt was appointed to the Los Angeles City Council representing District 10 as an interim replacement for Mark Ridley-Thomas, who had been removed from the council after being indicted on federal corruption charges. She was appointed as a permanent replacement in April 2023 after Ridley-Thomas was convicted. She is now running for a full term on the Nov. 5 ballot.
His challenger is Grace Yoo, a trusts and estates attorney with a history of activism in the district on a variety of issues, who has served as a Los Angeles city commissioner, a neighborhood council member, and executive director of the Korean American Coalition in Los Angeles. She lost her bid for this seat in 2020 and is running again to represent District 10, which includes the neighborhoods of Koreatown, Mid-City, Baldwin Hills, and Leimert Park.
There are things to admire about both of them: their community service, their determination, their commitment to the district. We have no doubt that each of them wants to serve all the communities in the district with great enthusiasm.
Of the two, we recommend Hutt for the position. She has earned the respect of other City Council members who have found her collaborative and thoughtful on issues during her two years on the council. Prior to being appointed, she was chief of staff to former Council President Herb Wesson during the several months he served as interim council member for the position. She earns recognition for constituent service from neighborhood activists and for showing up at numerous community events that council members often, understandably, do not have time to attend.
Hutt, who grew up in the district, also has relevant political experience. She worked as a state director for then-Senator Kamala Harris and district director for Isadore Hall III when he served in the state Legislature.
On homelessness, a big problem in her district and the rest of the city, she has maintained Ridley-Thomas’ humanitarian outreach strategy and worked to get people out of encampments and into both temporary and permanent housing. She tells the story of how she personally tried to convince two women living in tents near a busy street to move into housing. When they refused, she had outreach workers return to the women for four days in a row to talk to them and eventually persuade them to accept housing.
We are encouraged by her compassion, but she will have to be firm in promoting affordable housing. She says she wholeheartedly supports creating more affordable housing in her district, but she does not seem willing to oppose residents who do not want it in their neighborhoods.
For example, she supported a motion by Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky to stop the acceleration of affordable housing construction (which Mayor Karen Bass has championed with Executive Directive 1) in historic preservation zones to address residents’ concerns. Elsewhere in the district, she said, she’s willing to discuss with neighbors any opposition they have to affordable housing projects and try to talk them out of it. But there will be times when she needs to support a project even if neighbors oppose it. The city desperately needs multi-unit affordable housing and will never build enough of it if councilmembers cave to NIMBY pressure. We hope she has enough courage to stand up to them.
Hutt has other challenges ahead. She speaks enthusiastically about the need to keep local small businesses in the district’s commercial corridors, where rising rents threaten to push them out. But she will have to come up with specific plans to support or even subsidize those businesses. She has been an advocate for safer streets and backed Measure HLA, which voters approved in March and requires the city to install bicycle, bus and pedestrian improvements on city streets. Hutt, as head of the City Council’s Transportation Committee, will have to make sure the city follows through on its commitments.
Yoo is smart and capable. Like Hutt, he says he understands how badly Los Angeles needs affordable housing. But he has been on the wrong side of some issues and then changed his mind. For example, in 2017, he supported the anti-development, anti-slow-growth Measure S proposal (which was soundly defeated). He says he now realizes it would have only exacerbated our housing crisis and would not support it today.
So far, Hutt has done a respectable job in this role and we believe he can get stronger and improve in that area.
