During her first week in office three years ago, Mayor Karen Bass issued a sweeping directive to speed up affordable housing applications. Now, that plan is permanent.
The L.A. City Council unanimously voted Tuesday to adopt the Affordable Housing Streamlining Ordinance. Essentially, the ordinance takes Bass’ housing initiative, known as Executive Directive 1, and incorporates it into the L.A. Municipal Code, so the streamlined process will stick around even after Bass leaves office.
Under the ordinance, developers get fast-tracked city approval for projects that include 100% affordable housing. Reviews for such projects typically take six to nine months, but under the directive, they’re required to be approved within 60 days.
The expedited processing works by stripping away many of the discretionary review processes that typically bog down housing projects: City Council hearings, environmental reports, neighborhood outreach meetings, etc. As long as projects comply with certain criteria, including zoning and design review standards, they qualify for streamlined approval.
Bass introduced the directive to make good on her campaign’s promise to address the city’s affordability and homelessness crises. It also serves as a response to housing developers who have long complained about the city’s complex permitting process, in which projects languish for weeks or months while navigating the red tape of reviews and inspections.
Affordable housing applications have been pouring in under the directive.
As of November, 490 projects have been streamlined, accounting for more than 40,000 affordable housing units, according to the Planning Department. Of those, 437 projects have been approved, with an average application process of 22 days.
It’s unclear how many of those projects are actually being built. At a December City Council meeting, Planning Department officials said that as of July, 44 streamlined projects had been started, accounting for roughly 2,500 units. But there are no data on how many have been finished.
Maria Patiño Gutierrez, deputy director for policy and advocacy at the nonprofit Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE), celebrated the decision to make the directive permanent, but said she hopes to see changes to the process down the road.
“We want this ordinance to work and bring affordable housing, but we also want to make sure it doesn’t displace tenants,” she said.
The directive has become increasingly watered down over the last three years as Bass carved out more and more areas from being subjected to streamlined applications. In June 2023, Bass exempted single-family zones from the directive, which accounts for 72% of land in L.A.
A year later, she exempted historic districts — including areas of Highland Park and Lincoln Heights — as well as “very high fire hazard severity zones,” which include parts of Silver Lake and Hollywood Hills.
To make sure streamlined projects weren’t displacing renters, Bass also exempted those that would replace rent-controlled apartment buildings with 12 units or more.
These exemptions will carry into the newly adopted ordinance, though they may be tweaked in the months to come. In a Dec. 2 meeting, City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado argued that the exemption to preserve rent-controlled buildings should shrink from a minimum of 12 units to five units, claiming such projects could displace tenants in neighborhoods such as Boyle Heights and Lincoln Heights.
Jurado said the current ordinance exempts 19% of rent-controlled buildings, but if the minimum threshold were set at five units instead of 12, it would exempt 36%.
Housing groups are pushing for amendments as well. A public comment letter published by Public Counsel and SAJE argued that maximum rents for streamlined projects should be cheaper than they’re allowed to be under current rules.
The directive defines “100% affordable housing” as 80% low-income units and 20% moderate-income units, but the nonprofits claimed that those rates, which would still let a “low-income” two-bedroom apartment be rented for as much as $2,726, are still too expensive for many Angelenos.
Contamination of key Los Angeles waterways such as the Santa Monica Bay, Los Angeles Harbor and Echo Park Lake due to the spread of toxic chemicals is at the heart of a $35-million settlement between the L.A. City Council and agriculture giant Monsanto and two smaller companies.
The City Council on Tuesday announced the payout by the companies to settle a lawsuit filed in 2022 over damage from long-banned chemicals called PCBs, which have been linked to health problems including cancer.
The City Council approved the settlement at Tuesday afternoon’s meeting, voting 13 to 0 after a closed session. Councilmembers Imelda Padilla and Nithya Raman were absent.
A call to the office of City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto was not immediately answered, nor was a call to Monsanto’s representation.
In March 2022, then-City Atty. Mike Feuer sued Monsanto, which was swallowed by the German corporation Bayer in 2018, and smaller chemical companies Solutia Inc. and Pharmacia.
The complaint sought compensation for the cost of past cleanups — and for future abatement of — polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. The chemicals tainted and continue to pollute many Los Angeles waterways, including the Dominguez Channel, Ballona Creek, Marina del Rey and Machado Lake.
“The city has expended millions and millions of dollars so far and is going to continue to expend millions and millions of dollars to remediate this issue,” Feuer said at the time.
PCBs are human-made organic chemicals that have no known taste or smell and range in consistency from oils to waxes, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
They had several commercial uses, including in transformers and capacitors, oil used in motors and hydraulic systems, cable insulation, oil-based paint, caulking and plastics.
PCBs were produced and used domestically from roughly 1929 until they were banned in 1979, according to the EPA.
From the 1930s through 1977, Monsanto was the sole producer of PCBs in the United States, according to the National Library of Medicine.
Exposure to PCBs increases the chances of a person developing cancer while diminishing the effectiveness of the immune system and damaging reproductive organs and the nervous system, according to the EPA.
The lawsuit alleged that Monsanto knew that “its commercial PCB formulations were highly toxic and would inevitably produce precisely the contamination and human health risks that have occurred.” Instead of informing public officials, the company “misled the public, regulators, and its own customers about these key facts.”
The lawsuit alleged that, as early as 1937, Monsanto acknowledged internally that PCBs produced “systemic toxic effects upon prolonged exposure.”
Many of Los Angeles’ waterways had been impaired by PCB contamination, according to the lawsuit.
The city has said that it continues to shoulder the cost and responsibility of cleaning these locales along with monitoring and analyzing samples.
People face PCB exposure, according to the lawsuit, by eating contaminated food, breathing contaminated air, or drinking or swimming in contaminated water. Fish captured in contaminated waters and eaten also provide an avenue for PCB exposure.
The settlement avoids a court trial, which presented some risk to the city.
In May, however, an appeals court in Washington state overturned a $185-million verdict against Monsanto in a lawsuit brought by three teachers who claimed brain damage due to PCB leaks.
Ysabel Jurado, 34, a lifelong community member of Highland Park, and openly out candidate, is running against current Councilmember Kevin De Leon for Council District 14, the most powerful city council in Los Angeles County.
Her campaign slogan is ‘Ysabel For The Community.’
Earlier this year, Jurado made history in the primary, using her perspective as a historically underrepresented person in the hopes of bringing new leadership to the district after De Leon was called to resign in 2022, following a scandal.
The live voting results earlier this year highlighted Ysabel Jurado at 24.52%, with 8,618 votes, while De Leon fell behind by nearly 400 votes, with 23.39% in the primary.
Jurado is a tenants rights lawyer and housing justice advocate from Highland Park who has built her reputation in the community with support from social activist Dolores Huerta, L.A. City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez and L.A. County Supervisor Hilda Solis.
“I’m the daughter of undocumented immigrants, a public transit rider, a former teen mom, and a working class Angeleno who has navigated the challenges of poverty. I have held the line on countless strikes and defended truck drivers against the same wage theft my father faced,” said Jurado in her candidate statement.
De Leon secured the second spot and will go head-to-head against Jurado in November. Jurado rose to the top of the polls, while her opponents spent more money on their campaigns, including De Leon. Miguel Santiago raised the most money for his campaign and also spent the most to secure support. De Leon came in second with both money spent and money raised. While Jurado came in fourth in the amount of money spent and raised for her campaign.
Jurado is running to become the first queer, Filipina to represent CD-14. Among the list of issues she aims to tackle while in office are; homelessness, climate action, safer streets and economic justice that uplifts small businesses.
“I will bring the institutional knowledge of a legal housing expert and the lived experience of a queer, immigrant-raised, working class, woman of color – a battle-tested representative for and from the community,” said Jurado.
De Leon might be facing an uphill climb after he was caught saying homophobic, racist and anti-sematic remarks in a leaked audio recording that rocked his political career. Even President Joe Biden called for his resignation.
The conversation that rocked L.A politics is said to have started because of redistricting plans and gerrymandering. According to a report by the Los Angeles Times, De Leon had his hopes set on running for mayor of Los Angeles. Since the audio was leaked, protests erupted, calling for his resignation. De Leon continued in his position after an apology tour and is now running against Jurado on the November ballot.
The recording of a conversation between De Leon, Ron Herrera, Nury Martinez and Gil Cedillo.
“Between FBI raids, backroom gerrymandering, racist rants, and corruption charges, our needs have been chronically ignored,” says the statement. “City government has failed us. We deserve better.”
If she wins, she would join a progressive bloc of leaders in city council that include Nithya Raman, Hugo Doto-Martinez and Councilmember Hernandez. The leadership would have a pendulum swing toward city affairs that has not been seen before.
CD-14 covers Eagle Rock, El Sereno, Boyle Heights and parts of Lincoln Heights and downtown L.A., which includes skid row and other points of interest.
Those points of interest make CD-14 seats particularly difficult when it comes to dealing with polarizing issues like homelessness and street safety measures.
According to the latest demographic data by L.A City Council, 61% of the population is Latin American, while the second highest population is white, at 16%, followed by Asian, at 14% and Black at 6%.
If elected, Jurado aims to tackle homelessness in a district that has one of the highest unhoused populations in the city.
Jurado is now gearing up for the November election by continuing to campaign at various events across Los Angeles, including ‘Postcarding with Ysabel,’ at DTLA Arts District Brewing and The Hermosillo.
After a year-long battle, Marilyn Monroe’s Brentwood home has been saved from destruction.
On Wednesday, the L.A. City Council unanimously voted to designate the Spanish Colonial-style residence as a historic cultural monument, protecting it from being razed by its current owners.
“We have an opportunity to do something today that should’ve been done 60 years ago. There’s no other person or place in the city of Los Angeles as iconic as Marilyn Monroe and her Brentwood home,” Councilmember Traci Park said in a speech before the vote.
Park, who represents the council’s 11th district, where the property is located, added that she’s planning to introduce a motion to evaluate tour bus restrictions in Brentwood after neighbors complained about unwanted traffic around the estate. She also floated the idea of moving the home to a place where the public could more easily access it.
“To lose this piece of history, the only home that Monroe ever owned, would be a devastating blow for historic preservation and for a city where less than 3% of historic designations are associated with women’s heritage,” Park said.
The battle over the home on 5th Helena Drive has been brewing since last summer, evolving into a greater discussion of what exactly is worth protecting in Southern California — a region chock-full of architectural marvels and Old Hollywood haunts swirling with celebrity legend and gossip.
Monroe fans claimed the residence is an indelible piece of Hollywood history; the actress bought the house for $75,000 in 1962 and died there of an apparent overdose six months later, making it the last home she ever occupied.
The homeowners claimed the house has been remodeled so many times over the years that it bears no resemblance to its former self. They also said it has become a neighborhood nuisance as tourists and fans flock to take pictures outside the property.
The saga started when heiress Brinah Milstein and her husband, reality TV producer Roy Bank, bought the property for $8.35 million and immediately laid out plans to demolish it. They owned the property next door and wanted to expand their estate.
An aerial view shows the Brentwood house where actress Marilyn Monroe died.
(Mel Bouzad / Getty Images)
The couple obtained a permit but soon ran into opposition, as historians, Angelenos and Monroe fans jumped in to protest the planned demolition. Councilmember Park said she received hundreds of calls and emails urging her to take action.
The next day, she held a news conference, while sporting red lipstick and short blond hair in a nod to Monroe, giving an impassioned speech urging the City Council to designate the home as a landmark.
In the months after, the landmark application slowly advanced, first receiving approval from the Cultural Heritage Commission and then from the Planning and Land Use Management Committee.
In the meantime, Milstein and Bank were barred from demolishing the home. Milstein addressed the Cultural Heritage Commission directly in January in an effort to sway its decision.
“We have watched it go unmaintained and unkept. We purchased the property because it is within feet of ours. And it is not a historic cultural monument,” she said at the time.
In an attempt to halt the landmark designation process, they sued the city in May, claiming that officials acted unconstitutionally in their efforts to designate the home as a landmark and accusing them of “backdoor machinations” in trying to preserve a house that doesn’t meet the criteria for status as a historic cultural monument.
“There is not a single piece of the house that includes any physical evidence that Ms. Monroe ever spent a day at the house, not a piece of furniture, not a paint chip, not a carpet, nothing,” the lawsuit says.
A judge denied the claim in June, calling the suit an “ill-disguised motion to win so that they can demolish the home and eliminate the historic cultural monument issue,” according to ABC 7.
The City Council vote was originally set for June 12, but Park requested a postponement, citing the recent court decision and pending litigation, as well as ongoing discussions between the city attorney’s office and the property owners.
After a lengthy discussion, the Los Angeles City Council voted Friday to prohibit the eviction of tenants whose rental assistance applications have been approved but who have not yet received their funds.
The move comes days before a deadline for tenants to pay pandemic-era rental arrears. Under the city’s plan to end COVID-19 eviction protections, unpaid rent accumulated from Oct. 1, 2021, to Jan. 31, 2023, is due Thursday.
More than 25,000 applicants are waiting to find out if they are eligible for funds from the United to House L.A. Emergency Renters Assistance Program, which provides up to six months of unpaid rent for qualified and selected renters and property owners.
Roughly 3,200 applicants were approved for the program, but most have not received their aid. Only 25% of the $30.4 million allocated for emergency assistance has been distributed.
Renters who did not apply for the program or were not approved could face eviction if they do not make their outstanding payments by Thursday. The deadline to apply was in October.
The City Council motion, introduced by Councilmembers Eunisses Hernandez and Paul Krekorian, originally aimed to protect every renter who applied to the United to House L.A. program, regardless of their application status.
After pushback from groups representing property owners, the motion was amended to prohibit evictions only for applicants whose applications have been approved. Those individuals will be protected from eviction for 120 days after Feb. 1 while their rental assistance funds are processed.
“Tenants who have already been approved for emergency rental assistance should not be evicted while they’re waiting for their checks,” Krekorian said. “Their landlords are going to get paid, so they shouldn’t be putting tenants out just because the city took a little longer to get them the money.”
Applicants who have not yet been approved but are qualified will receive the same protections once granted approval.
Daniel Yukelson, executive director of the Apartment Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, said the motion was unfair to small property owners who rely on rent payments for their livelihood.
Before the amendment was enacted, the motion would have prevented landlords from evicting tenants for an indefinite period of time while they waited for their application to be processed.
“Owners would not be participating in the program if they knew this would be the ramification,” he said. “It’s not as egregious as it would have been without this amendment.”
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Fred Sutton, senior vice president of local public affairs for the California Apartment Assn., also said the amendment was key. But he’s still wary of how long it might take for renters and owners to receive their money.
“It’s just a matter of those funds getting to the individual,” he said, “but we are very concerned about the procedural bureaucracy that takes so long to get these dollars out the door.”
Sutton also criticized the “rushed” timeline of the City Council motion, which was introduced on Wednesday.
“There was one business day to review a very broad and somewhat complicated motion and on a procedural level, that shouldn’t be acceptable,” he said.
Hernandez said it was necessary to get the motion approved prior to the rent payment deadline.
“With the Feb. 1 rent debt deadline looming and thousands of tenants at risk of eviction, it’s incumbent on us to do everything we can to stop the eviction-to-homelessness pipeline and keep people in their homes,” she said. “The city can and must do more to keep Angelenos housed.”
After a years-long neighborhood battle against an oil drilling site in South Los Angeles, a local nonprofit has purchased the now-demolished facility and plans to transform it into a park, community center and affordable housing.
The Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust recently bought the 1.86-acre dirt lot on Jefferson Boulevard for nearly $10 million from Sentinel Peak Resources. The nonprofit and its partners are now seeking grants and other funding sources to pay for planning, remediation and project execution.
“It’s what we hoped for,” Richard Parks, president of the South L.A. nonprofit Redeemer Community Partnership, said of the purchase. “It’s just so amazing to see our community receiving beauty for ashes. It’s overwhelming and feels like such a blessing.”
The sale marks a new chapter in a persistent and community-led fight against the oil drilling site, which residents argued for years was noisy and spewed foul odors. It also comes at a time of growing concerns about the risks and inequities of urban drilling in neighborhoods. L.A. City Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky recently introduced legislation aiming to address public health and environmental threats posed by a drill site near the Pico-Robertson area.
Oil wells are known to emit carcinogens such as benzene and formaldehyde, and living near wells is associated with health problems such as respiratory issues and preterm births, studies have found.
Community leaders hope the purchase serves as a model for how to repurpose shuttered fossil fuel facilities as the city phases out existing oil and gas wells, a historic move approved last year by the L.A. City Council that also bans new oil and gas extraction.
Tori Kjer, executive director of the L.A. Neighborhood Land Trust, believes it is critical that these sites are transformed into uses that benefit communities historically affected by oil drilling. “It’s an environmental justice issue,” she said. It’s also imperative that planned site uses won’t displace residents through gentrification, she added.
“It’s so important, this idea of joint development, where you’re layering in affordable housing, community space and a park together,” she said. “For us, it’s really the ideal approach to equitable development in communities. … This is a rare opportunity, and an important opportunity, as we think bigger scale about future types of development in Los Angeles.”
Kjer estimates they will need three to six months and about $600,000 for remediation planning, and an additional year and $2 million to $3 million for cleanup. They are seeking state grants. The park’s budget will be about $6 million.
Lori R. Gay, president and chief executive of the Neighborhood Housing Services of Los Angeles County, said their target is to build 70 affordable housing units. They are also considering creating a community land trust to preserve the neighborhood and produce new homeowners.
After a years-long neighborhood battle against an oil drilling site in South L.A., a local nonprofit has purchased the now-demolished facility and plans to transform it into a park, community center and affordable housing.
(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
“The Jefferson site is in a homeownership community, so we wanted to maintain both the integrity and culture of the community with affordable homeownership,” she said. “It is too easy to just build affordable housing focused on tenancy and not provide the opportunity to build generational wealth. This development provides the opportunity to build wealth for generations to come.”
But the grand visions for the property won’t come without hurdles.
Finding land trust lenders will be challenging, Gay said, as will plan reviews and significant market changes that could hinder the speed of development. Having multiple partners involved in a large project could also further complicate it, Kjer added. Planning, remediation and raising and finding finances will also be tricky.
“The housing kind of funds itself, and we have some really good prospects for funding the park through different grants, but the community center I think will be a very big challenge,” Parks said. “How do we raise the several million dollars to be able to build that out for the community?”
First approved nearly 60 years ago, the South L.A. oil site on West Jefferson Boulevard and Van Buren Place was situated closer to homes than any other city drilling facility, according to the nonprofit Community Health Councils.
In 2013, environmental justice advocates with Redeemer Community Partnership began organizing after the oil company requested permits by the city of Los Angeles to drill three new wells.
Parks remembered knocking on residents’ doors and hearing concerning stories about the nearby oil facility: One woman was sprayed with oil while she watered her front lawn. The noxious smells of diesel exhaust and petroleum fumes permeated through a toddler’s room even with the windows closed. Others complained of headaches and nosebleeds, and miscarriages were commonplace, he recalled.
A report by a petroleum administrator, who was hired in 2016 to oversee oil and gas operations in the city, noted that the Jefferson Boulevard facility was classified as having hydrogen sulfide gas, which can give off a rotten-eggs odor and cause smell loss, and that chemicals such as benzene have also been emitted from the site.
A group of community members who were involved in the fight against the Jefferson Boulevard oil drilling site stand on the demolished facility.
(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
In 2017, after persistent demands from community activists to enclose the site, L.A. City Council members issued a set of stringent rules that oil companies must follow if they wanted to continue operating drilling sites next to homes in South L.A.
The requirements included, among other things, that drilling equipment be permanently closed off by a 45-foot-tall structure to reduce noise, odors and block glaring lights. It was a big victory for community activists, who had argued that the site exemplified the toxic outcomes of oil drilling in urban neighborhoods.
Officials at the time described the requirements as the toughest ever imposed on a drill site in L.A.
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Sentinel Peak Resources spurned the commands and filed a lawsuit. The company argued that the new mandates were “unduly oppressive” and would force it to reduce or stop its operations.
Nearly a year later, the company announced it would shutter the site for good.
While it removed all oil operating equipment and capped the 36 wells on site, the community began working on a shared vision for the site’s future.
“Because we knew if we did not do that, that the toxic violence of oil extraction would be replaced by the violence of displacement,” Parks said. “Developers are coming in, they’re tearing down homes, they’re building up student housing, they’re driving out longtime residents, and we didn’t want to see that happen.”
With help from California Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D-Los Angeles), who is running for L.A. City Council District 10, they secured a $10-million state grant for those efforts.
“I’m really excited,” Jones-Sawyer said. “This will be the blueprint for how you can effectively make changes.”
When Redeemer Community Partnership contacted him about their vision for the land, “it seemed like the perfect combination of dealing with our housing crisis and dealing with our crisis with having no open space. And so when I had the opportunity to provide the $10 million … it seemed like a wonderful opportunity,” Jones-Sawyer said.
For residents such as Corissa Pacillas, who fought for years for more stringent protections from the Jefferson Boulevard site, the purchase exemplifies the power of organizing.
“It was encouraging to see that when people really intentionally organize and speak up, and are persistent … passionate and have good leadership … that change can happen,” said Pacillas, who spent years documenting the facility’s activities from the porch of her second-floor apartment. “I’m just so excited that the property … is going to go toward really benefiting the community.”
For Cindy Montañez, the seeds of her drive to fight for her community were planted before she was even born.
Her grandfather, a miner in the Mexican state of Zacatecas, died before she could meet him — an early death caused by his line of work. Her immigrant parents settled in the northeastern San Fernando Valley, where factories spewed chemicals and companies dumped waste with little care for the Latinos who lived nearby.
“My dad told us, ‘Whatever you do, you’ve gotta fight against the people who oppress our people and the exploitation of the land, because the two go together,’” Montañez said in an interview earlier this year.
She took that advice to heart by blazing trails in both politics and environmental activism. After serving in the California Assembly, Montañez used her connections and iron will to bring hundreds of millions of dollars to the San Fernando Valley and other underserved communities to clean up polluted areas and beautify neighborhoods.
The San Fernando City Council member died Saturday morning after a long battle with cancer, according to a family spokesperson. She was 49.
At UCLA in 1993, Montañez and a teenage sister were among those who went on a 14-day hunger strike that helped to establish a Chicano Studies department. She became the youngest San Fernando council member at 25, then the youngest woman elected to the California State Assembly at 28.
After leaving Sacramento, Montañez became an assistant general manager at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, playing a crucial role in pushing the agency to use cleaner energy and create better water-capture methods. Shy by nature but at ease in any crowd, she became CEO of TreePeople in 2016, making her one of the few Latinas in charge of a large, U.S.-based environmental nonprofit.
Mark Gold, director of water scarcity solutions for the Natural Resources Defense Council, first met Montañez while she was in the Assembly. He credits her for “marrying environmental justice with conservation” by getting politicians and wealthy funders to care about environmental justice in inner cities and getting working-class people into the open spaces that Montañez so loved to explore.
“The work she did was nothing short of extraordinary,” said Gold, who helped Montañez get appointed to the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability’s board of advisors.
“Cindy had a lot of courage, and she demonstrated that courage again and again,” said United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta, who first met Montañez at the UCLA hunger strike, which sparked a personal and professional friendship that lasted decades. “People followed her. She was never about promoting herself. She was about doing the work.”
Richard Alarcon, a former L.A. councilmember and San Fernando Valley-area state Assembly member and senator, first met Montañez after he read about how she and a sister chained themselves to a tree in an attempt to save it from being cut down. Soon after, he hired her as an intern.
“She contributed to women’s empowerment, she contributed to the environmental movement, and she never wavered to her commitment to grassroots mobilization,” Alarcon said. “She and I had many discussions about trying to create a bridge between the greater environmental movement to recognize the challenges that poor and minority communities had in taking on environmental issues. And she built it.”
Cindy Montañez in 2014 in Panorama City
(Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times)
In a written statement, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass called Montañez “a relentless trailblazer who led with conviction and a vision of a better Los Angeles for all.”
“I saw her tenacity up close many times,” Bass wrote. “She was by my side when we fought together in Sacramento, making difficult decisions to help our state, and she advised me when I served in Congress on a range of issues impacting our city. Throughout it all, one thing was always clear — Assemblywoman Montañez’s heart and soul were always dedicated to the people of Los Angeles.”
The fourth of six children, Montañez grew up in a household where healthy living was emphasized as way to survive the tough, toxic environment they lived in. For years, the family would get up every morning at 5 a.m. to run together. They also would drive to the Central Valley on weekends to pick crops, then sell them back home. At 12, Montañez began to spend her summers volunteering anywhere and everywhere: street and park cleanups, Special Olympics, in juvenile hall, at hospitals, even to help with Pope John Paul II’s 1987 visit to Los Angeles.
She entered UCLA as a mathematics major and quickly joined the school’s vibrant Chicano activist scene.
“Education is important to me,” she told the Associated Press nine days into the hunger strike. “That’s why I’m starving myself for it.”
The connections she made during that time propelled her toward politics. She began working for Alarcon, the first Latino to represent the San Fernando Valley in Sacramento. His mentorship helped Montañez win a seat on the San Fernando city council in 1999, then achieve her Assembly milestone three years later.
“This victory is a victory for our community, not for me,” Montañez told a jubilant crowd at a primary night election party in 2002, on her way to winning the Assembly seat. “The northeast Valley is going to continue to be a beautiful place to live and work because we’re going to continue to work together. Se los digo de todo corazon (I tell you this from the heart).”
In the Assembly, Montañez made national headlines for authoring the so-called Car Buyers Bill of Rights, a consumer protection bill that was among the first of its kind in the nation. But in the environmental movement she had long embraced, there were few people who looked like her or cared for places like her hometown.
“The L.A. River was getting all the attention,” Montañez told The Times earlier this year. “So I [said], ‘Hey, here I am in Sacramento, voting [to protect] preserves in Santa Monica. We gotta do something for our [San Fernando Valley] communities.”
“She developed the concept that the beach starts in Pacoima,” said Steve Veres, a former UCLA classmate who worked for her as an Assembly staffer and is now a trustee on the Los Angeles Community College District board. “She used all the relationships that she had made in her life to make things happen for not just her community, but others.”
Then-San Fernando mayor Cindy Montañez, in a 2002 photo
(Myung Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Montañez made sure that state funds were allocated to build parks in working class neighborhoods. And she planned to accomplish more — she told the media that she wanted to run for the L.A. City Council and eventually Congress. But two other rising San Fernando Valley politicians truncated her political career.
In an interview a few months before her death, Montañez said she had no regrets about the abrupt end to her political rise.
“Oh my gosh, I can’t tell you how happy I am,” she said. “How proud I am of the team we put together to truly move people and educate folks and have fun. In politics, it’s all fighting.”
She used her Rolodex as TreePeople CEO to convince the Assembly last year to pass a $150-million bill to help schools combat climate change with more trees, shade structures and gardens. Her cheerful presence at community tree-planting events became a regular part of Valley life.
“Every tree that we plant,” she told The Times, “I think about the tree that may help somebody.”
In the weeks leading up to her death, former colleagues and political heirs publicly honored her. The California Legislature declared her birthday, Jan. 19, to be Cindy Montañez Day. The San Fernando and L.A. city councils renamed as Cindy Montañez Natural Park the area around the Pacoima Wash, which Montañez had long advocated remaking as a green space. Last week, the Los Angeles Unified School District voted to rename Gridley Street Elementary in San Fernando in honor of Montañez.
Assemblymember Luz Rivas didn’t meet Montañez until after getting elected to Montañez’s former seat, but was already familiar with her legacy.
“She inspired people to run or serve in their community, because she was like a lot of us are,” Rivas said. “She was standing up as an environmentalist and owning that identity at times when young Latinos didn’t see themselves as environmentalists. She pushed what that definition is.”
The two began to speak more regularly when Montañez rejoined the San Fernando City Council in 2020. Rivas said she would continue to look to her as an inspiration.
“[She] and I are the exact same age,” Rivas said. “So it hits me: Am I doing what I want to do? Am I doing enough?”
Montañez is survived by her parents, Margarita and Manuel Montañez, along with siblings Ezequiel, Maribel, Miguel, Robert and Norma.
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