Your guide to the L.A. City Council District 11 race: Traci Park vs. Faizah Malik

Traci Park won the Los Angeles City Council’s 11th District seat in 2022 on a promise to clean up the rising number of homeless encampments dotting the affluent Westside district.

The homelessness issue is again near center stage as Park faces a challenge from Faizah Malik, a public interest attorney and housing advocate. Other issues also are animating the race, including debate over the response to the Palisades fire and a controversial housing project in Venice.

Park is seeking her second term with the benefit of incumbency and the backing of two powerful unions, the Los Angeles Police Protective League and the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City.

Malik comes to the race and the June 2 primary backed by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. A land use attorney, Malik most recently worked for Public Counsel, a public interest law firm.

The district encompasses some of the richest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, including Brentwood, Pacific Palisades and Playa Vista, but also has been plagued by homelessness issues and suffered the devastating and deadly Palisades fire, which destroyed thousands of homes.

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May 1, 2026

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  Traci Park

  (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

A municipal law attorney, Traci Park won the seat after predecessor Mike Bonin declined to seek a third term. Park, who switched her party affiliation from Republican to Democrat in 2004, has been a close ally of the police and fire unions in the city, calling for more cops and firefighters. Park gained prominence following the Palisades fire and chairs the city’s newly former Ad Hoc Committee on LA Recovery.

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  Faizah Malik

  (Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)

Faizah Malik is one of six candidates across the elections endorsed by the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which bills itself as the nation’s largest socialist organization. Former district councilman Bonin also is backing her. She grew up in Orange County, a Muslim American with a father who immigrated from Pakistan and a mother who came from Myanmar when she was a teenager. Malik has numerous union endorsements, including the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and Unite Here Local 11, which represents hotel and airport workers.

The Westside district is bounded by the Santa Monica Bay on the west, the 405 Freeway on the east, Mulholland Drive to the north and Imperial Highway to the south.

It includes Venice, Mar Vista, Pacific Palisades and Brentwood.

The Palisades fire in January 2025 decimated the district. In the aftermath, Park became a sort of folk hero in the Palisades, while Mayor Karen Bass took much of the blame from residents for the failures of the fire department and the pace of the recovery.

Park called herself a “tireless and fierce” advocate for the interests of the fire victims. She pushed permit fee waivers for Palisades residents looking to rebuild their homes, calling it a “meaningful step forward in the recovery process.”

She stepped down as the chair of the council’s committee on the 2028 Summer Olympics to chair the Ad Hoc Committee on LA Recovery.

Park also is a backer of the firefighter union’s ballot measure aimed at funding the LAFD with a half-cent sales tax increase that could bring in hundreds of millions for the department per year.

“This is about preparedness ... It’s about response times and saving lives,” she said about the tax.

Malik, meanwhile, does not support the ballot measure for fire department funding. She opposes new sales taxes that would “hurt working people” and said the city must make sure the department is adequately funded without a new tax.

Malik also believes Park has been too focused on single-family homeowners affected by the fire and would focus more energy on renters.

She cited the council’s decision not to pass a rent freeze and further eviction protections following the fire.

Both candidates are fiercely passionate about one specific development in the district: Venice Dell.

The development, which would replace a city parking lot with 120 units of housing for low-income and homeless people, was approved under Bonin but has stalled under Park, who opposes its completion.

Park said the project has been mired in “scandal and litigation” for years and that taxpayer costs are skyrocketing. Instead, Park wants to develop the lot as a “mobility hub” and move the housing project to an adjacent lot.

She called the fight over Venice Dell “manufactured controversy.”

Malik worked as a lawyer representing the developer, which filed suit against Los Angeles claiming that Park and other officials improperly sought to kill the project by failing to sign off on approvals and cutting off meetings with developers. The city has disputed the allegations and the case is pending.

Malik said Venice Dell’s delay was a big reason why she decided to run for Council District 11.

“Now we’re blocking the project and it’s costing us millions of dollars [in litigation] and we’re not housing people. The ground should have already been broken on it. We are wasting time and wasting money... It is so, so tragic,” she said.

Park ran for office on a promise to remove Westside homeless encampments and says her strategies — bringing homelessness nonprofits together, expanding interim housing through master-leased hotels and using anti-encampment laws to clean up streets — are working.

“We have drastically turned around the circumstances on the ground,” she said.

Park supports the the mayor’s Inside Safe program, which moves homeless Angelenos out of encampments and into temporary housing in hotel and motel rooms. She said the program has “enabled the city to drastically increase its inventory of interim housing” and credits Inside Safe with progress on homelessness in her district and across the city.

Park also supports the city’s anti-encampment law, known as Municipal Code 41.18, to clear encampments near schools and other protected places. When a zone is designated as 41.18, the city puts up signs banning encampments from the area. She has proposed expanding the law to include areas of critical infrastructure, environmentally sensitive areas and high fire severity zones, though that hasn’t passed.

Malik acknowledged Bass committed resources to housing the homeless but said Inside Safe needs more “accountability and transparency.”

“What we know is people are cycling in and out of Inside Safe. If people don’t have services and permanent housing exits, then it’s just a cycle,” she said.

Malik said 41.18 is “not a policy that solves homelessness,” but instead shuffles homeless people from street to street and district to district.

Signs banning encampments “is not how we get our neighbors off the streets and into housing,” she said.

The candidates diverge sharply on policing.

Park said the LAPD needs at least 12,000 officers — though she concedes that number isn’t realistic. The LAPD has about 8,700 officers. She said the city should get to 10,000 as soon as possible.

“Everywhere I go in the district, people ask for more police resources,” Park said.

Park voted in favor of the 2023 LAPD union contract, which boosted starting salaries for cops and gave 3% increases to officers for each of the next four years. She said keeping police pay competitive is a top priority.

Malik would have voted against the 2023 agreement, which every DSA-backed council member opposed at the time. She also said the police force does not need to grow from where it stands, arguing that more officers will not solve underlying safety issues.

Malik said the city needs more unarmed personnel to deal with situations in which armed police are not necessary, such as unarmed people experiencing mental health crises.

Instead of saying she would cut police positions, Malik said she would carefully examine the police budget for areas where the council could make cuts. She highlighted the department’s request for new helicopters as one area where she would decline to support the use of millions of dollars.