Los Angeles All-Stars: Azeen Khanmalek, Dulce Vasquez, & Alex Melendrez on Radio Abundance

The following conversation was featured on Radio Abundance, Episode XXI: LA All-Stars.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Hey, everybody! Welcome to Radio Abundance!

I'm your host, Steve Boyle, here on location in downtown Los Angeles with three amazing Angelenos. YIMBYs. Abundance-minded Democrats.

I'm with Azeen Khanmalek, Alex Melendrez, and Dulce Vazquez.

Dulce, Alex, Azeen – thanks for hanging out with me today, and thanks for welcoming me to Los Angeles.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Thanks for having us!

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

Thanks for having us!

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Happy to be here!

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Why don't we go around? If everyone can maybe share, for a second, who you are and what's your background in the YIMBY movement? How'd you come to this? What are you most passionate about here? And what's on your mind today?

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

Sure, I'll start. I'm Azeen Khanmalek. Thanks so much for having me today. I am the Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA. For the past 10 years or so, we have been LA County's YIMBY organization. We're a nonprofit advocacy organization. We advocate for more housing at all levels of affordability throughout LA County.

I am an urban planner by education and training, and that's how I first came into this work. I worked at the City of Los Angeles for many years for the Planning Department and for several years at the Mayor's Office focusing on housing policy, housing finance, and land use, all in the service of building more housing.

In my journey in the public sector and as a policy expert in the housing space, I think what became clear to me over about a decade or so – and I really started my planning career right as the YIMBY movement was also dawning and in its infancy – I came to the realization that, although I loved being a planner and I love working for government, the solutions that we need to solve our housing crisis go beyond what any one city can do.

Local advocacy and local organizing is extremely important to this movement, and it is, in fact, what Abundant Housing LA mostly focuses on, but this is not just a policy effort that we're involved in, right? This is a social effort to change hearts and minds. And it's also a political effort, to get the kinds of leaders elected that will actually pass the policies we all know we need to get out of our housing crisis. So that's why I'm here today.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Speaking of a multi-pronged movement, Dulce, how about you?

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Yeah, absolutely. Dulce Vasquez, longtime Los Angeles resident, former candidate for Los Angeles City Council and the California State Assembly. I've been in the YIMBY movement for a long time, and, I feel like, as a candidate, I was kind of in the first wave of those who were really honing in and centering pro-housing and Abundance in my platform.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

And what year was that?

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

2022. 2020 to 2022 was the campaign, and I got a lot of pushback for it, particularly in where I was running, where there were bountiful anti-gentrification efforts.

Azeen talks about sort of the social aspect of it and changing of hearts and minds. I was swimming in this very big ocean, but I've continued on in the movement. I'm a former Board Member of Abundant Housing. I continue to be involved with organizations like California YIMBY, YIMBY Action, launching YIMBY Latino with Alex, and I'm just happy to be here and continuing to spread the message.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

How about you, Alex?

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Well, Alex Melendres. I have been in some combination of Democratic Party advocacy and YIMBY advocacy for the last 10 years. I started as a volunteer and basically worked my way up in a variety of capacities.

I'm a former Organizing Manager with maybe four different former titles at YIMBY Action, from LA Organizing Manager to Regional Bay Area Manager to National Chapter Manager. And I, for a while, was the Equity Officer at YIMBY Action, where I really focused on building equity-based coalitions trying to work with affinity groups and diversify the movement. Which is something I had been doing for a while, but I was given more of an official role with that.

In the Democratic Party, I pretty much started as any basic Democratic volunteer and worked my way up to be a DNC attendee. I got elected to my local Democratic Central Committee, which are the local governing boards for the Democratic Party.

I should say most of this was in the Bay Area. I just moved here, roughly a year ago.

I've been neck deep in the state Democratic Party, and I like to joke that one of my biggest side missions in the California Democratic Party for a number of years has been to make it more pro-housing and more pro-Abundance. And that's taken a lot of work.

But, given the last election cycle in 2024, we saw a big shift with then-Vice President Kamala Harris actually adopting a lot of the housing shortage language and a lot of the messaging that was really important to what YIMBY Democrats for America is really pushing for. It speaks to the origins of YIMBY Democrats and the YIMBYs for Harris movement.

I've been doing that for a number of years, and my approach has always been to come from a grassroots building-power approach. There's enough policy people out there, but I've always been somebody to focus on building power in people because that's really what it takes. The old joke I used to say is: you can be right or you can learn how to win. We know we're right, and we have to work on winning.

So, that's where a lot of my work and background has been spent.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Nice! And Alex and Dulce, can you tell us a little bit about YIMBY Latino?

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

I think this is Alex's baby.

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

One of the things that I started to notice around 2018 and 2019 is – I'm just gonna speak kind of candidly – very oftentimes, I was the only person of color in the room, as both my co-guests are probably familiar with!

But, over time, I did notice the movement start to grow more diverse. There was a variety of online discourse and in-person discourse, not just in the Bay Area, but in the state of California, about YIMBYs and Latinos at odds. But, there were a lot of people in the Abundance and YIMBY movement at the time who were Latino and who saw the connection of how their neighborhoods and displacement efforts were actually being affected by the housing shortage.

One of the reasons why I started that was because I saw a real untapped audience there. There was an untapped group of people who felt like they didn't have a space to be both their, affinity-based self and pro-housing at the same time. There were a couple activists in San Francisco that were actually really mad that I started this!

One of my very first events was a walking tour of a freeway removal in San Francisco at the time. It was to remove the Central Freeway and replace it with a park and housing, and some Latino activists in San Francisco were really upset by that.

But, when I started building this audience, I noticed that there were a lot of people that were happy that they had a space. There were other Latino YIMBYs out there who were really willing to hold their values and hold their representation forward.

Since then, we’ve held a couple of events. I held a panel at the last YIMBYTown on how to make the YIMBY movement more diverse. There was also a secondary panel by one of my good friends at California YIMBY, his name is Jordan, on Latinos in YIMBY. And, since then, it's become just a more common thing to see.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Well, thinking of all of your cultural backgrounds, I'm curious about your experience growing up of housing in your community? I don't think you speak for your entire demographic! But everyone has a community, right?

Think of your community's experience of housing: did you come to feel like you developed a heterodox take on that?

I mean, I think this is one of the most pivotal questions right now in the YIMBY movement and the Abundance movement is. One of the reasons I'm animated about this is because when you have scarcity – when you have a world where there aren't enough homes and it becomes an auction just for a roof over your head – the first people to lose and suffer are going to be marginalized people. They’re going to be vulnerable people, whether they're low income or whether they have historically not had access to certain communities or neighborhoods or levels of wealth.

And it feels like there is a tension, of course, when you have communities that are cultural communities, that are vital, that we want to keep and sustain and thrive and protect, that are at risk from gentrification, that are terrified of being displaced or eradicated by new luxury towers, and so, therefore, you end up fearing the idea of new housing. And then, when you don't create new housing, then you get the opposite effect and the scarcity and hollowing out, not just of those neighborhoods, but of entire cities becoming inaccessible to people. But it's very challenging to talk about!

It's very challenging to think, how do we protect people in a world where we're dealing with 50 years of a built up housing crisis? And so, even the solutions have, in their release valve, challenges and transitions and transformations.

So, big question, because it is a big question: I’m curious for your personal experience and how you think about these wider questions?

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

You know, for me, I came into this as someone who has not struggled with housing. My dad was a farm worker. He lived in farm-provided family housing, and when they sold the farm to build gated communities in South Florida, he was able to buy the housing that we were living in for $45,000 in the mid 1990s. So, at $45,000, we never had to worry about our rent increasing. We never had to worry about interest rates.

As an adult coming into the Los Angeles market and seeing increasing rents, I was able to buy a very, very small condo when prices were down here in downtown Los Angeles. And coming to the understanding that I’d paid 10x what my parents paid for a tiny unit, and then realizing I'm going to have the same mortgage payment for 30 years, and then looking at communities that I now live in in South Los Angeles: there are no condominiums in South Los Angeles.

Actually, there's one condominium in South Los Angeles. It's on MLK and Figueroa, and that is the cheapest unit that you can buy in South Los Angeles. It was like $300,000 for basically a studio.

So, being able to purchase intergenerational wealth – that creation of equity, that creation of stability, of pricing, being able to borrow against your home, equity for college education, for a new car if your car breaks down, and being able to pass something on to the next generation – is really what drove me into the space and thinking about, well, why don't we build more condominiums?

And the laws are complicated around liabilities and everything. So, initially I'm like, we need to build more condos in order to get cheaper housing for families that can afford maybe a $200,000 or 250,000 unit right in Los Angeles. That is half the price of any decrepit house that is on the market right now.

So then going into this and launching a campaign focused on housing and walking the neighborhoods of people living 10 people to a unit – living in squalor, basically units that shouldn't be permitted and living in housing that gets more – I don't know what's the right word – deficient, or used, year over year – it falls into disrepair over time. And, every year, they're charging them more. And I'm just like, why can't people understand that creating more housing would provide more availability?

But also, to your point, you mentioned something about luxury housing. At this point, the housing availability is so decrepit in certain areas that any unit – not luxury, literally any new construction – is just seen as luxury.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Yeah, I mean, I think about this a lot, right? Luxury – of course, there's no meaning to it, right? There's no attribute. It is a branding term, right? It's branding.

And, rather than saying "no luxury housing," I think everyone should have "luxury housing." And I think the more "luxury housing" you build, the more people have "luxury housing," and, God willing, today's luxury becomes tomorrow's expectation. And two tomorrows from now, it becomes just an expected and extended benefit to everybody.

That's what we want, right? We want everyone to have a good home.

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

Also, everyone advertises! I feel like everyone advertises that their building is luxury.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Right! Everyone advertises as luxury, even when it's literally the most basic thing that you can buy.

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Isn't the old adage like, the real luxury housing is a single family home?

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

That's right!

So, I grew up on the West Side of LA in Palms. I think that my neighborhood that I grew up in is very exemplary of this debate around density and the need for more housing. I grew up in a single family home on the West Side of LA, but Palms is also one of the densest parts of West LA. So, I lived on a street with all single family homes, but all the streets around us were mostly apartments, and Palms to this day remains one of the most affordable parts of the West Side of Los Angeles.

It's not that affordable, right? But it is one of the most affordable parts of the West Side of Los Angeles because it's got more units as a neighborhood than almost anywhere else. So it's the perfect encapsulation of more supply offering more elasticity in the housing market and more affordability.

I think the thing that always really gets me when I go back to Palms – and my mom still lives in the house I grew up in – is, because of a lot of the new density incentive programs and things like that, development in Palms has been taking off, especially on some corridors around Overland and Westwood.

I walk around, and I'm, like, “Wow, this is so amazing. You know, Palms is becoming more walkable. It's becoming more interconnected. It’s got a transit stop, which was something I could only dream of when I was growing up as a kid.” You know, so I view it as really exciting, right?

I will say: a lot of folks in the neighborhood I grew up in don't necessarily see it as more exciting.

But I think that, also, Palms and the West Side and the continued exclusionary nature of land use on the West side also points the way forward to me. The complex thing about the housing movement is that we do have to hold these two fundamental things together: that we need more housing extremely urgently, and eviction is a terrible and traumatic thing to go through.

One of the campaigns Abundant Housing has been focusing a lot on over the past year and a half or so is: we need to upzone the hell out of our single family neighborhoods. Especially on the West Side of LA, in some of our most historically exclusionary neighborhoods.

To us, it's no wonder that we have these continuous and revolving cycles of gentrification and displacement because we're closing off more than 75% of our land to new multi-family housing development.

In the National Zoning Atlas that was recently just published – I was just looking at it – 79% of land that you can build housing on in the entire County of Los Angeles, it is illegal to build apartment buildings on.

So, if we really want to avoid gentrification and displacement, what that means is having the courage to confront the exclusionary nature of our land use regulations and reforming single family housing.

That's the only way we're going to do it, right? Making the pie bigger. Opening up the field to where we can build new housing.

Because, as it stands, you can build multifamily housing in, like, half a dozen neighborhoods in LA, and that's it. Right?

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Right! That actually reminds me of the two narratives that we use in that particular aspect. One of them in the housing movement is we have decades, maybe almost a century, of racial segregation that we have to basically undo. And single family housing and our exclusionary policies, unfortunately, have deep roots in that, even in some of our blue cities.

Segregation didn't just happen in the south. It happened here, you know?

One half of the coin is usually redressing a lot of the historical segregation and economic opportunity that has been denied to people. But also, what we're trying to do now is shifting the narrative more to what's possible: the vision of economic development and how can we unlock those particular areas.

I think being able to hold those two together is a powerful narrative for where we should be going.

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

Yeah! I will say: not necessarily zoning writ large, but density restrictions as a part of zoning are – and always have been – a tool of racist and classist exclusion. That's why they were invented. And even if that's not the intent behind them to this day, today, a hundred or so years later, that is what they still function as.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You know, Senator Brian Schatz from Hawaii recently teamed up with another favorite of ours, Congressman Scott Peters, on the new Build Housing Near Transit Act at the Federal level.

Senator Schatz just took the floor of the United States Senate for a barn-burner of a speech on housing, and he did say “zoning is a proxy for racism now being weaponized against the working class.”

And, I have to say, he's 100% right. Zoning was racist. It's not ambiguous. We're not reading between the lines. It’s the same level of clarity as when you ask why did the Confederacy secede from the United States? Like, they told us! They told us it was for slavery!

Zoning: they told us. They wrote it down! It was for racism!

That was the point. It was first to say “black people can't be in this neighborhood” and then to say “Chinese people can't be in this neighborhood.” And, when that was struck down, it was not to say, “oh, that's bad to say black people can't live in the neighborhood.” Or, “oh, that's bad to say Chinese people can't live in the neighborhood.” No! It was struck down because the Supreme Court decided it was bad that those white homeowners didn't have the freedom to sell their homes to whoever they wanted to.

So, living where you wanted, that wasn't the legal issue. The legal issue was people who owned homes and had money being able to sell them to all their customers. Zoning. Is. Racist.

Now, are there elements of zoning like, “the pig slaughter oil factory shouldn't be near my et cetera?” Sure! Sure. Sure. For uses, whatever. But shouldn't people be able to live everywhere? Should that be illegal?

Just because you crossed out where it said “black” and changed it to “apartments?” I don't think so! I don't think you can wink your way away from that!

And, when we talk about gentrification, I think we need to be thinking about the mirror image of that. “Here's a middle class cultural neighborhood, and what happens if wealthy white people move in?” Well, what about the neighborhoods of only wealthy white people (or only wealthy whoever can tap their way into that neighborhood)? I think the people from the cultural scenes and middle class should be able to move there! Right? Every neighborhood should be for everyone, right?

If you can build it – if it's your land, if you want to make a home, if you want to make a skyscraper, if you want to make a bunch of apartment buildings, if you can find a place to rent there for a night, a week, a month, a year, buy for the rest of your life – people should be able to live.

If you're an American in the United States, you have to be able to live where you want in America.

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Your neighbors shouldn't get to choose who's deserving and who's not.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

No, it's bizarre!

It's a neighborhood; it's not a private membership club.

And this drives me crazy. I remember being in San Francisco. I met somebody who's part of a local San Francisco Democratic Club for the West Side, which is very suburban, and he was saying we shouldn't build housing and shouldn't build apartments there because the neighborhood had decided, as a neighborhood, they did not want three story buildings.

I just couldn't help but think, “Man, if the neighborhood decided they didn't want Chinese people there, then this guy, me, all of us would rightly say ‘that is b******t and unacceptable. Your local rule ends where human rights begin. It is not your property. It is not your call. Be racist in your own house. The neighborhood is for anyone.’”

And I think that's got to be – if we want opportunity to be for everyone, if we want to lift everybody up, if we want to live by our Progressive values, that means letting people live.

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

Yeah, they're those, like jokes you see of someone with one of those lawn signs in front of the house. Like, “in this house we love everyone, we accept, everyone's welcome, blah, blah, blah.” Except, you know, you can't build any new housing. You know, you can't build an apartment building, you can't build affordable housing, whatever it is – not here. It's not good enough. There's too much traffic, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

I mean, we have to be honest with ourselves. It's a huge problem in Liberal circles and Democratic circles, you know? Most people in West LA are Liberals, but they still don't see the irony. I feel like a lot of Democrats and Liberal Progressive folks in LA don't see the irony in trying to say, we're a sanctuary city, we welcome immigrants, but housing is so unaffordable that we can't functionally welcome anyone.

You know, my parents are immigrants. They came here from Iran. They came to LA because it was a place full of opportunity. It was affordable. But we are closing the door behind us to the next generation of folks who want to come to LA – whether it's from other places in the United States or from abroad – and make a life here and pursue happiness here. We're not going to provide that kind of place unless we make housing.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You know, Trump doesn't talk about The Wall so much anymore, now that he has concentration camps to play with, but in his first term, it was a very routine event for San Francisco NIMBY activists: maybe in the same day you would protest Trump's Wall and also say, verbatim, “we should build a wall around San Francisco.”

I just don't think we should have walls in America!

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

This is the hypocrisy that basically got me into the YIMBY movement in the first place around 2017 or 2018, when I was coming off of being a young college advocate in Democratic Party circles.

I went to some of my local Democratic clubs where everybody was significantly older than me. There was probably one person closer to my age, and it was nice to be around people who had the same kinds of values as I did. And then, when I tried to mention housing nearby, all I got was, “oh, oh no, I mean, like, we don't want that near us.” I'm like, “wait a minute! That's holding our values in our own neighborhood, though!” It's like, why wouldn't we want to do that? And it's something I feel is coming to a head, particularly right now, as we're trying to offer a better vision for the Democratic Party of how we open up Blue cities.

I mean, to some of the earlier points, it's not just sanctuary city policies. We have a lot of these protective policies for people of marginalized identities. Open communities for the LGBTQ+ community. Sanctuary city policies. We just codified abortion rights in California. But the thing that we don't usually recognize enough – or we're starting to recognize now – is: that's only as good as the access that we allow. And we don't have that access! We can't provide our Blue cities and Blue areas, where we have these protections, with adequate, affordable, and abundant housing.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

It is a sick hypocrisy, I think, at the heart of our values and our identity of who we are as Progressives and Democrats that I think is tantamount to a betrayal of promises we've made.

Los Angeles is a sanctuary city, proudly. San Francisco is a proud sanctuary city. Are they sanctuary cities? Not if you can't live there!

If you can't afford the sanctuary, it's not a sanctuary. So these are not – these are sanctuary cities with walls against people who are coming to our doors seeking sanctuary. And I don't mean coming to our doors from outside the country. I mean they're in this country, and they have contributed to their communities, and they are good Americans – even if not in name yet – and people who need sanctuary and people that we claim to be protecting and offering sanctuary and safe haven to. But we are not. It's not a sanctuary if you can't afford it.

And this is, I think, also true for the queer community, and for any kind of marginalized communities. Again, San Francisco prides itself on being a haven for the downtrodden and a refuge and a place where you can find your community and your people and anyone can be accepted. But only if you can afford it, right?

The days of Harvey Milk are gone. If you are a trans kid growing up in Oklahoma, you cannot dream of finding your people in San Francisco. You can't afford it. It is off the map for you.

That, to me, is unacceptable.

That, to me, is a betrayal of who we are as Progressives.

And that, I think, is why Abundance is the road, not just to Progressive victories in elections, but to Progressive victories on policy. To Progressive victories in our culture and values and the identity of who we are as Americans. I think this stuff matters for becoming who we say we are.

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

You could say the same for refugees. I’m half Mexican, and I've spent a lot of time organizing a lot of Latinos in the YIMBY space. But I'm also half Afghan, and one of the pivotal points for me in Democratic Party politics and activism and Progressive policies in general was refugee policies.

In 2021, Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, and what you saw was a wave of Afghan refugees trying to come into this country. And the Bay Area and California in particular is the biggest hub of Afghans outside of the country of Afghanistan. And it was near impossible for a lot of these refugee organizations to be able to find affordable places where these refugees can actually integrate into communities.

It was something that I found really disappointing. I will say, one of the things that I did notice, if we're talking about larger coalition politics, is that refugee orgs have started to hop on the Abundance movement!

In my prior work at YIMBY Action as a National Chapter Manager and Equity Organizing Manager, I often met with refugee organizations where, outside of actual refugee policy, their second biggest goal was trying to build enough housing to make sure that they can have areas where their refugees could actually live in the communities and where they can properly integrate.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Well, I'm thrilled, and even a little emotional, to know that refugee groups are getting behind building homes. The fate of – and how we've treated – Afghan refugees is pretty near and dear to my heart.

I am a survivor of Al-Qaeda terrorism. I lived through an attack that they coordinated on the London Underground that was planned by Ayman al-Zawahiri.

When the US military was in Afghanistan, so many civilians and Afghans helped us out beyond measure and absolutely risked not just their lives but their entire family's lives. They took a risk that a partnership with the US could work. That America would stand true to our values. That we would keep our promises. That we would protect them. That they could bet on civil society, and they didn't have to collaborate with the Taliban, or they didn't have to participate in a perpetual cycles of violence.

So many people took that risk for us. To keep their countrymen safe. To keep us safe. To help us track down bin Laden and dismantle al Qaeda and the Taliban.

And then, when we got out of there, we said, “see ya.” And we broke those promises.

Now you've got people who worked for us as translators, as spies, as couriers, as local ambassadors, and as people who helped us move around Afghanistan, who were promised that we would keep them safe, whether they're in Afghanistan or here.

And they're not, now. They're not safe. In either place.

And so, it's just another betrayal to me.

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

I have a family member with some horror stories on that, particularly.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

I do, on the positive side, though, want give a shout out to Sean VanDiver, my friend down in San Diego, who started Project Afghan Evac, who has been doing a ton of policy work, like hearings in DC, to help protect and evacuate at the time and now protect the Afghan refugees that are here.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Well, speaking of shoutouts, I'm curious what's going on in LA right now, and who's rocking it? Who – whether they're an activist, an organizer, an academic or scholar, a policy thinker, city planner, someone in local government – who's doing great right now? Who deserves a shout out? What's the state of play in LA right now? And who should we be excited about and be championing?

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

There are some great bright spots, and there's some great folks.

First, right now, I'm going to shout out Council Member Nithya Raman on the LA City Council, who has been absolutely leading the charge on pro-housing policy in the City of Los Angeles. She just released a raft of motions, all focused on making the housing development and permitting system better, faster, and more efficient in the City of Los Angeles. Tackling ADUs. Condo-ization. Tackling power hookups for new multifamily buildings. She is whip-smart, on-the-ball, and really thinking about how we can build more housing faster in the City of LA.

I don't think it's limited to the city of LA either. We are a county of 88 different jurisdictions, and the County of Los Angeles, which administers the municipal affairs of 1.5 million people in the unincorporated LA County. I think West Hollywood is doing a great job.

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Santa Monica.

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

West Hollywood, Culver City, and Santa Monica are three Progressive West Side cities that, in the last election, all elected pro-housing city councils, and there are a lot of really great folks.

Jesse Zwick and Natalya Zernitskaya in Santa Monica are also really leading the charge out there. Bubba Fish and Yasmine-Imani McMorrin in Culver City. John Erickson in West Hollywood.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Chelsea Byers!

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

And Chelsea Byers in West Hollywood.

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

New Council Member Danny Hang!

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

And Denny Hang!

Those are three of the five. So, there are some great folks really leading the charge. I would even say that our smaller cities right now in LA County are on the leading edge of housing reform. In LA County, I would say they are showing the City of LA – which is the big boy in our region – how it's done, what you should be doing, and how to lead with moral courage on the housing crisis.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Those are three great cities that have strong economic cores, strong restaurant scenes, and strong nightlife, and adding to their resident population just increases the foot traffic, not just from tourism, but literally on a 24/7 basis. So I really love those three.

I am hopeful for the future. We have some really fantastic candidates running in 2026 that have, from the jump, adopted this Abundance, pro-housing, we're-gonna-get-this-done mentality. So I'm really excited about '26.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Anyone in particular you think we should be watching?

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Sarah Hernandez, who would oversee, I think, half of or most of Downtown.

Downtown needs a lot of help. I figured at some point we might address the sort of elephant in the background?

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Tell us!

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

This was the failed project that lost funding during the pandemic. And, at some point – what was that now, two years ago? – we had these gorilla graffiti artists tag literally all three buildings on every single floor.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

That's it? That’s the one?

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

That's the one! That's the Graffiti Tower. Yeah, this is it.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Look at that!

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Yeah, this is it. I mean, look at how many units we could have on the market! Literally. I know that it's been sitting there for a while. It's been exposed to the elements. There's funding –

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

$800 million to finish!

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Yeah! But the fact that our city paid how many millions of dollars to protect this building from further damage? When it's privately owned?

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

My contrarian viewpoint on this is that we should make it a historic cultural monument and never change it. And we should feature it in the Olympics. Like the Olympic torch lighting ceremony should happen right in front of it.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

I mean, honestly? I disagree and don't disagree. I have thought about, like, in the way that when you tore down the Berlin wall, you had fragments of it as artwork. You should take down every single one of these glass mirror unit things and sell them off at auction. Literally spread it around the world and raise money.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

I would also say: a skyscraper of rogue graffiti is exactly the kind of thing that becomes, 50 years later, a cultural monument. Right? And becomes beloved. And everybody wants to live by this graffiti skyscraper.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

But look at this! You're next to so much. There's a train station right there. There's the center of entertainment here in Los Angeles. The Staples Center. The Peacock Theater. The et cetera. Like, this is it. You're in the center of the city. This could be utilized to actually house people.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

How does this factor into YIMBYism? Because it seems like a housing failure, right? It’s a private developer. They get permission to build a big tower. And they didn't sell the units.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Three big towers. Three three big towers. And they didn't sell the units.

And now it's, well, they couldn't even finish. They couldn't finish. They couldn't finish. They lost their funding during the pandemic. Yeah. Couldn't finish it. Yeah. It's a failure. From all sorts of sides.

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Well, we don't have to go that deep for it. We can just basically state that a lot of the policies that we have right now that prevent the development of housing – there's like a laundry list, you know – and increase the cost of development – it becomes hard. Like, this is why you can't find new funding for this sort of stuff. The old adage, this is why we can't have nice things, unfortunately. It's because of all of these restrictions. All of these – you know, CEQA's receiving some reform – there may not be one particular issue that caused this particular death here, but it's adding those up and why you can't secure enough funding to redevelop it or even finish the project.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Yeah, I mean, it's such a good point, right? In terms of how constrained our housing is by the cost just to build it and get it permitted, and by the fact that community developers are shut out in favor of bigger and more corporate developers because theirs are the only projects that can pencil out and they’re the only people who can spend the money to endure years and processes and grease the wheels of government –

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

There's an entire economy of lobbyists and consultants to just get permits and to get things passed. There's probably billions of dollars in just consultants.

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

I think this is a point that I feel like gets missed, and we do really need to hit, is that the people who really benefit from regulations that either ban new housing or make it difficult to build are large corporate developers and large corporate landlords.

You know who really loves housing scarcity? Large national corporate landlords.

And it's also not a secret! They put it in their Quarterly Earnings Reports! Like, “oh, Seattle built more housing and so now we can't charge as much.” Those are the incumbents that really benefit from these kinds of regulations.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Yeah. The sum of all NIMBY fears, the NIMBY nightmare scenario of rampant YIMBYism? That is the current system!

That world of extreme corporate consolidation, where only the big guys can thrive and we're all shut out? That is the current system!

Community developers, you can't do it. You don't have the money. You don't have the resources. You don't have the connections. You don't have the time. It's only a few big companies that can do it. And so the housing they build is always the big luxury towers, because that's the only thing that pencils out.

Or, my favorite little pet thing, as an aesthetic guy: those horrid 5-over-1s of gentrification architecture? The fact that that's not some brilliant architectural scheme or what we are condemned to build for housing because we've lost the arts. That's in the law!

You can't build a beautiful Parisian Haussmannian building! You must, in fact, vary the colors at certain increments, and the heights and the shapes and the textures. And those clunky-ass horrid gentrification buildings where you're like, “who wants to live there? Not me! Why is that here?” That is mandated and prescribed!

We live in the oligarchy and the corporate takeover that shuts the rest of us out. That is the current system of intense permitting regulations. And we can be the antidote.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

You know, I think about this all the time as I'm driving down the 110, because all of these horrific Italian-style 5-story apartment buildings built by Jeffrey Palmer, the big Republican –

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

In 2016, he was Donald Trump's single biggest individual donor.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Right! So, I get nauseous thinking about this. I get nauseous looking at them. But also, it's the cheapest housing you can find downtown Los Angeles.

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

We were talking about the NIMBY fear? It's because most of our land is locked up under exclusionary policies and under single family zoning!

This could be a good time to tie in a recent policy that was going around in the YIMBY world in LA, which was ED 1. It was a directive by the Mayor of LA to speed up the permitting process for particularly 100% affordable housing. Azeen can correct me if I miss some of the policy details here, but in the City of LA, what people didn't know when it was started was that single family zoned areas were included in that policy for a while. And what you saw was tons of permits being sent in for development of multi-family affordable housing in these single family zoned areas.

Why? Because it was possible! Because there wasn't as much land value speculation, and the whole area was unlocked for that kind of potential.

And then that got pulled back as soon as people started to figure out that was the case.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Yeah, and the conversation about gentrification, I think, always misses the areas that are already gentrified, namely by what I think you might call “the Landed Gentry.” Which is to say: single family homes, single estates.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

There is a whole other conversation around gentrification, or what now we have coined as the Left NIMBYs (and I wish I had had that vernacular in 2022!). Something very real is, in these minority communities that are concerned about gentrification, where to buy a house is three quarters of a million dollars, you start getting white people moving in and they're like, “we don't want you here.” Well, it's like, “that couple would've bought a three quarters of a million town home in Santa Monica, but it doesn't exist, right? So, you need to get on the movement to create that town home in Santa Monica if you don't want them moving into these neighborhoods!”

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Yeah, I mean, this is what we've been dealing with in San Francisco, right? Wealthy people want to move somewhere that is disruptive, but, you know what? If you don't build them a shiny place to live, they're not going to not come to San Francisco. They're going to just take your home. Drive up the price of your home. And now, everybody moves down a rung and is worse off.

We, in the conversation around gentrification, when we think of urban renewal and Robert Moses and that horrid era of obliterating neighborhoods – when we don't build homes and we make it hard to build homes, we're just obliterating neighborhoods in advance.

You would never go into somebody's home and say, “you can't live here anymore. I'm knocking this down.” We talk about evictions. We talk about displacement. It's not somehow moral if you do it in advance.

If you wouldn't, once that building's built, go kick out everyone who lives there and tell them they're homeless now, don't do it before the building's built!

Those are all homes that people are going to live in. People with families. People who need them. People who are ready to be a part of your neighborhood community and your neighborhood character.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

You know, we talked about the Supreme Court decision around who you can sell to, right? So, we're having that conversation now in historically minority communities, where people have owned those homes for 60, 70, 80 years, they're passing away in their homes at ages 90 to 100. Their children are in their 60s and have their homes already elsewhere and just want to cash out, and there's this movement around, like, “well, don't only, like, sell your home to black, Latino, or whatever,” right? But it's like, “well, this is their retirement. This is their generational wealth that they're passing on. Wouldn't you want them to sell for the highest dollar if they've invested their whole life in this?”

And I just think that type of mentality is very toxic.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

You know, I have two dreams here, right? One is for any American to live anywhere. So that you would never say, “oh, I'm a white homeowner and I will only sell to white people.” And you also don't have to say, “oh, I own this piece of property in my cultural community, I will only sell to members of my culture.” Everyone in every culture should be able to go everywhere and be the full expression of themselves everywhere.

And part of that full expression that I dream about is, when we talk about neighborhood character, when we talk about culture, the argument right now is still a scarcity argument, right? It's about displacement and change, right?

I want us to think about extension and growth and glory and taking neighborhood character and saying, “it's not the height, it's the people, it's the culture, it's the aesthetics, and how can neighborhood character actually grow skyward?”

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

I was going to say, I have a couple narrative frames on this that I've thought about for a while. I want to tie this back to the organizing and the people and what we're trying to focus on with the Democratic Party. Everyday people. I'm going to take an old expression from one of my old YIMBY friends who was a Planning Commissioner back in my hometown of the Bay Area, specifically on the neighborhood character.

I distinctly remember he said this one time at a Council meeting, and it just stuck with me forever. He was like, “our city is great, so let's make more of it.”

That’s the core messaging we should really focus on.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Yeah! I don't just want to see the historic Latino neighborhood. I want to see a new, historic, tall, Latino neighborhood! I want to see skyscrapers that look like the culture and the aesthetic and the imagery and the heritage and the architecture and the colors.

Skyscrapers, homes, apartment buildings, buildings in general – these are monuments. These are works of art. Or at least they could be.

These are expressions of who we are and our culture and what we value. And I think we should think of our neighborhoods not just as changing and evolving, but as canvases for us to paint on and leave our mark on. And if we have a culture and a community and a heritage and a history that we care about – and we all do, and hopefully many – we should be asking how to show that off to other people and to future generations by what we paint in brick and mortar and where we live and how we live and what we do together.

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

And I think what's important about this narrative framework of focusing on people is that it's easy to get caught up in,the number of units and the density and the height –

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

And the parking spaces!

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

The parking space! All these numbers, right?

At the end of the day, we really need to come back to the fact that these are not just units. These are homes for people.

The barista that you see every day at the coffee shop you go to. The person who takes care of your kids at daycare. Whoever. They're people in your community. And these can be homes for them.

And also that, through effective outcomes-focused policy and good housing policy, we can provide for people. Provide for people and enable them to flourish throughout their entire lives.

You know, we are an organization that is certainly very pro-tenant protections and pro-rent stabilization and very pro-housing and more housing supply, right? Because a critical component here is that people change. They grow. They have kids. They create families.

And so, as your circumstances change, we also want to make sure that you don't have to leave LA because, “oh, I have two kids now and I need more space and more space means unaffordable rent, so I'm going to move to Riverside or San Bernardino, you know, or Arizona or Las Vegas or wherever.”

Building more housing and ensuring that there's enough supply of all kinds of housing means that we can allow people to grow and change and age in place and not force people to move to wherever because they can't afford a home.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

And, oh, by the way: if you do leave, you can come back.

I think that's important. Te idea that you can always come back.

And I hope to come back to LA soon! This has been a delight! We could do this for hours – and I want to – but we're not going to. But, no, it's been delightful. It's such an honor to be with all three of you, and I hope to return to LA and be welcomed back and do this again soon!

Alex, Dulce, Azeen: any final thoughts?

And, real fast Lightning Round: where can people find you? Where can they follow your work? How can they get involved?

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

We are at AbundantHousingLA.org. We have 17 chapters all throughout LA County. We have fun ways to get involved, like Happy Hours, and boring ways to get involved, like sitting through a City Council meeting to give public comment. Check us out. Check out what we've got going on. We love new members and new people.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Dulce Vasquez. I'm @Vasquez on TikTok and Instagram. I'm going to start ramping up some political content for the 2026 election.

And, speaking of politics and elections, just on people's radar: SB 79 if you're in California!

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Alex Melendres. My handle at pretty much every social media is @ACMelendrez, M-E-L-E-N-D-R-E-Z.

I also want to give a quick shout out to two LA candidates, Sarah Hernandez and John Erickson, both of which are running for the State Senate.

And, if I had something final, I'd say go register to vote!

Because that kind of matters at the end of the day.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Thank you, Alex, Dulce, Azeen! Such an honor. So much fun.

Thank you for joining me today. Thank you for joining us on Radio Abundance!

Thank you for the welcome to LA. Let's do it again soon.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Thank you!

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Thanks for having us!

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

Thank you so much!

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