Endorsement: Heather Hutt for Los Angeles City Council District 10

Heather Hutt standing in the rotunda at L.A. City Hall

Sept. 16, 2024 5 AM PT

Two years ago, Heather Hutt was appointed to the Los Angeles City Council representing District 10 as an interim replacement for Mark Ridley-Thomas, who had been removed from the council after being indicted on federal corruption charges. She was named as a permanent replacement in April 2023 after Ridley-Thomas was convicted. She is now running for a full term on the Nov. 5 ballot.

Her challenger is Grace Yoo, a trusts and estates lawyer with a history of activism in the district on various issues who has served as an L.A. City Commissioner, a neighborhood council member and executive director of the Korean American Coalition in Los Angeles. She lost her bid for this seat in 2020 and is running again to represent District 10, which includes the neighborhoods of Koreatown, Mid-City, Baldwin Hills and Leimert Park.

There are things to admire about both of them — their community service, their determination, their outreach to the district. We don’t doubt that each wants to serve vigorously all the various communities in the district.

Of the two, we recommend Hutt for the seat. She has earned the respect of other City Council members who have found her collaborative and thoughtful on the issues during the two years she has sat on the council. Before she was appointed, she was chief of staff to former Council President Herb Wesson during the several months that he served as an interim council member for the seat. She wins kudos for constituent services from neighborhood activists and for showing up at numerous community events which council members often, understandably, don’t have time to attend.

Hutt, who grew up in the district, also has relevant political experience. She served as state director for then-Sen. Kamala Harris and district director for Isadore Hall III when he served in the state Legislature.

On homelessness, one of the big issues in her district and the rest of the city, she has retained Ridley-Thomas’ humane outreach strategy and has worked to move people out of encampments and into both temporary and permanent housing. She recounts a story of personally trying to convince two women living in tents near a busy street to move into housing. When they declined, she had outreach workers go back to the women four days in a row to talk to them and finally persuade them to take housing.

We’re heartened by her compassion. But she will need to be tough-minded when it comes to pushing for affordable housing. She says she wholeheartedly supports the creation of more affordable housing in her district but she doesn’t seem ready to push back against residents who don’t want it in their neighborhoods.

For example, she seconded a motion from Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky to stop fast-tracking affordable housing — which Mayor Karen Bass has championed with Executive Directive 1— in historic preservation zones to address concerns from residents. In the rest of the district, she said, she’s willing to discuss with neighbors any opposition they have to affordable housing projects and try to dissuade them. But there will be times when she will need to support a project even if neighbors oppose it. The city desperately needs multi-unit affordable housing and it will never build enough of it if council members bend to NIMBY pressure. We expect her to have enough backbone to stand up to them.

Hutt has other challenges ahead. She speaks enthusiastically about keeping small local businesses in the commercial corridors of the district where rising rents threaten to run them out. But she will need to come up with specific plans to support or even subsidize those businesses. She’s been a supporter of safer streets and backed Measure HLA, which voters approved in March, that requires the city to install bike, bus and pedestrian improvements on city streets. Hutt, as head of the City Council’s Transportation Committee, will need to make sure the city follows through on its commitments.

Yoo is smart and capable. Like Hutt, she says she understands how much L.A. needs affordable housing. But, she has been on the wrong side of some issues and then changed her mind later. For instance, in 2017, she supported the anti-development, slow-growth Measure S proposal (which was resoundingly defeated.) She says now she realizes it would have only exacerbated our housing crisis and she would not support it today.

Hutt has so far done a respectable job in this position. And we believe she can grow stronger and get better at it.