Four candidates are trying to unseat the incumbent in L.A. City Council District 1, which includes the neighborhoods of Highland Park and Westlake, among others.
Robert Greene
is an independent journalist in Los Angeles. He is a 2026-27 John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation fellow.
The incumbent faces a primary challenge from his upstairs neighbor, as well as two others, in District 13, which includes Echo Park, Atwater Village and much of Hollywood.
Los Angeles City Council District 1 runs from Pico-Union to Northeast Los Angeles, covering all or parts of 22 city-designated neighborhoods, many of which serve as L.A.’s ports of entry and first residences for generations of immigrants.
Citywide housing costs have attracted first-time homebuyers to this district and pushed apartment rents here higher, causing concern about displacement of longtime residents. Parts of the district remain among the nation’s most densely populated neighborhoods.
Once located in the San Fernando Valley, the district was redrawn in roughly its present location in 1987 in response to a lawsuit over underrepresentation of Latino voters.
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What’s at stake in the City Council races
L.A. voters in 2026 will choose who will be their chief steward of city services in each of eight odd-numbered council districts (look up your district here) for the next four years and will determine the ideological makeup and effectiveness of the 15-member City Council.
Challenges include federal immigration enforcement, homelessness, the city’s readiness for the 2027 Super Bowl and the 2028 Summer Olympics and continuing city budget shortfalls.
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What does a City Council member do?
Council members have three distinct roles:
Each member curates their district by identifying local problems and opportunities and working with more than 40 city departments to steer needed services to residents and businesses. They may work to bring in non-city resources in the form of county, state, federal or philanthropic grants. They serve as intermediaries between their constituents and City Hall. Members play a vital role in shaping development in their districts.
As part of the full-time, 15-member council, they set citywide policy, adopt ordinances, commission studies and provide a counterweight and oversight to the mayor and city departments and bureaus. They adopt an annual city budget ($14 billion in 2025-26) based on a proposal provided by the mayor, divvying up money among the Los Angeles Police Department, homeless services, libraries, parks, sidewalk repair and tree-trimming, among other services. They approve or reject the mayor’s appointments to city commissions and to lead most city departments. They focus on areas such as policing and public safety by leading or serving as members of council committees.
Council members often work outside their formal roles through appointment to other governmental boards such as Metro and the Metropolitan Water District and by providing leadership in their communities through assisting charities, schools and civic institutions.
District 9 in South L.A. is one of the most competitive races for a City Council seat in the June 2 primary, partly because the incumbent is termed out.
Fast facts about the City Council
Each City Council member represents about 260,000 Angelenos.
Annual salary is $244,727.
A term lasts four years. Members may serve a maximum of three terms.
City elections are non-partisan.
Voters may have a chance to enlarge the council from the current 15 members to 25 members under a charter reform proposal that supporters say will provide better representation. (As a point of comparison, several other major cities have far larger councils. New York has a 51-member City Council. Chicago has a 50-member council.) It’s up to the current council whether to put the question on the Nov. 3 ballot.
What it takes to win
Candidates who win more than 50% of the vote June 2 will be sworn into office in December. If no candidate wins more than 50%, a runoff between the top two vote-getters will be held Nov. 3.
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The candidates in City Council District 1
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Some candidates did not reply to our requests for images. Some did not have a campaign website and/or list of endorsements available online at the time of publication. We will update this guide as more candidate information becomes available.
Eunisses Hernandez, incumbent
Eunisses Hernandez
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Courtesy Eunisses Hernandez
)
Eunisses Hernandez defeated two-term incumbent Gil Cedillo in June 2022 and will complete her first term in December. A lifelong Highland Park resident, she previously worked as a criminal justice reform advocate with the Drug Policy Alliance and co-founded reform group La Defensx. She co-chaired L.A. County Measure J, a successful 2020 ballot measure to reallocate funding to community investment and alternatives to policing and incarceration. She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Hernandez describes herself as “the tip of the progressive spear” on the council. She was the sole “no” vote on the city budget in her first term because she opposed allocations to be used to hire police.
Her chief first-term achievements include building out a pilot program for unarmed crisis response for social and mental health to redirect calls from police to clinicians, a program now due to go citywide. As chair of the council’s Public Works Committee, she helped lead an effort to solarize street lights to prevent outages caused by copper wire theft. That effort may expand citywide under a program announced in March by Mayor Karen Bass. Hernandez defends her handling of MacArthur Park, which her opponents criticize for open-air drug dealing and disarray. She cites rapid overdose response and street medicine teams and peace ambassadors for reducing deaths and violence and has directed county and philanthropic funds to improve the park.
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If reelected, Hernandez’s goals include expanding housing by encouraging construction on vacant lots, expanding non-police crisis response and making MacArthur Park a clean and safe place that attracts families who live nearby. “I want them to have nice things,” she said.
Nelson Grande grew up in Highland Park and worked in sales and as a model and actor before becoming a consultant to entertainment clients on tech matters and representation of Latinos in media. He co-founded an entertainment production company and a streaming service.
He calls himself a “pragmatic progressive.” He’s part of a neighborhood group in Highland Park installing sirens that users could activate from smartphone apps to warn residents and workers about the approach of federal immigration agents. The LAPD has said the sirens could violate the city’s noise ordinance. A federal prosecutor said it could violate laws against assisting people who are in the country unlawfully.
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Grande said he would use a county ordinance known as Sec. 41.18 to remove homeless encampments near schools and other sensitive areas and said he would put homeless people to work picking up trash and and similar community-improvement tasks. He wants to support legacy businesses with a concierge-type service to help with permitting, increasing foot traffic, improving adjacent landscaping and other improvements.
“I look at things, I audit things, I look at the operational flow, where dollars are leaking,” Grande said, asserting that he would help the city make better use of funding meant to house the homeless.
Sylvia Robledo is a public affairs and communications consultant who previously worked as a field deputy delivering constituent services for District 1 Councilmember Gil Cedillo. Before that, Robledo worked as an aide to Councilmember Jan Perry. She worked on community-based health initiatives at California Hospital Medical Center and was Western Regional Director for Emily’s List. Her online program Political Sazon featured interviews of elected officials and community leaders at iconic eateries on L.A.’s Eastside and examined political issues including immigration reform. More recently, she was a contestant in the inaugural season of The Golden Bachelor.
Robledo’s campaign focuses on what she says will be a restoration of constituent services in the district. She said she would make careful use of Sec. 41.18 to remove homeless encampments from sensitive areas, such as near schools, after trying to move people from the street to shelter voluntarily. She supports increasing the size of the LAPD to make more officers available on the street.
Robledo was 14 valid signatures short on her nomination petitions just before the filing deadline. She was assisted by fellow challengers Maria “Lou” Calanche and Nelson Grande, who signed her petition, and Raul Claros, who gathered signatures for her from his own supporters in order to make it less likely for Hernandez to win more than 50% of the vote in June and avoid a November runoff.
Community organizer Raul Claros grew up in the Pico-Union Westlake area, then left L.A. for college in Iowa. He coached baseball at Los Angeles High School and created and ran an afterschool program at a city park.
“I had to bring cops, prostitutes, gang members and other people [in the] community to agree to make the park safe for the youth,” he said. “That became the basis of my community organizing.”
Later he became executive director of the American Red Cross Los Angeles Region and served on city boards, including the Affordable Housing Commission and the Police Permit Review panel. He currently serves on a homelessness advisory board for District Attorney Nathan Hochman and founded and leads a neighborhood advocacy nonprofit called California Rising. He lives in Chinatown with his young daughter.
If elected, Claros has promised to live in a trailer at MacArthur Park for the first 100 days of his term to draw attention to the problems there and to rally assistance from police and other officials to remove drug dealers and users. He said he would seek full implementation of Proposition 36, a 2024 ballot measure to require treatment or prison for drug users with multiple convictions. He vowed to use Sec. 41.18 to move homeless encampments away from children and families.
Claros said voters in his district elected Eunisses Hernandez in 2022 “because we were desperate. We wanted anybody but the old guard. That was a mistake.” He now calls himself the official founder of the “Anybody but Eunisses” movement. He gathered signatures for fellow challenger Sylvia Robledo, whom he called his “sister in the struggle” to make a runoff against Hernandez more likely.
Maria “Lou” Calanche grew up in Ramona Gardens in Boyle Heights. As a teenager, she began a girls’ softball program to reclaim Hazard Park, near Los Angeles General Medical Center, for families and young people. Noticed for her community involvement, she was recruited by Councilmember Richard Alatorre as a field deputy for Boyle Heights and served in that position for three years. She later became a professor at East L.A. College but left the tenured position to help build the nonprofit Legacy L.A. to promote youth development and gang prevention. Mayor Eric Garcetti appointed her to the Board of Police Commissioners, and she used the position to advocate for more mental health workers to respond to police calls when appropriate. She lives in Montecito Heights.
Calanche said the city lacks a cohesive vision, making it difficult to coordinate officials and departments to get anything done. If elected, she said, she would create a city that sees everything it pursues through the lens of children and families.
She said she would use the same skills and drive that helped her to clean up Hazard Park in order to rescue MacArthur Park and the drug users who live and would otherwise die there.
“I’ve done it before,” she said. “I know where the resources are. I know how to collaborate.”
She said she would press county government to provide more mental health care in the district but would explore the city creating its own public health department because, she said, the county falls short. She said she would use Sec. 41.18 to move homeless encampments away from schools and other places that children and families gather.
The incumbent faces a primary challenge from his upstairs neighbor, as well as two others, in District 13, which includes Echo Park, Atwater Village and much of Hollywood.
