This past Sunday afternoon, the Westside Regional Alliance of Councils (WRAC) hosted a candidate forum for Los Angeles City Council District 11 at Venice First Lutheran Church. All three candidates showed up: incumbent Traci Park, public interest attorney Faizah Malik, and entrepreneur Jeremy Weinberg.
I wasn’t expecting any revelations. As you are all mostly aware, I’ve been tracking Traci Park’s policies, propaganda, and political machinery since she first ran. But what made this forum notable wasn’t new information — it was the setting. For once, Park was outside her media fortress. No Westside Current filtering. No curated press pool. No scripted town hall where she controls the questions and the audience (that we know of). This was a public forum with a live moderator and two opponents who weren’t going to let her talking points go unchallenged.
And the cracks showed.
Before I get into it — for those who don’t know me, I’m Mike Bravo. Fifth generation Venice Chicano. Two-term VNC board member. And despite what certain publications and institutions would have you believe about who carries the Indigenous and anti-gentrification activism torch on the Westside — it’s me. I’ve sat in these rooms. I know how agendas get shaped, who gets heard, who gets managed, and whose priorities dominate the conversation. What follows isn’t outside observation. It’s experiential institutional knowledge.
Quick credit where it’s due: organizing an event like this takes real work, and the WRAC volunteers put in the effort. The format also did something local media consistently fails to do — it gave visibility equity to the other candidates. When Westside Current and the broader local media landscape cater to Park’s gentrification-friendly narrative, a forum like this at least creates space for other voices to be heard side by side.
That said, let’s talk about the room itself.
The Room: WRAC and the Neighborhood Council Ecosystem
WRAC is a coalition of 14 neighborhood and community councils on the Westside. Sounds democratic on paper. In practice — and I say this as a two-term VNC board member who’s navigated these dynamics from the inside — these spaces skew white, older, and homeowner-class. BIPOC and traditional residents lack meaningful representation. The extreme few BIPOC folks who do participate tend to go along with the status quo. The conversations and priorities that dominate are gentry-centered. Notice how no topics of ICE or displacement of traditional residents came up.
That matters because the audience influences the performance. When Park tells the room “every community I go in, the conversation is always how do we get more police” — she’s describing a self-selected audience, not “the community.” When the questions focus on policing, Venice Dell, and whether Mike Bonin did a good job — those are topics whose perception has already been shaped by gentrification-aligned media outlets before they ever hit a public forum. By the time the question is asked, the framing has already done its work.
Also worth noting: the event rules prohibited any independent filming, recording, or live streaming. Only the official video — hosted on YouTube by the church and shared by WRAC — was permitted. Still photography was allowed “if not disruptive.” Who controls the footage controls the narrative. For a public forum about a public office, that was an interesting choice that shouldn’t go unconsidered.
Park’s Opening: Fear as Foundation
Park’s opening statement was a masterclass in the propaganda template she’s been running since day one. Let’s break it down.
She opens by walking the audience “back in time” to 2020, 2021, 2022 — listing encampment locations one after another like a horror movie roll call: Mar Vista Park, Westchester Park, the Venice ABH, Centennial Park, Ocean Front Walk, the Bundy Triangle, and on and on. The message is clear: remember the chaos? Remember how bad it was?
What she conveniently erased from that timeline is a global pandemic. COVID-19 devastated every major city’s infrastructure, overwhelmed social services, and drove a national surge in unsheltered homelessness. That’s not a Mike Bonin problem. That’s a systemic crisis that every city in America was navigating. But Park doesn’t do systemic analysis. She does boogeymen.
Then comes the pivot: from all that manufactured fear, she lands on the “comeback story.” Baywatch is filming. FIFA World Cup is coming. The Olympics are next. Venice went from “the butt of late-night jokes” to a success story — her success story, of course.
This is Westside Current’s narrative delivered live from the stage. Chaos → her arrival → salvation. It’s effective story-based propaganda, and it works on audiences primed to receive it. But when you strip it down, there’s no policy substance. Just fear, then self-congratulation.
The Venice Dell Admission
Here’s where it got interesting.
Park has been telling anybody who will listen — and Westside Current has been faithfully amplifying — that the Venice Dell affordable housing project is dead. Done. She killed it. She has a better plan.
So when Josh Haskell asked her directly, “Is Venice Dell dead?” — you’d expect a definitive answer. Instead, here’s what she actually said:
“The city council has already moved to do another project on those parcels. There is still litigation pending to build this boondoggle. I don’t know and I can’t predict ultimately what a court will do, but we have such better opportunities to use our land and our money wisely.”
Read that again. “There is still litigation pending.” “I don’t know and I can’t predict ultimately what a court will do.”
That’s not dead. That’s alive in court and she can’t stop it.
She spent the rest of her time calling it a “Mike Bonin boondoggle” plagued with “backroom deals, shady appraisals, and all sorts of deception” — zero receipts offered, just rhetoric — and then touted her alternative plan: a “coastal access hub” at lot 731 and “unit-for-unit replacement” at lot 701.
Faizah Malik wasn’t having it. She responded directly:
“The alternative plans that Council Member Park is talking about are not feasible. There has been no forward movement on them. The plan she’s talking about is not moving forward.”
So let’s be clear about what’s actually happening. Venice Dell — 120 units of affordable housing, developed by reputable nonprofit developers, legally upheld multiple times despite challenges, approved through all proper city channels with community input — remains in active litigation. Park’s alternative plan? Vaporware. No forward movement. Meanwhile, every year this drags on costs taxpayers millions and keeps 120 affordable units off the market in a district drowning in a housing crisis.
The gap between Park’s public messaging and her own words under direct questioning is the whole story.
The Housing Credit Fraud
This might be the most important exchange of the entire forum, and it deserves its own attention separate from Venice Dell.
After Park rattled off her housing numbers — 60 projects advanced, 30 in the pipeline, “look around you, there is building going on all over the west side” — Faizah dropped the hammer:
“She cannot claim housing under policies that she has actively opposed like our zoning laws, like our streamlining laws. She cannot do that. And that is housing that has been built under her predecessor. She is at ribbon cuttings for housing that is being built from her predecessor.”
Park’s response? She repeated the numbers. 60 projects. 30 in the pipeline. “Look around you.” She never disputed the claim. She never said, “I voted for those zoning laws.” She never said, “those projects were initiated under my leadership.” She deflected with volume because she couldn’t dispute the substance.
Now connect that to what she said later in the forum about renter protections. When asked about strengthening protections for renters, Park said — and this is a direct quote — that the best thing we could do is “stop adopting stupid policies in city hall and stupid ballot measures that make the cost of developing housing and the cost of providing housing in the city of Los Angeles more expensive.”
Let that land. She’s calling the voter-approved policies that protect renters and enable housing development “stupid.” These are the very same policies that produced the housing projects she’s out here taking credit for at ribbon cuttings. lmao.
That’s not a blunder. That’s her real position. And it aligns perfectly with her donor base — the real estate PACs, landlord associations, and MAGA-aligned money that bankrolls her operation. They want deregulation. She delivers it. And then she shows up to cut the ribbon on what other people built.
Policing and the Carceral Frame
When asked about LAPD funding, Park didn’t hesitate: “I would absolutely increase the budget.” She painted a picture of a city in crisis — 8,600 officers for 4 million people, “dangerously critically understaffed.” Every community she visits wants more police, she said.
Faizah offered a different picture. We spend 46% of our discretionary budget on police, but only 8% of calls are for violent crimes. People still feel unsafe despite all that spending. The answer isn’t more of what isn’t working — it’s investing in what actually creates safety: housing, streets, youth programs, alternative crisis response.
The moderator pressed Faizah on whether she’d lower the police budget. Notably, he didn’t press Park with equivalent specificity when she said she’d increase it. Just an observation.
On homelessness, Park’s framing was revealing. She described looking at unhoused people and thinking “I need a doctor and a hospital” — then pivoted to saying we’ve lost “a binary choice between accepting help and consequences for not accepting help.” Help or punishment. That’s the carceral frame dressed up as compassion. And her push to expand 41.18 zones into “very high fire severity zones” and “environmentally sensitive habitat areas” is worth watching — using environmental protection language to justify criminalizing unhoused people in the Coastal Zone is exactly the kind of move the California Coastal Commission’s Environmental Justice policy was designed to challenge. I have to admit that’s a slick tactic.. Like I’ve said many times before, Traci’s manipulative communication tactcs are top tier.
Park also leaned hard on her LAFD endorsement — “our frontline firefighters and paramedics wouldn’t be endorsing me if they thought I defunded them.” LAFD unions have historically skewed conservative and right-wing. That’s an MAGA ideological alignment signal, not a credibility marker. This same union took photos from my website — images of the First Baptist Church of Venice related events — and used them in pro-Park ads to simulate Black and Brown community support she doesn’t have. She benefits, the union does the dirty work. That’s the real association.
The Bonin Boogeyman and the Smear
An audience question — submitted anonymously — asked: “Do you think Mike Bonin did a good job?”
Let’s keep it 100. That question was a setup. It’s a litmus test designed for Park’s base. And it collapses a complicated reality into a binary that only serves one narrative.
Here’s the thing: the real locals’ issues with Bonin were never the same as the gentry’s issues. Traditional Venice residents had substantive critiques about community investment, representation, and responsiveness. The gentry hated him because he wouldn’t criminalize homelessness fast enough. This question erases that distinction and hands Park the mic to do what she does best — weaponize Bonin’s name. Which she did every chance she got.
But she went further. Park doubled down on the claim that Faizah is “literally representing Mike Bonin and these boondoggle interests in shakedown lawsuits against the city.” She added: “She’s endorsed by Mike Bonin. She refers to him as her mentor.”
Faizah’s response was clear and direct: “I have never represented Mike Bonin. I am not Mike Bonin’s lawyer. I work for a nonprofit legal aid called Public Counsel that is serving low-income communities all over Los Angeles.” She added that she never called Bonin her mentor and asked Park directly to stop spreading this in fundraisers and to the press.
This isn’t a disagreement over policy. This is a deliberate lie on Park and Westside Current’s part ( no surprise there) — a calculated conflation of nonprofit legal work with personal representation that Park has been running in fundraisers, mailers, and press for months. She got corrected on the record at this forum. Whether she stops is another question.
Venice Culture: A Conversation Without Its Culture Bearers
The Venice Neighborhood Council submitted this question: How would you balance economic development and tourism while protecting Venice’s cultural, artistic, and bohemian identity?
The framing tells you everything. “Artists, street performers, and bohemian identity.” That’s the Venice that transplants tend to romanticize. It’s not wrong — those elements exist and are definitely Venice. But Venice’s actual cultural foundation is also very Chicano, Mexican-American, Indigenous, Black, and working class. The families who’ve been here for generations. The people who built this neighborhood from the labor up, long before it became a “world-class tourist destination.”
None of that was centered. Not on the stage, not in the question, not in the audience composition.
Park’s answer to preserving Venice culture? Baywatch taking over the historic Venice Lifeguard Tower — which got laughs from the crowd — and moving the Venice Heritage Museum into Westminster Park. The fact that she felt comfortable name-dropping VHM as a cultural credential raises an eyebrow for me. VHM is cool on some levels, but their track record of sincerely centering Chicano and Indigenous narratives is still highly lacking. That Park sees VHM as her vehicle for Venice cultural preservation raises questions about the direction and fate of Mexican and working-class narratives.
Faizah got closer — she mentioned “a diverse community that has been built by immigrants, by our Black community.” But once again, Chicano, Mexican-American, and Indigenous Venice goes unnamed. It’s not just an oversight at this point. It’s a pattern. And it’s exactly the kind of erasure that happens when the Black and white binary dominates the political imagination on the Westside.
Basically it comes down to this: you cannot have a legitimate conversation about Venice’s cultural identity without tapping in with or deferring to the traditional, generational culture bearers of this neighborhood. That didn’t happen. And until it does, these forums will keep producing answers that sound nice but miss the foundation entirely. We need to move beyond the Black and white binary political discourse that dominates Westside politics and center the original people of this land and lift up authentic, rooted voices. That should have been the key sentiment driving every answer up there.
The Other Candidates
Jeremy Weinberg is not equipped for the job. He said so himself — “there may be questions today where I don’t have the answer, and I’ll be honest about that rather than pretend I do.” And he wasn’t pretending. He stumbled through several responses and passed on at least one question entirely.
But here’s the thing: his fire survivor credibility gave him a platform to land shots on Park that nobody else could. He challenged her directly on cutting the fire department budget in May 2024 and failing to follow up after the January 1st fire — a fire that burned for six days before the January 7th disaster that destroyed the Palisades. A Senate report from a former LAFD Assistant Chief later confirmed what many suspected: the Palisades Fire was a preventable event shaped by decisions made before the wind arrived- including Traci Park. When asked about pre-deployment preparations, Park claimed council offices “typically are not part of” those conversations — a claim her own predecessor directly contradicted. Mind you, this is the same council member who took $400K+ from the firefighters’ union. She wasn’t out of the loop. She just wasn’t doing her job.
He asked the questions that would’ve been dismissed as partisan from anyone else. He asked the questions that would’ve been dismissed as partisan from anyone else. And his closing statement included the sharpest receipts of the day: a million dollars from fire aid went to a playground; Park directed more than half a million from Airbnb — the same company the city is suing for price-gouging fire survivors — to a nonprofit with no connection to the fire, not even in the district. “Not a dollar reached you.” Seems like a reasonable guy. A useful spoiler who said what needed saying.
Faizah Malik was the most substantive voice on that stage. Policy-sharp. Evidence-based. Her background — renter in Venice, parents who immigrated from Pakistan and Burma, career fighting for tenant rights at Public Counsel, instrumental in the largest expansion of tenant protections in LA in 40 years — is real. She was strongest on Venice Dell facts, renter protections, and exposing Park’s housing credit fraud. She operates within the Democratic lane, but she’s offering a genuine alternative grounded in facts and accountability, not fear and self-promotion.
What This Forum Actually Showed
Traci Park’s strength has always been her media fortress. Westside Current amplifies her messaging. Friendly press gives her softball coverage. Her curated town halls control the questions and the audience. That’s where she thrives — in environments she scripts.
This forum cracked that. She admitted Venice Dell isn’t dead. She got exposed claiming housing built under policies she actively opposed and under her predecessor’s tenure. She called voter-approved protections for renters “stupid.” She smeared Faizah with a lie and got corrected on the record. She leaned on an LAFD endorsement that signals MAGA alignment more than firefighter credibility. And her answer to Venice culture was Baywatch.smh
All of this happened in a room where BIPOC representation was structurally marginal — neighborhood councils that skew white and homeowner-class, an audience primed by gentrification-friendly media, and questions framed through priorities that don’t center the communities most affected by Park’s policies. And she still couldn’t hold it together.
Nice to see her outside the fortifications. The lies are harder to maintain when you can’t control who’s in the room.
And at this point, if you’re still backing her, you’re not uninformed — you’re complicit. Her lies are well documented. She’s anti-the very culture of inclusivity and diversity that people claim to love about this Venice and the westside. So if you’re still co-signing that garbage, at least admit you’re lame and just care more about your business interests than the people, history, and culture of this territory.
Mike Bravo
5th generation Venice. Two-term Venice Neighborhood Council board member.
