Editor’s note: Andrew is biracial and identifies as Afro-Latinx. He was born and raised in Westwood/Westside, and has been a renter his whole life. Andrew sat down with us late last month and shared how his identity shaped his housing advocacy work.
I came into the YIMBY movement as a result of living in Westwood. I was actually born in Westwood, my mom immigrated from South America into Westwood, she met my dad in Westwood, I went to UCLA and now I am a renter in Westwood. I realized that we need more housing to stabilize the housing market that’s going off the rails here in California. We can’t keep supply low, especially in college communities, and expect students to be able to afford housing.
YIMBYism is a personal necessity as I fight for my own well being and the ability to live and stay in this neighborhood, where my family has deep ties. I do think there’s a lot of complexity and nuance in what type of housing one city needs as opposed to another; every neighborhood is not the same. There should be a deeper discussion of affordability and what that means to each neighborhood, and what type of housing needs to be built. And usually it’s a combination – not all market rate, not all subsidized affordable housing – which depends on the needs of the local community.
I am currently the Vice President of the North Westwood Neighborhood Council, which has jurisdiction over the north village (where most of apartment housing is), the UCLA campus, and the Westwood business district (Westwood Village). It’s really the heart of Westwood. Our vision for Westwood – in terms of housing, is that we absolutely need more housing here. I want to give props to UCLA for adding hundreds of student housing units over the past couple of years. But for those who are not in student housing, in the private market, there’s an urgent need to add housing capacity and build more homes.
The divide of different neighborhood council areas are invisible – with issues like housing, it impacts all of us. But currently there’s little strategic collaboration between neighborhood councils even though we do end up working on the same thing, quite a bit.
Running for and holding a local public office wasn’t in the cards for me, at all. I studied Political Science at UCLA, and afterward went to work with the LA Mayor’s Office. And that really was my goal at the time, which was to focus on local policy – working within the local government to try to shift and shape policies. And then opportunities came up and I went to work with Obama’s reelection campaign in Florida. Yet all this time I didn’t think I’d one day be a local elected, representing Westwood.
But it happened and it’s quite a natural progression because I live here and I can see the rents go up, and there is a growing vision to make this neighborhood more livable. So I started to go to the Westwood Neighborhood Council, and actually ran to get into that office. But North Westwood is a primarily renter neighborhood surrounded by the affluent, like many other college neighborhoods. And we started to realize there needs to be more representation of North Westwood – when students who are sleeping in cars and suffering from housing insecurity aren’t at the table, no one is going to fight for them. So we fought for that and won, creating the North Westwood Neighborhood Council, the first new neighborhood council since our city was incorporated.
Andrew (right) campaigning in Florida. Courtesy of Andrew Lewis
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The housing crisis is very complex, I don’t have all the answers, and I don’t think anyone has all the answers – if you don’t have the lived experience & keep that focus, it’s hard to imagine what solutions are needed to address every single struggle, and it’s going to be hard to prioritize certain solutions because the issues aren’t impacting you at the day to day level. And this is why we need to have voices with lived experiences, and that mindset, of the housing crisis, at the table.
And I’ve been through it. I’ve been a renter my whole life, I am the child of an immigrant, I am a person of color, I am a mixed African-American, I’ve been housing insecure here in Westwood – I know what it’s like. And I do what I do because I know I could go back there. And people who have been there should absolutely be leading this fight for housing.
LA is an incredibly segregated city, and it’s by design through planning and policies – redlining & racial covenants have impacts on the whole city. And we need to grapple with this history and the remnants of it in the discussion of housing, the fact that housing has been a tool of racialized oppression. Zoning has been created as a racial segregation tool, and I personally think there needs to be more emphasis on that.
The author. Courtesy of Andrew Lewis
I grew up with my mom and my younger brother on the Westside, and we bounced from apartment to apartment to apartment, and I knew it has something to do with the fact that she’s an immigrant from Peru with two biracial children. I’ve heard conversations about that, so I know it factored into why we are able to live in certain places and why we were kicked out of certain places. Even I, as someone who is well-educated and went to UCLA, had to ask questions such as “why didn’t I get that apartment?”.
And it’s subtle and coy, like the term “character of the neighborhood”, and I hear that. I used to hear that all the time when I attend neighborhood council meetings. “Character of the neighborhood”, “Integrity of the neighborhood”, “Is that development a good fit in the neighborhood”. “I’ve been here 60 years, I’ve been here 50 years” – all these are different terms of saying, who has the right to be here and who doesn’t; who has more of an ownership of the neighborhood and who doesn’t. At the end of the day that translates into whose voice planning and policy are taken more seriously. And that translates directly into housing.
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YIMBYism is diversifying. We have folks that are low-income renters as well as folks who are higher-income renters. I look at initiatives such as AB 854, how all sides of the housing debate are able to stand behind this reform – things like this remind me that we can build a coalition to reform housing. And sometimes that requires taking a step back – there’s no magical formula to this, as I learned through years of talking to people.
I still have my position – I am pro-housing at my core; I am a neighborhood council member but also an activist at heart. I am an activist because of who I am in this world, as an Afro-Latinx person. If I am not fighting for housing and the struggles I’ve been through, I am shooting myself in the foot. I am an activist because I have to be. It at times is exhausting, but you have to keep up hope. The fight can be deflating and a lot of moments I do feel that. But I look at the progress being made and increased awareness all around us – housing wasn’t a cool, hip topic 10 years ago. Now it’s more in LA’s centralized culture – young Angelenos are more plugged in on housing than ever. Our best housing gen is still ahead of us – it’s not just about me or even my generation. I look at my colleagues on the neighborhood council who are 19, 18, already tuning in to the planning commission meeting, and I am motivated to continue the work today so they may accomplish even more in the future. LA can be that city where everyone is housed affordably.
I don’t know to this day why my mother moved from Lima, Peru to Westwood. But she was the first in her family to leave South America and come to this country. And I often remind myself that, although my dad is a multi-generation Angeleno born and raised in West Adams, for half of my family, I am first generation. I have to remind myself, “Andrew, you don’t have to have everything figured out”, even as I accomplish many “firsts” in my family.
My grandma on my dad’s side is from a small coal-mining town in West Virginia. She was one of the first African American woman surgeons in America. Went to medical school and made her way to the west, where she raised my dad and my two aunts. My father went to USC – we fought about that often – and my two aunts went to Berkeley. They all do quite well, but there’s still this sense of, especially with regards to housing – they have dealt with redlining in a literal way – that there’s nothing sitting around and waiting for us. We have to secure that ourselves. That has baked into my identity as well.
The POC YIMBY space is very diverse and we are all coming at this with different experiences and motivations. There are absolutely more Black pro-housing people, and I know YIMBYism is not as diverse as it could be, and is seen as a sometimes affluent movement- but there are definitely more POC YIMBYs out there. I encourage all young folks of color in any City, to look into studies on housing, data on housing, why housing isn’t being built, the history of housing, and just jump into these conversations – go in where you’re at.
My hope for the YIMBY movement is for it to grow, diversify, and become more inclusive of different perspectives and voices; and I think it has become more “mainstream”, which I am highly encouraged to see. We now have city council candidates, state legislature candidates, and even congressional candidates running on pro-housing platforms. I think this broadens the movement’s demands, as well as the scope of the conversations surrounding housing. It’s incumbent upon all of us to have collective conversations about being creative with housing, about offering options on housing.
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