As I continue running for Culver City Council, I keep discovering parts of local government that most residents probably never hear about.
Here is today's discovery: some extremely important housing policy can begin its journey through City Hall in a room with only two members of the five-member City Council.
It is called the Standing Housing and Homelessness Subcommittee.
And when I looked at who sits on it—and what it is currently considering—I started asking questions about balance.
First: What Is This Subcommittee?
Culver City has a five-member City Council:
Mayor Freddy Puza
Vice Mayor Bryan "Bubba" Fish
Councilmember Yasmine-Imani McMorrin
Councilmember Albert Vera Jr.
Councilmember Dan O'Brien
But all five councilmembers do not sit on every City Council subcommittee.
The Standing Housing and Homelessness Subcommittee currently consists of only:
Vice Mayor Bubba Fish and Councilmember Yasmine-Imani McMorrin.
The City says this standing subcommittee was created to address housing affordability, the housing and homelessness crisis, and the City's declaration of a homelessness emergency.
Unlike an ad hoc subcommittee created temporarily for a specific project, this is a standing subcommittee dealing with an ongoing area of public policy. Its meetings are subject to the Brown Act, noticed and open to the public.
That distinction matters.
This isn't the Advisory Committee on Housing and Homelessness, which includes appointed community members. This is a City Council subcommittee composed of elected councilmembers.
So Who Decides Which Councilmembers Sit on It?
This may be the most interesting part.
The voters don't elect anyone specifically to the Housing and Homelessness Subcommittee.
The Mayor does not simply appoint the members acting alone.
There isn't a separate election among landlords and tenants.
And the seats aren't automatically assigned based on someone's professional background or experience with housing.
Instead, the five-member City Council itself makes these appointments through action at a public City Council meeting.
Culver City's staff explains that the Council traditionally appoints councilmembers to represent the City on outside agencies and to serve on City Council subcommittees.
The process becomes an agenda item.
City staff prepares a report identifying the various outside agencies and subcommittees requiring appointments. The Council can then make appointments by resolution or motion. The Council can also create new subcommittees, dissolve existing ones, and give additional direction to the City Clerk.
That is exactly what happened on January 12, 2026.
The Council's agenda contained an action item specifically dealing with appointments to outside agencies, City Council subcommittees and other bodies.
For the Housing and Homelessness Subcommittee, the staff report did not dictate that Fish and McMorrin had to serve.
Instead, the proposed motion essentially left two blanks:
Appoint __________ and __________ to the Standing Housing and Homelessness Subcommittee.
In other words, this was a choice for the City Council.
At the January 12 meeting, the Council went through a long series of assignments. Different combinations of the five councilmembers were appointed to different subjects.
For example:
Puza and Fish were appointed to the Standing Mobility Subcommittee.
Puza and McMorrin were appointed to the Standing Sustainability Subcommittee.
Fish and Vera were appointed to the Standing City Council Police Subcommittee.
Vera and Puza were appointed to the Standing Economic Development Subcommittee.
Fish and McMorrin were appointed to the Standing Governance Subcommittee.
And Fish and McMorrin were appointed to the Standing Housing and Homelessness Subcommittee.
So the composition of this housing subcommittee was not predetermined by law.
It resulted from a public City Council appointment process.
That is important because it also means the composition can be examined as a policy choice.
If we believe a two-person subcommittee dealing with landlord-tenant policy should contain people bringing different experiences to the discussion, the question isn't whether some outside authority prevents Culver City from doing that. For instance, in this case, Fish and Vera would have been the best choices, since Fish appears to still be a renter and Vera owns property.
The question becomes:
Why didn't the City Council choose to do that when it made the appointments?
And perhaps more importantly:
Should it do so the next time these appointments are considered?
Why Does This Matter Now?
On September 9, the Housing and Homelessness Subcommittee is scheduled to discuss potentially significant changes to Culver City's Rent Stabilization and Tenant Protections ordinances.
The subjects include such things as:
establishing a minimum amount of unpaid rent before an eviction can occur;
restrictions involving security deposits;
landlord-occupancy evictions;
protections involving evictions during the school year;
demolition of rental units;
capital-improvement pass-throughs;
rent-adjustment applications;
defining housing services;
algorithmic rent setting; and
additional tenant protections.
These aren't abstract questions.
They can determine what happens when a tenant cannot pay the entire rent.
They can determine what happens when an owner needs to recover a unit for personal or family use.
They can affect whether an owner can recover part of the cost of a major improvement.
They can affect what happens when someone wants to demolish rental housing and redevelop a property.
They can affect tenants' housing security.
And they can affect whether small property owners decide that providing rental housing in Culver City continues to make financial sense.
That is why I started wondering:
Who is bringing the housing-provider perspective into this particular room?
Fish Is a Renter
Vice Mayor Bubba Fish publicly identifies himself as a renter.
That is a valuable perspective.
Renters experience housing policy directly. They understand rent increases, housing insecurity, leases, deposits, maintenance disputes and the difficulty of finding another home in an expensive housing market.
A renter absolutely belongs in this conversation.
McMorrin Owns a Condominium
Councilmember Yasmine-Imani McMorrin owns a condominium in Fox Hills.
Homeownership is also an important perspective.
But owning the home in which you live is not necessarily the same experience as providing someone else's housing.
A housing provider has another set of responsibilities: collecting rent, maintaining a rental property, complying with tenant laws, making repairs, paying insurance and property taxes, dealing with vacancies, and sometimes confronting the difficult situation of a tenant who does not pay rent.
That perspective appears to be missing from this two-person subcommittee.
What About the Other Three Councilmembers?
This is where the situation becomes especially interesting.
Albert Vera is clearly a property owner and housing provider.
A California Fair Political Practices Commission advice letter concerning Culver City's Rent Control and Tenant Protections ordinances documented Vera's ownership of multiple Culver City residential properties and discussed rental and occupancy arrangements involving those properties.
In other words, there is documented evidence that one member of the current City Council has actually experienced the regulatory system from the housing-provider side.
Dan O'Brien is also a homeowner.
Public reporting from his 2022 campaign states that O'Brien and his wife purchased their Culver City home in 2000. I have not found similarly reliable evidence establishing that O'Brien is currently a residential landlord, so I will not label him one.
Freddy Puza has experienced both homeownership and renting.
A 2022 candidate profile described Puza as having been both a homeowner and a renter in Fox Hills. Again, I have not found sufficient evidence to call him a current landlord.
That leaves an interesting five-member Council:
Fish — renter
McMorrin — condominium owner
Vera — documented property owner/housing provider
O'Brien — homeowner
Puza — has publicly been described as both homeowner and renter
Yet the two people sitting on the Housing and Homelessness Subcommittee are Fish and McMorrin.
Where Is the Small Landlord?
That is my concern.
I am not arguing that landlords should control housing policy.
I am arguing almost exactly the opposite:
Nobody should control the conversation by themselves.
Tenant protections exist for very good reasons. There are bad landlords. There are tenants who have been treated terribly. There are people living paycheck to paycheck for whom an unexpected rent increase can be devastating.
Their voices need to be represented.
But there are also small housing providers.
A person renting the other half of a duplex is not necessarily a billion-dollar real-estate corporation.
Someone may own a four-unit building as retirement income.
A family may inherit a property.
A homeowner may build an ADU and rent it to another Culver City resident.
These people provide housing too.
And poorly designed regulations can have unintended consequences.
Imagine a Simple Example
Suppose a tenant owes a landlord $200.
The City considers creating a minimum amount of unpaid rent that must accumulate before eviction for nonpayment becomes available.
From the tenant's perspective, the argument might be:
Should somebody really lose their home because they're $200 short?
That is a legitimate question.
But the housing provider might ask:
Does the unpaid amount accumulate? How does the owner collect it? What happens if the tenant repeatedly pays slightly below the threshold? Who absorbs the loss?
That is also a legitimate question.
Good policy should answer both.
Or consider a $75,000 roof replacement on a small apartment property.
The tenant understandably says:
Maintaining the building is the owner's responsibility.
The owner responds:
My rents are regulated, but my roofing contractor, insurance company, plumber and property-tax bill are not.
Again, both perspectives deserve to be heard.
Balance Does Not Mean 50/50 on Every Decision
Having a landlord on the subcommittee would not mean that every tenant protection must be weakened.
It would not give landlords a veto.
It would not mean that Vera—or any other housing provider—would automatically be right.
And it certainly wouldn't mean that councilmembers can vote on matters when state conflict-of-interest laws require them to recuse themselves.
It would mean something much simpler:
When two councilmembers conduct the City's preliminary examination of landlord-and-tenant policy, one of them should understand what it is like to actually provide rental housing.
My Proposal: Build Balance Into the Appointment Process
I think Culver City should reconsider how it composes the Standing Housing and Homelessness Subcommittee.
The January 12 appointment process demonstrates that the City Council has an opportunity to think about who should sit on each subcommittee.
So why not make balance part of that consideration?
If the Housing and Homelessness Subcommittee is going to evaluate rent stabilization, evictions, landlord occupancy, capital improvements, demolition and tenant protections, I believe its two councilmembers should bring meaningfully different housing experiences whenever legally possible.
One seat could include a councilmember bringing substantial renter experience.
The other could include a councilmember with experience as a housing provider.
On the current Council, Albert Vera is the clearest candidate for that second perspective because his experience as a property owner providing housing is documented.
That doesn't mean Vera should get his way.
It means that perspective should get a seat at the table.
Then Fish, McMorrin, Vera, staff, tenants, housing advocates, landlords and members of the public can challenge one another's assumptions.
That is what deliberation is supposed to look like.
I Have a Personal Perspective on This Too
I should disclose mine.
I am a homeowner and a small housing provider. I own a duplex, live in one unit and rent the other.
That experience has taught me something important: "landlord" describes an enormous range of people and organizations.
A person renting one unit of an owner-occupied duplex and a corporation owning 5,000 apartments may both technically be landlords.
Their economics are not remotely identical.
The City should understand that distinction when writing housing policy.
Likewise, renters aren't a monolith. A renter earning $250,000 a year and a senior citizen surviving on Social Security can face completely different circumstances.
Good government recognizes those differences instead of forcing everyone into two political boxes labeled LANDLORD and TENANT.
This Is Why I Attend These Meetings
Before running for City Council, I had no idea how much important policy work happened at the subcommittee level.
I suspect many voters don't either.
You vote for five councilmembers.
Then, through public Council action, those five councilmembers are assigned to numerous smaller bodies dealing with particular subjects.
Those smaller bodies examine issues, hear staff reports, question proposals and provide direction. Some of those ideas eventually return to the full City Council.
By the time the television cameras are focused on the final Council vote, a tremendous amount of the discussion may already have occurred.
That is another lesson from this strange world of local politics.
My Question for Culver City
I don't think the question should be:
Are you pro-landlord or pro-tenant?
I think that framing is part of the problem.
The better question is:
Can Culver City protect tenants while maintaining an environment in which responsible people are still willing to provide rental housing?
I believe the answer can be yes.
But to reach that answer, we need both perspectives in the room.
And now that I understand how the appointment process actually works, I think the solution is even clearer.
When the City Council appoints members to the Housing and Homelessness Subcommittee, balance should be one of the considerations.
If a two-member City Council subcommittee is going to help shape the rules governing the relationship between landlords and tenants, then Culver City should make a deliberate effort to ensure that both sides of that relationship are represented in the discussion.
That isn't pro-landlord.
It isn't anti-tenant.
It is simply balanced government.
And balance should begin with who gets a seat at the table.
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