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Rafael Perez: Adam Miller promises to bring back sensible solutions to Los Angeles

March 26, 2026

For the first time in a long time, I managed to have a boring conversation with a politician – and that’s a good thing. He didn’t have any food on his face unlike Antonio Villaraigosa, he didn’t imply that vaccines may cause autism unlike Gloria Romero, and he didn’t brag about how much more Mexican food he eats than Mayor Karen Bass unlike Spencer Pratt.

I spoke to Adam Miller over Zoom about his campaign for Los Angeles mayor.

Miller is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Better Angels, a non-profit focused on addressing homelessness. He was also the chairman for Team Rubicon, a charity organization with veteran volunteers who respond to disaster areas.

Through his organizations, he has gained experience fighting homelessness, so I asked him how he would fix the city’s current approach to the problem.

“What we found was there was no silver bullet,” he said. “It’s a complex problem that requires a comprehensive holistic solution to get us out of this epidemic that’s plaguing our city. That is addressing the problem holistically across five different pillars, prevention, services, shelter, technology, and housing. The most obvious thing we can do to mitigate this problem is prevent new people from becoming unhoused … What we found is that for on average $2,100, we could keep our most vulnerable neighbors who are at imminent risk of eviction, housed.”

The homelessness crisis is significantly fueled by the cost of housing in Los Angeles. The high cost of housing itself is largely driven by a massive shortage of available units – new housing development is at historic lows in LA with only about 8,700 permits last year compared to over 15,000 in 2022.

According to Miller, in order to increase supply, LA has to become an attractive place to build where developers are able to financially justify new construction. Regulatory burdens, slow permitting and slow inspections all disincentivize new construction by making building more costly and less financially viable.

“It also includes land use and the way we’re leveraging the property that the city owns and how that land could potentially be used to incentivize developers to build more housing and get the kind of market rate returns they need to be attracted to building here,” he explained. “It also means the attitude we have with real estate developers. The city has generally treated real estate developers as the enemy, when in fact they should be some of our best partners.”

Miller has promised to automate permitting and approval processes to speed up construction and lessen regulatory burdens on businesses.

We moved on to matters of transparency and accountability. In recent years, several city council members have been criminally charged with bribery and corruption.

In Miller’s view, the city lacks a culture of transparency. “We have lots of issues with corruption in the city council and elsewhere. We have obviously multiple groups under investigation all the time in local government. We have a lack of transparency about spending and projects and the time it takes to do things. And that kind of system of non-transparency encourages bad behavior.”

“Would you commit to pushing for the Charter Reform Commission to clarify that the controller has the authority to audit all city projects?” I asked.

“Of course. It makes no sense to self-audit if you’re trying to have transparency. You need an independent auditor to have transparency,” he answered, referring to the current practice of exempting projects backed by city officials from independent oversight.

These are simple steps we can take to compel city officials to act in the public’s interest and it would only help the cause to have a mayor who sees the value in transparency.

In a recent interview at the Montgomery Summit, Miller stated that many of the problems with the city stem from how the city chooses to allocate funds and that it’s a relatively easy fix. He didn’t go into any detail about what those reallocations would look like so I asked him to go into specifics. Miller emphasized the need to fund the basic functions and services of government.

“We have a lot of inefficiencies in how we do things in the city … So whether we’re talking about public safety or we’re talking about infrastructure, street services and the like, there’s an obvious need to get this city back to a baseline level of service, which it’s not operating at today. We see broken streets, broken sidewalks, trash all over the place, encampments everywhere.”

Miller will undoubtedly face many challenges if elected mayor. As a business leader and non-profit CEO, he has had the ability to dictate change and often unilaterally push decision-making. In the political arena, however, he will have to navigate other powerful individuals with completely distinct agendas who will often undermine him.

He has built experience on two of the most pressing problems in Los Angeles, housing and homelessness, importantly, from the perspective of the contracted non-profit and the developer.

Given that our city could use a mayor that appreciates basic ideas such as the need to make building easy, the value of transparency and accountability, and the practicality of providing essential municipal services before extravagant projects, we should strongly consider Miller for mayor.

Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. He is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Rochester. You can reach him at rafaelperezocregister@gmail.com.

Orange County Register

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Rafael Perez: Adam Miller promises to bring back sensible solutions to Los Angeles

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