Lauren Meister

I always liked West Hollywood. So when I was going through a divorce, I decided to come live with my sister who had been living here for a number of years. I thought it would be nice to be someplace where it was easy to meet new people and where I felt safe walking by myself. That was January 1985, right after West Hollywood became a city, but I didn’t know it had just become a city.
         During those first years, the biggest activist thing I did was getting my fellow tenants to sign a petition so the landlord would paint the building. That changed whenI bought a house on Westbourne Avenue in the neighborhood represented by the West Hollywood West Residents Association (WHWRA). Living in a neighborhood with so many activists was a whole new thing for me. My neighbors Joyce Hundal and Ethel Shapiro were both active in Cityhood, and Brad Crowe was a planning commissioner at the time. Brad became a friend and mentor, and he said to me, “Here’s the zoning code, here’s the general plan. You need to get involved with the City to know what’s going on here.” I started reading them and going to Planning Commission meetings all the time, even when they didn’t have anything to do with my neighborhood. 
        At the first meeting I went to, the land use activist Jeanne Dobrin got into a screaming match with a gentleman named Effie. I looked at my friend Dan and I said, “You’re crazy if you think I’m going to be coming to one of these meetings again because this is insane.” I ended up going back to those meetings and started going to City Council meetings too. I was absolutely fascinated. There was always a cast of characters there, and a lot of shaking of heads by the City Council. It was like councilmembers understood what the public was saying, but then they’d vote the opposite way. It would be like a roller coaster. They’re going this way. No, wait a minute, they’re going that way. And I just thought it was so exciting. 
        The real turning point for my activism was when the Chabad synagogue proposed a seven-story building at the end of a cul-de-sac, basically right in my backyard. I went out in the neighborhood with a petition opposing the project and turned out seventy-five people to the Planning Commission meeting where the project was being discussed. The attorney for the developer called us all antisemites for opposing the project, which was wrong—I’m an American Jew.
        After that, people realized I was a little bit of a force to be reckoned with, and  Marty Strudler, the president WHWRA, asked me to help him out with the organization. Marty wanted to travel more, and I started thinking that if I’m going to be this involved, I’m going to run for president of WHWRA. As president, I took the association to a different level. I emailed out our newsletters and set up block captains. When I wrote to councilmembers and commissioners about our opposition to something, I would back up my statements with data from things such as an environmental impact report. It wasn’t that WHWRA was against every development, but that we wanted to make projects better. When I think of development, I think of what my mother used to say, “Don’t settle.” I think we have to tell developers, “This is a great city, and you should be giving us spectacular designs.” 
        I wasn’t involved in City politics until 2001 when I said to myself, “I’m already going to all these Planning Commission and City Council meetings, I want to be part of the process.” I knew if I wanted to run for City Council, I had to meet people from other parts of the City. I took a citywide Community Emergency Response Team certification course—I wanted to know how to turn off my gas in an emergency. I went to an eastside meeting about the park and to meetings about proposed billboards on the Sunset Strip. I got the perception that the City wasn’t doing enough to bring people together because I’d hear people were pitting landlords against tenants, tenants against homeowners, businesses against the residents, and the eastside of the City against the westside. Eastside residents felt the westside got more of the City’s money and they said, “Hey, don’t treat us like the stepchild.” That started changing after the approval of the Gateway Project on Santa Monica Boulevard at La Brea Avenue [construction began in 2002]. 
        The first time I ran for City Council was in 2003. I only raised about $25,000, which wasn’t a lot for a campaign, and I lost. People were very surprised by how well I did since I ran against three incumbent councilmembers—Sal Guarriello, John Heilman, and Steve Martin—and also Abbe Land, who had been off the City Council for a while but was like an incumbent because she was so well known. Losing didn’t stop me from being involved in the City, and when there was an opening on the West Hollywood Public Safety Commission, Councilmember John Heilman appointed me. After that, I said, “Okay, now I’m on the inside and I can try to make some changes and use them to try to leverage the position to get things done.” 
        As a Public Safety commissioner, I worked on the Live, Work, Play, and Be Safe initiative of the City. That was my baby with fellow Commissioner Sam Borelli. A lot of cities say, “Live, Work, Play,” but we added “Be Safe” and put together a whole public education campaign. We did posters on pedestrian safety and emergency preparedness, on not keeping things in your car, how to keep your home safe, and that you shouldn’t drink and drive. I helped rebrand the Neighborhood Watch groups to get more people engaged in the City. I did the Public Safety Commission for almost four years.
        I wasn’t planning to run again for City Council, and then months before the 2009 election, I heard that only Councilmembers John Duran and Jeff Prang were running, so the City didn’t need to have an election [by law]. I was like, “What?” So not much before I had to turn in signed petitions to get on the ballot, I was asking people to sign for me. Once again, I did well but lost. I had raised $20,000 something, and John Duran had raised $200,000; and I got 1,500 votes and he got 2,500 votes. After that, I got the idea for term limits for councilmembers because incumbents who had been there for a long time had a big advantage over non-incumbents. I thought, should someone be in office for thirty years? The idea didn’t get anywhere back then, but in 2012, a couple of people said, “Okay, let’s try to get term limits on the ballot,” and they asked me to be the chair of the Term Limits Committee because I had credibility from running for City Council before. This was a time when Democrats wanted term limits on a national level, and West Hollywood was eighty percent Democratic. Our ballot measure won with over sixty percent of the vote.
        When I heard in 2013 that Councilmember Jeffrey Prang was giving up his seat to run for Los Angeles County Assessor, and there was going to be an open seat on the City Council, I said, “If I’m going to run for City Council again, this is the time.” A year before the election, I started what I called The Listening Tour—going to lots of community meetings. I focused more on public safety in this campaign. And I won. 
        As a councilmember since 2014, and before as an activist, I’ve been on the renters’ side of things and the homeowners’ side of things. I’ve been an advocate for every neighborhood. I’d like to see us become the leaders in terms of making West Hollywood an urban forest, but I’m really proud that my colleagues passed several of my initiatives that benefit the entire community: the Construction Fence Art initiative, which requires art on the fences of construction sites; the initiative to have sunscreen dispensers in our parks; and the initiative for our Homeless Services donation meters, which look like regular parking meters but when someone puts money in those meters, it goes to our homeless services. All those ideas actually came from conversations I had with friends and residents.
        The City has become much more sophisticated since I moved here in 1985, and that can be positive and that can be negative. Art and culture have been taken to another level. Now, we have these incredible sculptures on our median strips [along Santa Monica Boulevard] and a free music concert series [in Plummer Park and at the Pendry West Hollywood hotel]. But I’m worried that we are turning into a city of haves and have-nots. And that scares me. It’s why I’ve stayed so focused on our neighborhoods and our small businesses, and why I believe we need to incentivize workforce and middle-income housing and disincentivize luxury housing. 
        Although development has always been the issue the community disagrees over the most, I’ll never forget how we came together after the shock of  9/11 [the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center]. People congregated at the Pacific Design Center (PDC), and there was such a strong feeling of community—even among people who usually disagreed with each other. I always say, “West Hollywood is like a big dysfunctional family, but we’re family.”
        My life would be incredibly boring if I didn’t live in this city. I really kind of miss the days when City meetings were held in the auditorium at West Hollywood Park. Those meetings felt more social. A lot of us would stand in the back of the room, talking about stuff going on in the City, trying to find out things from each other, and laughing. Many times, Councilmember John Heilman would shout from the dais, “Can you please keep it down in the back of the room?”
        We’d say, “Yes John,” and we’d be quiet—until the next time.