When Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass made solving the city’s homelessness problem one of her administration’s top priorities, she turned to a Bruin to get it done.

Now, Lourdes Castro Ramírez, who earned her master of arts in urban planning at UCLA in 2003, is tackling the challenge at an even higher level.

After declaring a state of emergency on her first day in office, Bass appointed Castro Ramírez as the city’s homelessness czar, ostensibly one of the toughest civic jobs in the nation, in 2023.

Castro Ramírez streamlined the approval of more than 20,000 affordable housing units and worked with a network of city and county agencies to get thousands of unhoused Angelenos off the streets.

Her success didn’t go unnoticed. In December, she took over as president and CEO of the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, where she now oversees the day-to-day operations of the organization’s 1,000 employees and 13 public housing communities across L.A.

Castro Ramírez has often found herself caught between two very different but very politically potent constituencies: progressives and activists who want the unhoused treated with dignity and respect on one side, taxpayers and NIMBYs tired of seeing all those tents and junker RVs on the other.

“Many people think that the unhoused are there by choice, that they didn’t work hard enough, or that’s where they want to be,” she says. “That is absolutely not correct. We have a housing crisis. People end up unhoused here because there’s just not enough housing that’s affordable.”

Read more about Castro Ramírez’s three-decade career in public service in UCLA Magazine