The office of Lourdes Castro Ramírez ’94, M.A. ’03, is chockablock with mementos: a gold medallion honoring her days in Washington, D.C., as director of HUD’s Office of Public and Indian Housing, and commendations from the County of Los Angeles and the San Antonio chapter of the American Institute of Architects. There’s a photo of her in the Oval Office with President Barack Obama — both beaming — and another with California governor Gavin Newsom, the two posing in front of a stack of vintage surfboards. There are framed UCLA diplomas: her B.A. in political science and Chicana and Chicano Studies, the M.A. in urban planning. “I think it’s one of the best public systems in the U.S, if not the best,” she says of the UC system, before taking a gentle swipe at the University of Texas (before joining HUD, she served for six years as president and CEO of the San Antonio Housing Authority). UT Austin, she concedes, is a premier university, “but the rest of the campuses have to catch up with us.”
When Karen Bass ran for mayor in 2022, her challenger, mall magnate Rick Caruso, made the runaway problem of homeless encampments one of the biggest issues of the race. (Over the past decade, the city’s unhoused population nearly doubled, from 25,686 in 2015 to 45,252 today.) When Bass won, people expected something to be done about the issue — and quickly. Bass declared a state of emergency on her first day in office, and the following year she appointed Castro Ramírez as the city’s homelessness czar, ostensibly one of the toughest civic jobs in the nation. The pressure on Castro Ramírez to perform was enormous.
And perform she did, streamlining the approval of more than 20,000 affordable housing units and working 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 (HACLA), where she now oversees the day-to-day operations of the organization’s 1,000 employees and 13 public housing communities across L.A. “HACLA is the second-largest housing authority in the country, so it’s a player on the national level,” she says. “As part of the Council of Large Public Housing Authorities, I’ll be working on shaping the federal housing agenda for the next administration.”
The issue of the unhoused and what to do about them — wanting to find them shelter, but also to treat them with dignity and respect — is one that carries a lot of unvarnished emotion. “The Chief,” as Castro Ramírez was lovingly referred to during her City Hall days, 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.”
Castro Ramírez had to hit the ground running. She’s still running. Wherever she goes, somebody’s stopping to talk with her, or ask her something, or ask something of her.
Just before she began her new post, I accompanied Castro Ramírez to a meeting of the L.A. County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency, a powerhouse collection of elected officials and citizens who have been granted unprecedented power and resources to tackle the city’s thorny, seemingly intractable homelessness crisis. LACAHSA meets in the boardroom of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, a cavernous space that bears a passing resemblance to the U.N. Assembly Hall. Castro Ramírez was seated in the upper tier of a massive, U-shaped table, as representatives from various organizations approached the group to make presentations. Board members include regional mayors and various city council members — one could feel the power in the room. Castro Ramírez proffered several questions to the presenters, who included representatives from the California Housing Partnership and the Little Tokyo Service Center.
At present, there are more than 75,000 unhoused individuals in L.A. County, living under freeway overpasses and in city parks, many of them on the very streets the board members traveled to get to this section of downtown. There is an undeniable urgency to the situation. “We have not made housing a priority, like we’ve made health care or education or the economy and jobs,” Castro Ramírez tells me.
There are other pressures. In 2026, the eyes of the world will be on Los Angeles when the city cohosts the FIFA World Cup. Two years later, the Summer Olympics come to town, dropping millions of tourists into areas hardest hit by the homelessness crisis, from Long Beach to Inglewood to downtown L.A. “There’s a lot to do,” Castro Ramírez admits.
In her former role with the Bass administration, the Chief’s primary charge was to get people off the streets and into housing. In many ways, that’s still a priority, and Castro Ramírez continues to serve on the mayor’s cabinet and in LACAHSA. But now she has much more direct contact with the community, including the more than 19,000 residents in the city’s public housing sites her organization oversees.
For her, the crisis requires a high degree of interaction and cooperation across agencies and departments statewide. Which seems obvious — until one actually tries to do that. But Castro Ramírez is ideally suited to the task. “She’s served in federal administrations,” says Yana Garcia, secretary for the California Environmental Protection Agency. “She’s served in state administrations in California. She’s done work at the city level, on the ground. Lourdes knows housing inside and out.”
An advocate “at a very early age”
For someone charged with waging war against one of our toughest civic problems, Castro Ramírez is remarkably warm and gracious in person. When I first meet up with her downtown, she asks me how traffic was, then thanks me for taking the time to talk with her. Ask her a question and she’s eager to reply, her answers often coming in the form of anecdotes and experiences — “I’ll share a story,” she often says. She has a self-deprecating honesty about who she is and where she came from, and she isn’t afraid to tell you the number of times that she didn’t know what she was going to do or be. She is also fiercely proud of her family, including her father, who rose from menial work in L.A.’s service economy to become supervisor of a team of mechanics — a man who, Castro Ramírez recalls, never missed a day of work in his life. “I would say I’m a workaholic,” she admits, “but not like him.”
Born in Mexico, Castro Ramírez emigrated to the U.S. with her family when she was 4. “We got on the bus from Jalisco and crossed the border illegally,” she says. “My family was undocumented up until I was 15.” Her father’s first job was as a cook at a Kentucky Fried Chicken; her mother worked as a maid at the Bonaventure Hotel. The family lived in a two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles that they shared with two other families. “I was always aware of how difficult it was for my mother and father to live in this country because they didn’t know the language,” says Castro Ramírez, the eldest of nine. “I had to learn to be an advocate at a very early age.”
A dedicated student, she excelled in math and science at Lynwood High, a school with 99.4% minority enrollment. She matriculated at UCLA in 1989 with hopes of becoming an engineer. “It was the biggest public university in Los Angeles, the city that had welcomed my family when we immigrated from Mexico,” she says. “Then I took a math class my first quarter, and was completely lost.” But she was captivated by her first political science course, as well as by later classes in Chicano studies; a double major was born. She joined the UCLA student group Latinas Guiding Latinas, where she served as a mentor for middle school girls from East and South L.A. “They were looking up to me because I was at UCLA, so that felt good,” she says. Even so, Castro Ramírez struggled with writing; she had to take two remedial courses her first year. “I’m fully bilingual and biliterate,” she says. “But that’s when I became aware of the inequity in terms of high schools. You could be in the gifted program at a high school that is low income and low resourced, and you still may not be at the same level as someone from one that is high resourced.”
Accepted into UCLA’s graduate program in architecture and urban planning, she became interested in social policy analysis and affordable housing. She wanted to get into public service, but how? And doing what?
During her final year, a professor told her about the Cabrillo Economic Development Corporation, a nonprofit looking for a community planner. “I don’t think I even knew there was such a field until I got to the urban planning school,” she says. “That set the course of my life in terms of being in the field of affordable housing and community development.”
As director of the Section 8 department at the L.A. Housing Authority, Castro Ramírez led nationally recognized programs to increase employment and educational programs for the city’s public housing residents. Ten years later, she joined the San Antonio Housing Authority as its president and CEO, leading a team of 525 employees and overseeing the creation of nearly 1,500 housing units in Texas.
“Housing is who she is,” says Jacqueline Waggoner ’93, M.A. ’96, who met Castro Ramírez in graduate school and now partners with her as the president of the Solutions Division of Enterprise Community Partners, a nonprofit committed to increasing affordable housing nationwide. “She’s very deep into her family, her husband, her kids, her siblings, her parents,” she says. “But she talks about housing on and off the clock.”
Her work hardly went unnoticed: In 2014, Castro Ramírez got a call from the White House Presidential Personnel Office (“I actually thought somebody was playing a prank on me,” she says). After meetings with top officials at the agency, she was appointed leader of HUD’s Office of Public and Indian Housing by President Obama. On the public housing side, she worked with 400-plus public housing authorities across the country, ensuring that the billions of dollars in federal funds were actually going to low-income households and affordable housing. On the Indian housing side, she advocated for more funding — “the funding formula for Native American housing programs was just dismal,” she recalls — and worked with other federal departments to assist native communities adversely affected by climate change.
In 2020, Governor Newsom appointed her Secretary of California’s Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency. Once again, she found herself overseeing an agency with a wide-ranging portfolio, from housing and civil rights to alcohol licensing and … horse racing. She started work on March 2; two days later, Newsom declared a state of emergency because of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We went right into emergency response mode,” she says. During her tenure, she worked with a range of government agencies and nonprofits to streamline the housing production process. “The work I did in the housing and homelessness space there,” she says now, “informed how I carry myself in this job.”
Two weeks after the LACAHSA meeting, Castro Ramírez is in a more intimate setting, overseeing the city’s subcommittee on affordable and supportive housing. Meetings, meetings, more meetings. This is her life, especially now in her new role as leader of HACLA. If it fazes her or wearies her, she doesn’t show it.
On this morning, group members are hashing out just how they’re going to define “affordable housing.” The issue isn’t mere semantics. It’s something everyone who works in this field has to contend with, but one that is particularly knotty in L.A., where rents are substantially higher than the national average. HUD defines housing as affordable if it costs no more than 30% of the renter’s income; in L.A., many households pay closer to 50% to 60%. So how is a 40% unit not affordable, in a town where many would be happy to pay half their monthly paychecks for a place to live? And then there’s the city’s area median income (AMI), which is nearly $100,000 for a family of four. How should the rents of so-called “affordable” housing units be set as a percentage of that relatively high figure?
The discussions are intense, and as always, time is of the essence. In six weeks, the subcommittee will have to deliver its findings to the group’s leadership. Castro Ramírez stresses the importance of focusing their efforts on the population segment the city terms “extremely low income,” and creating benchmarks to reduce the numbers of unhoused within that population.
While working under Bass, she spent a lot of energy beefing up the mayor’s Inside Safe program, a citywide strategy that’s already helped contribute to a 10% reduction in street homelessness. Castro Ramírez also helped take a scythe to the often red-tape-choked process of getting affordable housing permits. “What used to take six to nine months,” she says, “is now down to 43 days.”
“Lourdes knows how important this is”
On my last visit with Castro Ramírez, she shows me two small mementos that hold a place of pride alongside her various awards and commendations. One is a picture of California, with the state’s grizzly in the background, which was painted by Castro Ramírez’s niece when the Chief was working at the state capital. The other is a brown rock with “Nico” — short for Nicolás — painted on it in white. “This is in honor of the 10th anniversary of my son’s passing,” she says. One of three children she raised with her husband Jorge, Nicolás died of a rare form of liver cancer when he was 11. To honor his memory, the family created Nico’s Dream, which raises funds for pediatric cancer research.
Family has always been a central focus of Castro Ramirez’s life, and home has always been a big part of that. She still remembers her parents’ early struggles to find one — at one point, the family lived in a garage — and her father’s desire to move out of an area of Los Angeles caught up in gang warfare, which is how they ended up in Lynwood. Now, after 15 years away from Los Angeles, Castro Ramírez is once again home, working to help the tens of thousands of people in L.A. County without a home to go to.
“Lourdes knows how important this is,” says Helen Torres, CEO of Hispanas Organized for Political Equality (HOPE), a nonprofit working to increase the economic and political power of Latinas. “Anybody who comes from humble upbringings knows how important having shelter is, having a place to call home. She understands that. That’s been part of her trajectory.”
It’s a homecoming she’s been preparing for throughout nearly three decades of public service. After grinding it out at every level of the public housing spectrum, gathering knowledge and experience (and not a few high-powered connections and friends), Castro Ramírez has returned to Los Angeles at a crucial moment in the city’s history to confront one of the most difficult societal issues of our time.
“I had one boss say to me, ‘Lourdes, I don’t think I’ve known a person who goes from one hard job to a much harder job,’” she says with a laugh. “And I guess I never thought about it like that. I just really wanted to be on the ground. I wanted to be closer to the people — where I could really make a difference.”
Read more from UCLA Magazine’s Winter 2025 issue.
