This morning I delivered my final State of the City address. 

I stood on the brand-new 6th Street Viaduct, a symbol of what our City can do when we work together. It will open this summer to foot, bike, bus and car traffic, reconnecting the Eastside and our city center. 

The back to basics work we started on Day One of my administration has prepared us for the challenges ahead. The culture of collaboration that defines City Hall today will be indispensable as we confront our greatest challenges — our housing crisis and climate change.

If you missed the State of the City address, you can watch it here.

We will ensure that Los Angeles is the safest and cleanest city that it can be. We will hire 800 Angelenos to help clean up our city and deploy CARE+ teams in every council district that will provide services and promote public health and hygiene at encampments, and facilitate the move towards housing. 

A cleaner city is on its way. 

With public safety top of mind for many of us, the budget I'm releasing next week will fund efforts to reduce violence and crime and build trust. We’re investing in proven strategies like our unarmed mental health response to make our city safer and our public safety efforts more just.

If we’re going to keep the California Dream alive, nothing is more important than sustaining our increase in housing production. From 2013 to 2018, we tripled the number of housing units built each year. We embraced powerful tools to make this happen, like the Transit-Oriented Communities incentive program, Accessory Dwelling Units that gently add homes to our backyards while preserving community character, and Prop HHH, the largest-ever initiative to build housing for homeless Americans.

Today I announced our two-phase $21 million Climate Equity Fund, which will focus efforts in low-income neighborhoods that bear disproportionate environmental burdens. We’ll hire and train residents to retrofit community-serving buildings, distribute air purifiers in the neighborhoods that take on the most pollution, and provide new insulation and cool roofs throughout the low-income communities with the highest heat indexes.

Kenia Castillo, who swore me into office in 2013 as an 8th grader, joined me again on the bridge today. Hear other young Angelenos share their dreams for the future:

We are living through a year of transition — from pandemic to renewal, from a city founded on oil fortunes to one that phases out neighborhood drilling for good, and from one administration to the next. The end of this calendar year will kick off a new mayor’s first month in office. 

In my final State of the City address, I offered a few challenges to the next leaders of this city that I love. Keep bringing crime and poverty down. Keep bringing college graduation rates and housing production up. Get to zero-carbon emissions energy. Throw the best Olympic and Paralympic Games the world has ever seen. I’ll be rooting for you.

I’m never surprised by this city’s greatness, but I’m still in awe of the things we do. Serving the City of Los Angeles has been the greatest honor of my life. 

Thank you.

Strength and love, Los Angeles.

Eric Garcetti
Your Mayor